Chapter Six Evan #2
“He left me with them anyway,” she says. Not quite an accusation. More like an observation she's still making sense of.
“He had to. The situation wasn't his to manage, beyond a point.”
“I know,” she says. “I know that.”
The last button comes loose. I step back.
“There,” I say.
She reaches back to hold the dress against herself, then turns her head slightly, catching me over her shoulder. Her eyes are still red-rimmed, but they're sharper than they were downstairs. Clearer.
“Could you—” She hesitates, weighing the strangeness of the request against the practicality of it. “Could you wait outside? In case I need—”
“I'll be right outside the door,” I tell her, and step out before she has to finish the sentence.
I lean against the wall in the hallway and look at the ceiling and try to be normal about all of this.
It's fine. She showed up here, which was either resourceful or desperate or both, and Jase wasn't available, and now she's borrowing a pair of sweats and she'll probably be gone within the hour.
Back to her people. Back to the life that produced a wedding like that one, all those candles and that amount of money and a groom who stood outside hollering at the crew about optics while his bride was somewhere inside a burning building.
Back to that.
I push the thought aside. Not my business.
“Evan.”
I turn around.
Max is at the top of the stairs, arms crossed, in full You Have Disappointed Me posture. Which, to be fair to him, is a posture I'm pretty intimately familiar with.
“Hey,” I say, with as much casual energy as I can assemble.
It assembles to approximately none.
“What is she doing here?” His voice is low, controlled, conveying the full scale of his displeasure within a register that wouldn't carry through a closed door. I've always respected that about him, even when it's directed at me.
“She showed up,” I say. “What was I going to do, turn her away?”
“Yes.” He says it without missing a beat. “Evan, do you have any idea who her family is? Do you understand what kind of—”
“Max.”
“—exposure this creates for the station? For me? I am this close to—”
“Max.”
He stops.
I lower my voice. “She's got no shoes on. Her dress is in about twelve pieces. And she came here instead of going back to whatever was waiting for her out there.”
He holds my gaze for a second, something working behind his eyes that he's too controlled to let reach his face.
“It's temporary,” I add. “She just needs to—”
The door at the end of the hall opens.
We both look.
She's standing in the doorway in the oversized sweats, the hoodie hanging off one shoulder, her hair loose and still a little wild from everything the morning put it through.
She's holding the ruined wedding dress in a bundle against her chest with her bandaged hand, like she's not sure what to do with it.
Her eyes go to Max first, reading the tension in the hallway with an accuracy that suggests she's had a lot of practice reading rooms.
“I'm sorry,” she says quietly, looking directly at him. “Please don't blame him. I didn't give him much of a choice.” A beat. “I didn't really have anywhere else to go.”
The words are simple. No performance in them, no angle being worked. She just says the true thing plainly, and then waits.
I watch Max's jaw loosen by one almost imperceptible degree.
He looks at her for a long moment, then back at me, then back at her.
He doesn't say anything else.
He turns and goes back down the stairs.
I look at her.
She looks at me.
“That went okay,” she says, carefully.
“For him?” I say. “Yeah. That was basically a standing ovation.”
This time she does smile, small and real and a little exhausted around the edges.
I nod back toward the room. “Get some rest.”
She retreats inside without argument.
I stay in the hallway a moment longer, listening to the sounds of the station resuming its normal rhythm below me. Equipment checks. Low voices. The scrape of the kitchen chairs.
Footsteps on the stairs. Zack appears at the top with an incident report tucked under one arm and stops when he sees me standing in the hallway with no particular reason to be there.
He looks at the closed door at the end of the hall. Then at me.
"Runaway bride?" he says.
"Yeah."
He nods once, absorbs this, and continues past me toward the office without further comment. From Zack, that's about as close to a full endorsement as you're going to get.
Half a beat later, Rory's head appears at the top of the stairwell. He looks at me. He looks at the closed door.
"Is she staying?"
"Don't know yet."
"Okay," he says, and disappears back down the stairs. Which means he's already decided how he feels about it and the answer is fine.
Simple, I remind myself. Keep it simple.
Except she came here. Of all the places available to a woman with money and family and the entire city of New York at her disposal, she showed up at a small, slightly underfunded fire station in Brooklyn with a card Jase slipped her in a hospital room.
I head back downstairs.
Simple, Pomar.
I almost believe it.