Chapter Thirteen Brielle
My hair is clean for the first time in two days, and it feels like a small miracle.
I’m sitting on the edge of the spare bed with a towel around my shoulders, working a comb through the ends with the focused patience of someone who has learned the hard way that rushing this process is never worth it.
The room smells like the cedar soap from the bathroom and something faintly industrial underneath it, the permanent scent of the building itself, and I am finding, to my own mild surprise, that I don’t mind it.
The admin office is waiting for me. Captain Weston’s filing system, or rather the profound absence of one, is waiting for me.
There is an entire afternoon of useful, purposeful work sitting down the hall, and I am going to get to it, as soon as I finish with my hair and spend a few more minutes with the strange new quiet inside my chest.
The shower with Evan.
I’m not going to think too much about the shower with Evan.
What I will allow myself to think, briefly and without making too much of it, is that something happened in that shower room that I didn’t expect, and I don’t mean the foreplay, which I also didn’t expect but which surprised me considerably less than what came after it.
The moment when he pulled back. The honesty of it, undramatic and undefended, and the way he looked at me just before he did, like he was seeing something he hadn’t planned to see and wasn’t sure what to do with it.
I work the comb through the last section of hair and set it on the bed beside me, and look at the window. Outside, a pigeon is doing something extremely committed on the ledge. The street below is its usual indifferent self.
I am thinking about Evan’s face when I hear the front door of the station bang open downstairs, followed by a voice I would recognize at the bottom of the ocean.
“Where is she? Someone point me at her right now.”
I am on my feet and in the hallway before I’ve consciously decided to move.
Callie is standing in the main bay with two tote bags, a duffel, and the expression of a woman who has been worried sick and is converting it into forward momentum in real time.
She’s wearing paint-spattered overalls, and her dark hair is twisted up with what appears to be a pencil; she is the most welcome sight I have encountered in recent memory.
“Oh, thank God,” she says when she sees me at the top of the stairs. “You look terrible.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“No, I mean—the bruise. That bruise is genuinely alarming.” She’s already coming up the stairs, bags in tow, looking me over with the frank assessment of someone who has known me long enough to skip the performance of politeness.
“The rest of you looks okay. Better than okay, actually. Why do you look better than okay?”
“It’s a long story,” I say.
“I have time,” she says, and pushes past me into the spare room like she’s been here a hundred times before.
She brought three changes of clothes, which she selected from the emergency bag she apparently keeps at her apartment for precisely this kind of situation, which tells you everything you need to know about Callie Hayes and why she is the only member of my family I would voluntarily spend time with.
She brought toiletries, her own brand of dry shampoo, which she knows I’ve been stealing since college, two paperback novels, a phone charger, and a bar of the expensive dark chocolate we’ve been splitting between us since we were teenagers whenever one of us had a bad day.
She breaks it in half now, sitting cross-legged on the bed across from me, and hands me my piece without ceremony.
“Okay,” she says. “Tell me everything.”
I tell her, but it’s not everything, everything, rather, the shape of it.
The fire, which she already knows about since she was outside of it.
The hospital. The station. Captain Weston and the admin job.
The way the place feels, not like somewhere I ended up but like somewhere I arrived, which is a distinction I didn’t have language for until just now.
Callie listens the way she always listens, which is completely, without interrupting, her dark eyes moving over my face and reading the things I’m not saying alongside the things I am.
When I stop, she’s quiet for a moment.
“Your mother,” she says, “is absolutely losing her mind.”
“I assumed.”
“She’s hired a PR team. Did you know that?”
“I don’t but typical her.”
“They’re running a whole narrative. Brielle Hayes, overwhelmed by the trauma of the fire, temporarily displaced, expected to make a full recovery and resume normal life imminently.
” She eats a square of chocolate. “It’s actually quite well written.
Very sympathetic. You come across as a tragic victim of circumstance rather than a woman who ran directly away from her own wedding. ”
“How thoughtful of her,” I say.
“Your things from Richard’s apartment have been returned to your parents’ house. All of it. Apparently, Richard’s people moved very fast on that.” She pauses. “He’s telling people you had a breakdown.”
I consider how I feel about this. It takes less time than I expected.
“Let him,” I say.
Callie looks at me.
“I mean it,” I say. “Let him say whatever he needs to say. I know what happened. You know what happened. The rest of it is noise.”
She’s still looking at me, but differently now.
“Who are you,” she says, “and what have you done with my cousin?”
“She’s in here,” I say. “She just got some air.”
Callie is quiet for a second, turning her piece of chocolate over in her fingers.
Outside the window, the afternoon has settled into a softer light, the particular gold of a city afternoon in early autumn, and from somewhere downstairs I can hear the low sounds of the station going about its business.
“Tell me about them,” Callie says.
I look at her. “Who?”
She gives me a look that says she is not interested in playing this game. “The firefighters. The ones who keep appearing in the corners of everything you’ve said so far.” She tilts her head. “You mentioned three of them.”
“There are more than three people at this station,” I say.
“Sure,” she says. “But there are three that matter. I can tell because you’ve been not-mentioning them very loudly for the past twenty minutes.”
This is the thing about Callie. She reads a room the way other people breathe, automatic and constant, and she has been reading me specifically for twenty-five years, which means there is approximately nowhere to hide.
“Max,” I say. “Jase. Evan.”
“And?”
“And they’ve been.” I stop, trying to find the right word for something that doesn’t have a tidy one.
“Kind. Genuinely kind, not the performed kind. Max stayed in the chair next to my bed all night to make sure I was okay. Jase re-dressed my feet this morning and made me tea and told me about dropping out of Harvard and made me laugh when I didn’t think I had a laugh left in me.
” I pause. “Evan helped with the bandages before my shower. He didn’t have to do any of that. ”
Callie is watching me with an expression I recognize as the one she wears when she’s decided something but is waiting to see if she’s right.
“I feel safe,” I say, and the simplicity of it surprises me as it comes out. “Around all three of them. I feel safe in a way that I don’t think I’ve felt in a very long time, maybe ever, and I don’t entirely know what to do with that.”
“Brielle,” Callie says, with great care and obvious effort to keep her face straight. “Are you the firehouse concubine?”
I stare at her.
“Because from where I’m sitting,” she continues, “it sounds like you have three extremely attractive men competing to bring you tea and hold your hand and generally make your life more comfortable, and I want to make sure I have an accurate picture of the situation.”
“That is a reductive and slightly offensive characterization,” I say.
“Is it inaccurate?”
A pause.
“It’s not entirely inaccurate,” I admit.
Callie closes her eyes briefly in what appears to be genuine delight.
“Okay. Okay. I need you to understand that I fully support this. I support it completely and without reservation. You spent the last year planning a wedding to a man who was actively fathering children with other women. You are owed at minimum three firefighters.”
“Callie.”
“I’m serious. This is cosmically appropriate.” She opens her eyes. “Are they good-looking?”
“That’s not the point.”
“It’s a little bit the point.”
“They’re.” I stop. “Yes. Objectively. Yes.”
She looks satisfied in a way that I find both annoying and deeply comforting. Then her expression turns careful, the way it does when she’s about to ask something real.
“Can I ask you something?” she says.
“You’re going to, regardless,” I say.
“What do you like?”
I blink. “What?”
“What do you like. You. Brielle. Not what your mother likes, not what Richard wanted, not what looks good on a Hayes. What do you actually like?”
The question sits in the air between us.
I open my mouth.
And then I close it again, because the honest answer, the one that arrives before I can dress it up in something more presentable, is that I don’t entirely know.
I know what I’ve been told I like. I know what I’ve been given and what I’ve accepted and what I’ve performed with enthusiasm because it was easier than explaining the absence of it.
I know the shape of a life built entirely around other people’s preferences, because I’ve been living inside it for so long that it has the quality of something familiar even when it doesn’t fit.
But what I actually like. What I would choose, unprompted, if nobody was watching and nothing was at stake.
“I liked art,” I say finally. “In college. Not Art History, not the studying of it, but making it. Drawing, mostly. I stopped when my mother told me it wasn’t a direction.”
Callie’s face does something controlled. “What else?”
“I liked being abroad. The anonymity of it. Not being a Hayes anywhere.” I pause.
“I like this, actually. The admin work. Which sounds insane, I know, but there’s something about having a task that’s mine, that I’m doing because I chose to take it on, that feels—” I search for the word. “Different. Good different.”
“What else?”
I look at her.
“I think,” I say, “that I might like acting.”
Callie goes very still.
“Callie.”
“I’m not reacting,” she says, in the voice of someone who is very much reacting. “I’m sitting here. Completely neutrally.”
“I haven’t done anything. It’s just a thought.”
“It’s not just a thought, and we both know it.” She leans forward. “Do you remember in college, the year you did that one-act festival? The Chekhov piece?”
“That was one time.”
“You were extraordinary,” she says flatly. “I’ve been making films for four years, and I have worked with people who trained for a decade who couldn’t do what you did in that piece. On three weeks of rehearsal.”
I don’t say anything.
“I have a project,” she says. “Out in Queens. Small thing, indie, nothing fancy. There’s a role in it that I’ve been trying to cast for two weeks, and I keep thinking—” She stops. “Just think about it. That’s all I’m asking.”
“Callie.”
“Think about it,” she says again, and her voice has gone quiet in the way it does when she means something.
I look at her for a long moment.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll think about it.”
She nods, satisfied, and reaches for the last of her chocolate.
We sit together for a while after that, not talking much, the way we’ve always been able to not talk, comfortable in the silence of people who have known each other long enough that it doesn’t need filling.
She tells me about the project, what she’s been shooting, a producer who keeps sending notes that contradict each other, and I listen and ask questions and feel, for the first time since I woke up in this room, like something that was pulled out of place has found its way back.
Eventually, she stands, gathering her things, because Callie is always moving toward the next thing even when she’s trying not to be.
“Call me,” she says at the door. “Every day. Non-negotiable.”
“Every day,” I agree.
She looks at me, and the performance of breezy practicality she’s been maintaining drops slightly.
“I’m proud of you,” she says. “You know that, right?”
My throat does something inconvenient.
“Go make your film,” I tell her.
She goes.
The room is quiet after she leaves, and smaller somehow, the way rooms get when a particular kind of energy exits them.
I sit with it for a while.
Then I get up, carefully, and go to the duffel she left on the chair. I pull out the clothes she brought, the toiletries, the novels, and the phone charger. I arrange them on the small dresser, tuck the charger into the outlet by the bed, and set the novels on the windowsill.
The room looks different with my things in it. Still spare, still industrial, still a fire station in Brooklyn that was never designed to be anyone’s home.
But mine, for now.
I stand back and look at it, this small improbable space that I didn’t choose and wouldn’t have predicted, and cannot imagine leaving.
Then I go down the hall to sort Captain Weston’s filing system, because there is work to do and I am, it turns out, someone who likes to work.
That’s one thing, at least.
One true thing that belongs to me.