Chapter 23
Easton
Three weeks.
That was the count Shane had been waiting for. I'd told him in this kitchen on a Tuesday morning, the second day I'd been back on shift, to ask me again in a month. He hadn't waited a month.
He caught me at the end of a twenty-four.
The shift had been busy. Two structures. A medical. A car wreck on the BQE at three in the morning that ate an hour and a half between extraction and clean-up. I hadn't sat down since the dinner before. My boots had been on long enough that I'd stopped registering them.
The crew was in the bay finishing the wash.
Shane was at the island.
He had his coffee in one hand and a paper towel in the other, handling the mug because it was hot enough to call hot.
He set the towel down when I came through the door.
He pushed the second mug across the island.
Already poured. Cream and one sugar. He'd been pouring it for me at shift changes for four years before I'd gone north, and three weeks since I'd come back, and he had never once asked me how I took it.
"Ford."
"Captain."
"Don't."
"Shane."
"Sit."
I sat.
He drank his coffee. I drank mine. The kitchen was exactly where I'd left it the morning I'd taken the transfer to Hartsdale.
I wasn't.
I'd been finding that out for three weeks.
Shane set the mug down.
"Ford."
"Yeah."
"You told me three weeks ago to ask you again in a month."
"Yeah."
"I'm not waitin' the month."
He let it sit.
Shane could outwait a building. He could outwait me.
I scrubbed a hand down my face. Three days of stubble. I hadn't shaved on Monday. I hadn't shaved on Tuesday. I hadn't noticed until Shane, on the other side of the island, with the second mug already poured, that I'd also skipped this morning.
"I'm not alright, Shane."
"I know."
"You been watching."
"Been watching since you walked in three weeks ago."
I let out a breath.
"Talk to me," he said.
I looked at the coffee.
I'd been turning over the right opening sentence for three weeks.
I had a lot of them. I'd given Brian Torres a clean version at the lockers and let him let it go.
I'd given Garrett Stone the silence he'd give me back, and he'd taken it.
I hadn't given Shane anything because Shane had told me, my second morning, that he would ask me again, and I knew when he asked, I was going to have to say it.
I said it.
"There's a woman."
"Yeah."
"In Hartsdale. A vet. Lives across the street from my grandmother's place. She came back to town in September. We got together in October."
"And."
"And in November, she told me to take the slot."
I let it sit.
Shane didn't move.
"You believed her."
"I believed she meant it. She did mean it. She told me on the bank of the lake, the afternoon you called me. She told me my life had been pointed at this job for twelve years, and she wasn't gonna be the reason I turned it down."
"Mhm."
"Her ex spent six years overridin' her on every decision she made. I wasn't gonna be the man who told her she'd made the wrong call. So I drove down."
"Ford."
"Yeah."
"Did you tell her you didn't want it?"
The kitchen went very quiet.
I sat there with the mug in my hand. The question had been sitting under everything for three weeks, and I'd been telling myself a long answer. That I was respecting her. That I was honoring the decision of a woman who'd had her decisions overridden for six years.
The long version had a lot of words in it.
The question Shane was asking had one answer.
"I tried."
He looked at me.
"You didn't tell her all of it."
I blew out a breath. "No."
"That you'd been deciding for two months you weren't gonna take it."
"No."
"That you hadn't called the realtor in eighteen months."
"No."
"That you hadn't packed a box."
"No."
He set the coffee down.
"Ford."
"Yeah?"
"You're a smart man."
"I'm not feelin' very smart right now."
"You're a smart man, and you let a woman you love make a decision about your life based on a story you didn't bother to correct."
I closed my eyes.
He wasn't raising his voice. Shane hadn't raised his voice in fourteen years. Raising it would have been the kindness. The level, slow version—talking me through a job I'd gotten wrong the way he'd talk a probie—was the one that landed.
"She told me to go, Shane."
"She told you to go because she thought she knew what you wanted.
She didn't know what you wanted. She knew what you'd been telling yourself you wanted for twelve years.
You let her make a call about your life with the version of you you handed her on a bank in November. You didn't hand her the rest of it."
"I didn't want to override her."
"Tellin' the truth isn't overriding. Tellin' the truth is what you owed her before she opened her mouth at that lake."
I stared at the counter.
"Ford. Look at me."
I looked at him.
"Are you in love with her?"
I didn't have to think about it.
"Yes."
"Has she said it to you?"
"Yes."
"Have you said it to her?"
"Yes."
"You said it to her, and you didn't tell her you'd been deciding for two months not to take the slot."
"I said it to her, and I didn't tell her."
Shane let a breath out. He'd been waiting to see something in a friend, and the friend had finally said it, and what was on my face was not a thing he was going to comment on.
"Ford."
"Yeah."
"You're not gonna outgrow this. You hear me?"
"Yeah."
"That regret. The regret of not telling her. You think you're gonna outgrow it. You're not. You're gonna wake up at five every morning for the rest of your life and find a new way to turn it over. I've watched men do this. The shape of it changes. The size of it doesn't."
He let that sit.
"You go up there, and you tell her the truth.
The whole truth. Not the part of it she already heard.
The part you didn't say. You tell her you'd been deciding for two months.
You tell her about the realtor. You tell her about the boxes.
You let her make the call again with the whole thing in front of her this time.
And if she still tells you to go after that, then you go, and you live with that.
But she chooses with the whole story. Not the version of you that fit on a bank in November. "
He held my eye.
"Or you sit in my kitchen at the end of every shift for the rest of your career and turn it over."
The fluorescent buzzed.
In the bay, the senior man called something to the probie, but I didn't catch it.
I sat there with the coffee going cold in my hand.
I had known. Since the first morning I'd come into this kitchen at the end of a shift, and the breath in my chest had been where it had been for the eighteen months before her. Since walking off the BQE wreck at four-thirty yesterday, and not having anywhere to take the feeling of it.
I had been refusing to know for three weeks.
I set the mug down.
"Shane."
"Yeah."
"I'm goin'."
"I know."
"What about the slot?"
He shrugged.
"The slot's the easy part, Ford. The slot was never the part I was worried about for you."
"You're not mad?"
"I'm not mad. I'm not gonna be mad. I'm gonna take it out of your hide in five years when you're sittin' across from me at a Thanksgiving table tellin' me about your kids."
A laugh came out of me that I hadn't made in three weeks.
He saw it. He didn't comment on it.
He picked his mug up and carried it to the sink.
"Go home," he said over his shoulder. "Get a couple hours' sleep. Then drive."
"Yeah."
"And, Ford."
"Yeah?"
"Tell her the whole thing."
"Yeah."
He turned the tap on.
I got up off the stool.
I had a lease I'd signed in a hurry that was gonna eat for the next five months.
I had a duffel at the apartment I hadn't unpacked.
I had two hundred and forty miles to drive on the back end of a twenty-four, on no sleep, with three days of stubble and the smell of the BQE wreck on the inside of my jacket.
None of it touched me.
The only thing I had was a woman on Maple Avenue who had made the call of her life with half the story, and the rest of the story in my mouth, and two hundred and forty miles between me and the porch I was going to say it on.
I was going.
The phone in my pocket buzzed.
I pulled it out.
Duke
Brother. Moose got out the back gate. The whole town's in the woods behind Maple. Astrid's not askin' for help. She needs it.
I read it once.
I read it twice.
I'd been about to point myself at her anyway.