What the Sister Knows #2
The sip the coffee and it is genuinely terrible. I hold it anyway.
“Can I ask you something,” she says.
“Okay.”
“Has he told you about Priya?”
“A little. That she was a doctor. That it ended.”
“Right.” Becca nods slowly. “That’s the version he does at parties.”
I don’t say anything about his confession about their relationship during the black out game of truth or dare.
“She used to introduce him as this is my firefighter Sterling,” Becca says.
“Every single time. Not this is my boyfriend Sterling, or this is Sterling the man whom I am currently dating, or even just This is Sterling. The job first, before anybody asked, and then she’d stand back half a step and wait for the face people make.
And I watched her do it about forty times over two years and I never once said anything, because I was just his little sister and it wasn’t my business.
” She turns the cup in her hands. “She liked him for her status, and not for who he actually was. Only for how they looked together. The doctor and the firefighter.” She sighed softly, taking a sip of the coffee.
“And in the end, she said so, more or less, and he took that and he filed it, and somewhere in the filing it stopped being a fact about Priya and turned into a fact of his existence.”
“Meaning what.”
“Meaning he has already decided how this ends.” She says it gently, which somehow makes it worse.
“He thinks you’re going to work out what the job actually costs you and your potential relationship and go.
Not tonight, but eventually. And he has been quietly arranging things so that when it happens, he’ll have seen it coming. ”
Something cold goes down through the middle of me that has nothing to do with the wind.
“That’s why he didn’t come after me,” I say.
“That’s why he told you it was fine, and then went and worked seventy-two hours.” She takes another drink. “You didn’t leave him, Mandy. He went to work. He stayed at work. And then he stood in his own kitchen for nine days telling himself a story about a woman who left.”
“I did leave. I got an apartment.”
“You got an apartment while a man who had just told you he loved you was unreachable for three days.” She raises an eyebrow. “I’ve had this argument with him already. I won it. I’m not doing it twice in one night.”
I look at my terrible coffee.
“There’s something I should tell you,” I say, “since apparently, we’re doing this. There’s a job. In New York. I’ve had the offer for two weeks.”
“Ah.”
“And I haven’t answered it.”
“Because of him?”
“No.” I’m surprised by how quickly it comes out. “That’s the thing. It isn’t because of him. I don’t want to go. I’ve known I don’t want to go for about ten days, and I’ve been sitting on it, and I couldn’t work out why I wasn’t just saying so.”
Becca is quiet for a second. Then she says, “Do you want me to tell you why, or would you rather I wait while you work it out on your own? Both are fine. I’m told I do this too much.”
“Tell me.”
“Because if you turn it down and then walk over there tonight and tell him you love him,” she says, “he will spend the next forty years quietly convinced that you gave up New York for him. And every single time something goes wrong, every time he pulls a double, every time he comes home wearing somebody’s worst day, he will look at you across a kitchen and do the arithmetic of how he stopped you from living your best life.
” She shrugs. “He won’t say it. He’ll just do it. Forever.”
The street noise goes very far away.
“So you’re saying don’t tell him.”
“God, no. I’m saying don’t turn up empty-handed.
” She turns to face me properly. “You’ve got a thing in your inbox with a deadline on it.
Deal with it. On your terms, whatever those are, so that it’s a decision you made about your own life and not a thing you laid down at his feet like a dead bird.
Then go and knock on his door.” A pause.
“Also there is nothing on this earth more attractive to Sterling Hayes than somebody who has already handled it. Trust me. I’ve been observing him for twenty-six years. ”
Across the street the count must have finished, because he steps back from the doorway and takes the borrowed coat off and hands it to somebody, and stands there in his shirtsleeves in the cold with his hands on his hips, looking up at the building.
“He is going to be about another hour,” Becca says. “And then he’s going to want a shower and eleven hours of sleep and he is going to be no use to anybody until tomorrow afternoon.”
“Right.”
“So don’t do it tonight.” She drains her coffee and pulls a face. “Do the other thing tonight.”
“You’re extremely bossy.”
“I’m a triage nurse,” she says. “It’s mostly bossiness and paperwork.” She hands me her empty cup, which I accept for reasons I cannot explain, and steps off the curb. “It was very good to finally meet you, Mandy. He talks about you the way people talk about weather they got caught in.”
And she walks off into four hundred people in evening dress, and I stand on Michigan Avenue holding two cups and a truck blanket, with a fire under a hotel and a job in my inbox and a man across the street in his shirtsleeves.
I know what I have to do before I’m allowed to knock on that door.
I go and find my car.