35. The Space Between
Chapter thirty-five
The Space Between
Sterling
My mind is three miles away, anchored in the guest room of my loft, the room that should have been hers, but was only ever a temporary waypoint.
Specifically, my thoughts are on the nightstand where Mandy left her battered sketchbook.
I can almost feel the texture of the paper under my thumb, the way the spine is starting to give because she’s filled it with so much life.
She stood up to Derek at the ball. She looked him in the eye and chose me, even for a moment, and then the alarm had rung.
I let the bell pull me away before I could say the only thing that mattered.
I’m a man of action, a person who runs into burning buildings because the logic of a fire is simpler than the logic of a heart, and yet I’m paralyzed by the silence that’s grown between us like a thick layer of soot.
Every second that passes feels like a timber cracking in a house that’s already been red-tagged.
“Hayes? You with us?” The Chief’s voice cuts through the fog like a foghorn.
He’s looking at me with that tired, knowing expression he reserves for the younger guys who haven’t learned how to leave the job at the station.
Beside me, Jake shifts in his seat, his eyes darting to me with a look of pointed concern.
The rest of the crew is focused on the slide deck, but Miller has always been able to smell distraction from a mile away.
“Yeah, Chief. Loud and clear,” I say, the lie tasting like dry ash. My voice sounds hollow, even to my own ears. Miller grunts and moves on to the next slide, something about hydrants and winter maintenance, but I’m already gone again.
I’ve been in love with her since she spilled that double-shot latte on my favorite boots six years ago.
I can still see her face, flushed pink, eyes wide with horror as she spent ten minutes trying to rub the stain out with a napkin that only made it worse.
I knew it then, in the middle of a crowded cafe, that I was done for.
And I’ve spent every day since building a fortress around that truth so I wouldn’t lose the only person who makes the world feel quiet.
I called it friendship because friendship was safe.
Friendship didn’t end in a pile of charred rubble and insurance claims. But there’s an empty seat beside me in the briefing room, and the fortress I built has become a prison.
I’m the hero, right? The guy who protects things.
Yet, here I am, letting the most important thing I have slip through my fingers because I was too afraid to hold on too tight.
The meeting finally breaks, the sound of chairs scraping across the linoleum like a series of small explosions.
I stand up, my joints stiff and protesting, and head for the locker room.
My skin feels too tight for my body. I need to move.
I need a call, a fire, a high-angle rescue, anything that requires my hands to be busy so my head doesn’t have to be.
I need to be ’Saint Sterling’ because the ordinary man underneath the uniform is currently drowning in things unsaid.
I need the noise of the sirens to drown out the sound of my own heartbeat.
I’m halfway through the bay, the scent of diesel and rubber heavy in the air, when a hand clamps onto my shoulder, firm and immovable.
It’s Jake, and he’s not wearing his usual happy-go-lucky grin.
He looks like he’s about to deliver news about a fallen brother.
He steers me toward the small alcove behind Engine 99, away from the prying eyes of the crew who are currently arguing over whether to order pizza or Thai.
The engine’s massive tires loom over us, and the air here is cool and smells of iron.
“Sterling. Stop,” he says, his voice low, skipping the usual banter. “I just got off the phone with Becca. She’s been talking to Kayla.”
I feel a cold prickle of dread crawl down my spine, worse than any backdraft I’ve ever faced. “And? Is Mandy okay?”
“She’s fine. She’s better than fine.” Jake shifts his weight. “Kayla says she took a call yesterday afternoon. With New York.”
The bay goes very quiet, or my ears do.
“And?”
“And Kayla wouldn’t tell me what came of it. She said, and I want to be accurate here, that it isn’t hers to hand over.” He rubs the back of his neck. “So I don’t know, Ster. Nobody’s told me anything. But Becca said to tell you one thing and she made me repeat it twice.”
“Go on.”
“She said: it’s already done. Whatever it is, she’s already done it. She didn’t wait for you.”
I stand there in the cool iron-smelling air behind Engine 99, and something goes through me that I have to stop and identify, because it is not what I expected.
It isn’t panic. It isn’t the bottom dropping out.
It’s relief.
She didn’t wait for me. She had a thing to decide about her own life and she went and decided it, on her own, at her own kitchen table, without a single one of my opinions in the room. She did not stand in a doorway waiting for a man to come across a street.
“You’re smiling,” Jake says, accusingly. “Why are you smiling? That could be extremely bad news.”
“I know.”
“She could be on a flight.”
“I know.”
“Sterling.”
“If she’s on a flight,” I say, and I hear my own voice come out steady for the first time in nine days, “then she got on it because she wanted to, and not because I stood in my own kitchen and told her she was better off without me and then went to work for three days.” I pick my keys up off the workbench.
“That would be a thing I could survive. What I can’t survive is another week of this. ”
Jake looks at me for a long moment.
“Chief’s going to ask where you went.”
“Tell him I went to say a sentence.”
“That is a terrible thing to tell a chief.”
“Tell him whatever you want. Tell him I’m getting a coffee.” I’m already walking. “Jake.”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks. For the couch. For the sandwich. For calling my sister behind my back, which we are going to discuss in detail at a later date.”
“Worth it,” he calls after me. “Absolutely worth it.”
Here is what I do not do.
I do not sprint out of that bay and drive across the city with my hazards on.
I do not run six blocks through a rainstorm.
I have spent my entire adult life arriving somewhere at speed with a bag in my hand, and every single time it has been because somebody was in trouble, and I am finally clear on the fact that Mandy Peterson is not in trouble and has not been for some time.
So I go home first.
The loft is exactly as I left it, which is to say it looks like a place where a man has been conducting an experiment on himself.
I take a shower. I shave. I put on the grey Henley she said made me look like a man who owns a canoe, which she meant as an insult and which I have thought about approximately weekly ever since.
And then I go and get the notebook.
It’s on the counter by the sink where it’s been since the day she left, perfectly aligned with the edge of the granite, which is how I know I put it there deliberately and then lied to myself about it. Blue. Spiral bound. The wire binding still catching the light like a row of teeth.
I sit down on my own kitchen floor with it, which is where all of this started, and I go through it.
Rule One, in her handwriting, in her ridiculous careful lettering: Bathroom schedule is sacred.
Rule Four: Groceries split, no ledger, no martyrdom.
Rule Seven, in mine, in red pen, because she made me use the red pen: Don’t get weird.
And underneath all of it, at the bottom of the last page, in handwriting so small I have to angle it toward the window, something she must have written at some point when I wasn’t in the room and never mentioned:
Rule Twelve. He gets to have a bad day.
I sit on my kitchen floor for quite a long time.
Then I get up, and I take the notebook, and I go.
I rehearse it in the car, because of course I do.
The words tumble over each other like stones in a river.
I’ve been in love with you for longer than this charade.
Our friendship is the foundation of what I want, not the ceiling.
I would rather risk everything by saying so than spend the rest of my life wondering what would have happened if I’d just knocked on the door.
I want the morning coffee and the drawings on my table and the cat on my laptop.
I want the real thing. I want the arguments and the quiet mornings and the way you look in my oversized shirts. I want it all.
I think about all the times I could have said it.
The night her car died on Damen and we walked twelve blocks in the cold, which is the true version of a night I have since told a table full of her relatives an invented story about.
The night of the fire when I saw her on the curb, shivering and soot-streaked, and my heart stopped because I realized the world could just take her away in a puff of smoke.
Every time, I chose silence because I thought silence was the price of keeping her.
How could I have been so stupid to think that silence was anything but a slow death?
By the time I come off the Kennedy I have three complete versions of it and I am aware that every single one is a document.
They are all beautifully organised. They all have an opening, a middle, and a place where I explain myself, and not one of them has a single thing in it that I could not have written down and left on a counter.
So somewhere around Fullerton I stop rehearsing.
The drive out to her place takes eighteen minutes. I do it in eighteen minutes, at the speed limit, stopping at the lights. There is a moment on Ashland where I nearly turn around, and I don’t, and it passes.
Her building is a plain brown three-storey with a buzzer panel and a scrubbed lobby, and there is a name card in the slot for 3C that says M. PETERSON in her lettering, and looking at that card does something to me that I am not going to attempt to describe.
I go up. The stairs smell like other people’s cooking.
I stand outside 3C at ten past eight in the morning with a blue spiral notebook in my hand, and I do not have a speech, and I have not rehearsed a single word, and my heart is going like I have taken four flights in gear.
I have crossed the street.
I knock.