Chapter Twenty-Two Jase
The meeting room light is on, which is how I know something is off.
Nobody uses the meeting room on a Saturday evening.
It’s a small space with a table that seats eight, a whiteboard that hasn’t been fully erased since the last quarterly review, and a single window that faces the brick wall of the building next door.
It exists solely for meetings and is otherwise avoided by the collective instinct of people who have spent enough time in mandatory meetings to develop a physical aversion to the room where they happen.
The light being on at eight o’clock on a Saturday means someone went in there on purpose, which means something is either wrong or very boring.
I stop in the doorway.
Brielle’s sitting at the far end of the table with her knees pulled up to her chest, her phone face down in front of her, and her eyes doing the thing eyes do when someone has been crying recently and is currently trying to stop. She looks up when she hears me and tries to straighten quickly.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” she says.
I lean against the doorframe and look at her and don’t say anything, because sometimes the most useful thing you can do is give someone the space to decide whether they want to tell you or not. She holds out for about four seconds.
“I’m fine,” she says.
“I know,” I say.
“I’m just being stupid,” she says.
“You’re not being stupid,” I say.
She looks at me. Her eyes are red-rimmed, and her hair is coming loose from whatever she did with it this morning, and she has the look of someone who has been holding something together all day and has run out of hands.
“Can I come in?” I say.
She gestures at the room around her in a way that means obviously, and I pull out the chair closest to her and sit down sideways in it, one arm on the table, and wait.
“I don’t even know why I’m crying,” she says, which comes out with a small, helpless laugh attached to the end of it.
“That’s the thing. I cannot tell you what specifically is wrong right now.
My mother cut me off today, which I knew was coming and which I was fine about.
I was completely fine about it, I told Callie I was fine about it, and I meant it.
” She stops. “And then I came back here and had dinner, and it was a perfectly nice dinner, and then I came in here to look at something on my laptop and just.” She gestures vaguely at her own face. “Apparently this.”
I look at her.
“So I’m sitting here crying about nothing,” she says, “which is very dignified, and I’m glad you’re here to witness it.”
“I’m honored,” I say.
She laughs again, the kind that comes out wet at the edges, and scrubs at her face with the sleeve of her hoodie.
“I’m serious, though. I have no reason to be this upset.
I have a job. I have a roof. I have—” She stops, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the station at large, which I take to mean all of this, us, whatever this is.
“It’s not like I’m out on the street. It hit me all at once.
All of it. The wedding and the fire and the hospital and my mother and Richard and two weeks of just.” She exhales. “Two weeks of a lot.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That tracks.”
“Does it?” she says. “Because from where I’m sitting, it feels like I spent all day being very mature and composed about my mother cutting me off and then came home and cried about it in the meeting room like a person who is not at all mature or composed.”
“You spent two weeks holding it together,” I say. “Your body picked a Saturday evening in the meeting room. Could be worse.”
She stares at me. Then she laughs properly, the real one, and drops her forehead onto her knees, and the laugh and the leftover tears mingle into something that is mostly laugh by the end of it, and I sit there and let her get through it because that’s what the moment needs.
When she lifts her head again her eyes are still red but something in her face has loosened.
“Sorry,” she says.
“Don’t apologize,” I say.
“I feel like a spoiled brat,” she says. “Crying because my parents’ money got taken away. There are people with actual problems.”
“Your problems are actual problems,” I say. “You don’t get to decide they don’t count because someone else has different ones.”
She looks at me.
“Also,” I say, “you’re not crying about the money. You said it yourself. You’re crying about two weeks of a lot. That’s allowed.”
She’s quiet for a moment, turning her phone over on the table without looking at it. “I called my father,” she says. “After Callie dropped me off. I thought maybe.” She stops. “He didn’t answer. He never answers when my mother doesn’t want him to.”
I don’t say anything to that because there isn’t anything useful to say to it, and Brielle doesn’t need me to fix it, she needs me to hear it.
“Okay,” she says finally, sitting up straighter. “I’m done. I’m fine. This was a scheduled breakdown; it’s over, we can all move on.”
“Scheduled,” I say.
“Two weeks delayed,” she says. “Very organized of me.”
“Yes, very organized,” I say.
She almost smiles. I file it away.
At that moment, Max appears in the doorway with Evan, who takes in the scene with a single sweep.
“What happened?” Max says to me because he’s asking for the situation report.
“Nothing,” Brielle says, before I can answer. “I was having a moment. It’s handled.”
Max looks at her for a long moment.
“Sit down,” she says. “Both of you. I’ll explain.”
They sit.
She tells them the same thing she told me: the cut-off, the cards, her father not answering, two weeks of everything catching up with her all at once. She tells it with the same self-deprecating humor she used with me, laughing at herself in the right places.
When she finishes, Max says, “You need to talk to Weston about getting paid.”
“I know,” she says.
“Monday,” he says. “I’ll come with you.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Monday,” he says again, and she closes her mouth.
Evan leans forward on the table. “You’re not going back to looking at apartments, are you?”
A pause.
“Yes,” she says.
The three of us look at each other across the table.
It happens the way things happen between people who have known each other long enough that whole conversations can take place in the space of a glance. Max gives me a look. I give Evan a look. Evan looks at Max. Max nods once, which, from him, is the equivalent of a formal declaration.
I turn to Brielle.
“We have a third bedroom,” I say.
She looks at me.
“Mine and Max’s place,” I say. “Four blocks from here. It’s been a storage room since I moved in, but it’s an actual room.
Big enough. The building’s quiet, the super is fine, and before you say anything—” I hold up a hand before she can interrupt “—Max was going to move into it anyway. He’s been at mine for a year because his lease ran out and he never got around to finding somewhere permanent. ”
“Which means,” Evan says, “that you’d be taking a room that’s currently occupied by approximately forty boxes of things Max has been meaning to deal with since last October.”
“Forty-two,” Max says. “I counted.”
Brielle looks between the three of us.
“You don’t have to do that,” she says.
“We know,” I say.
“I mean it. You’ve already done so much, and I don’t want to—”
“Brielle,” Max says.
She stops.
“Do you want to live there?” he says. Simply, directly, the way he asks most things.
She looks at him for a long moment.
“Yes,” she says quietly.
“Then it’s settled,” he says.
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Looks at all three of us in turn.
“Okay,” she says. “Yes. Thank you.”
“You can keep working at the station,” I say.
“I’ll handle Weston,” Max says, which is the most Max sentence I have ever heard him say, and which makes both me and Evan look away quickly so she doesn’t see us trying not to smile.
***
Moving her in takes forty minutes.
This is partly because she doesn’t have much: a duffel, two tote bags, and the things Callie brought her, all of it fitting easily into the back of Evan’s car.
And partly because Max had apparently anticipated the conversation going this way and had already moved twelve of the forty-two boxes out of the third bedroom before we left the station, which he mentions only when Brielle notices the cleared space and asks how long it took.
“Not long,” he says, which is a lie but a kind one.
She stands in the doorway of the third bedroom and looks at it, the bare mattress and the clean floor and the window that faces the street, and I watch something settle in her face that I haven’t seen there before.
“Thank you,” she says.
Evan orders food because it’s ten o’clock and nobody has eaten since dinner at the station, and the four of us end up on the living room floor with containers spread across the coffee table and the television on low and the easy comfort of people who have figured out how to be in a space together without requiring anything from each other.
By midnight, Evan has fallen asleep sitting up against the couch, which is a talent I have always found both impressive and baffling.
Max calls it a night shortly after, in the quiet way he ends things, standing up and taking the empty containers to the kitchen without being asked, and then saying goodnight from the doorway.
Brielle and I sit with the television for a few more minutes after they’re gone.
“This is real,” she says to the room.
“Yeah,” I say. “It is.”
She nods. Then she gets up, stretching her arms above her head, and says goodnight and goes down the hall to her room, and I sit there for a minute longer before I do the same.
I’m brushing my teeth when I hear her in the hallway, and I stick my head out to find her at the bathroom cabinet with her arms crossed and a look of focused displeasure on her face.
“What are you looking for?” I say, through toothpaste.
“Painkillers,” she says. “I’m sore all overs.”
I rinse and look at her.
She looks back at me.