Chapter Twenty-Six Max
The apartment has never felt this quiet.
I’ve been in it alone before. Jase goes away for long weekends occasionally, back to Boston to see his dads, and those stretches of solitude are something I’ve always been comfortable with, the peace of a space that isn’t making any demands on you.
I work well alone. I think well alone. I have always been better at the internal conversation than the external one, which Jase finds hilarious, and Evan finds occasionally infuriating, and which is simply, as far as I’m concerned, the most efficient way to operate.
Jase and Evan are still at the station. A secondary call came in while the rest of the crew was running routine checks, something two neighborhoods over that needed bodies, and both of them got pulled in on extended duty.
I got home at four. Changed out of my work clothes.
Poured a cup of coffee that is sitting on the counter going cold because I set it down and didn't pick it back up.
I've been at the window since — a delivery truck idling at the curb below, someone's music leaking through the ceiling from the floor above, the city doing what the city does — and none of it does anything useful with the space inside this apartment.
My phone is on the windowsill. I've picked it up twice and put it back down without unlocking it. There is nothing on it I need to see. What I need is to finish the conversation I have been putting off for three days.
The conversation goes like this.
Weston pulled me aside on Wednesday. Not dramatically, not with paperwork or formal language, just the particular look he gets when he wants to say something that isn’t going in any official record.
He’d seen another article, this one less gossip and more legitimate, a city desk piece about the wedding fire and the Hayes family and the ongoing question of where Brielle had gone. The station was mentioned by name. I was mentioned by name.
The piece was careful and not explicitly accusatory, but the implication was clear enough that Weston didn’t need to spell it out.
He just looked at me and said, Max, you’re like a son to me and I care about you. That said, I need you to think about what you’re doing. This can blow up in your face.
And I said I would think about it.
And I have been thinking about it ever since.
The captaincy is not an abstract goal. It is the thing I have been building toward for twelve years, through every difficult shift, every bureaucratic battle, and every moment when I could have taken a different path and didn’t.
My father was the Fire Chief for this city.
The bar was set before I was old enough to understand what a bar was.
I have spent my entire adult life measuring myself against it, finding the distance between where I am and where I need to be, and closing that distance with the focused patience of someone who has no alternative plan.
There is no alternative plan.
There never has been.
And what I have been doing for the past three weeks, what has been happening in this apartment and in the station and in the quiet of the kitchen at six in the morning with a woman who looks at me like I might be something worth looking at, is not compatible with that plan.
I have known this, filed it away, and run out of space to keep filing it.
The front door opens.
I hear her before I see her, the particular way she moves through a space, and then she appears in the living room doorway, and she is.
She’s still in her jacket, color in her cheeks from the cold, hair a little wind-wrecked, and she’s smiling to herself.
She sees me, and the smile shifts into something warmer and more present.
“Hey,” she says. “You’re home early.”
“Jase and Evan got pulled in on a secondary,” I say. “I came back.”
She nods, dropping her bag by the door and shrugging off her jacket. “I was at Brighton Beach,” she says.
“How was it?” I ask because I am still capable of being a decent person for another thirty seconds.
“It was—” She stops. Looks for the word.
“It was really good, Max. It was really genuinely good. Callie thinks she might submit to Tribeca, and she gave me two agent names, and I did a monologue and—” She laughs quietly, shaking her head.
“Sorry. I’ll tell you properly later. You look like you’re thinking about something. ”
She’s always been able to read me.
I’ve been both grateful for and troubled by that from the beginning.
“I need to talk to you,” I say.
She stills.
Not dramatically. Just the quality of attention she gives things when she knows they matter, her whole self going present and focused, and she looks at me across the living room with those dark eyes and waits.
I tell her.
I don’t dress it up. I don’t build to it slowly or find a gentle approach, because there isn’t one, and Brielle has been managed and handled and spoken to for her entire life, and she deserves the plain truth even when the plain truth is this.
I tell her about Weston and the article and what my name being in the press in connection to hers means for a man who is twelve months away from a captaincy review.
I tell her that the optics of this situation, a Hayes, a runaway bride, a story that the tabloids have been running for three weeks and which is not going away on its own, create a professional complication that I cannot responsibly ignore.
She listens.
She doesn’t interrupt. She doesn’t flinch. She stands by the living room window with her arms loose at her sides and listens to every word I say with an expression that is so carefully controlled that I can only see what’s underneath it because I have spent three weeks learning to read her face.
“I think,” I say, and this is the part I didn’t plan to say but which comes out anyway, “that it would probably be better if you kept some distance from Jase and Evan as well. Until things settle. Until the press loses interest.”
There it is.
The line I should not have crossed.
She holds my gaze for a long moment after I finish.
“You’re right,” she says.
Two words. Quiet and flat and without argument, and they land worse than anything she could have said to fight me with because I hear in them the sound of someone agreeing with something they’ve been told to agree with their whole life.
Someone folding back into the shape they were pressed into before any of this started.
“Brielle—”
“No,” she says, and her voice is still quiet, but there is something harder underneath it now. “You’re right. I’m a complication. I’ve always been a complication. That’s—” She stops. Breathes. “That’s fine. I understand.”
“That’s not what I said,” I say.
“It’s what you meant,” she says.
The room is very quiet.
We are standing eight feet apart, and it might as well be a mile, and also it might as well be nothing, because the air between us is full of three weeks of something that doesn’t go away because one of us has decided it should.
I can feel it the way you feel weather coming, and she can feel it too because she’s looking at me with her jaw set and her eyes bright.
I take a step toward her.
I don’t plan it. My body makes the decision before my brain has finished the sentence it was forming, and then I am closer than I should be, and her face is tilted up toward mine, and I can see the exact moment she understands what is about to happen and doesn’t move away.
My hand finds her jaw.
She inhales.
“Max,” she says, low.
“I know,” I say.
“This is—”
“I know,” I say again.
Her hand comes up and her fingers close around my wrist, not pulling me away, just holding, and we stay like that for a moment that is not long and feels very long.
Then she drops her hand.
She takes a step back.
“I think you should go,” she says.
I stay where I am for another moment.
Then I nod.
I walk down the hall to my room and I close the door, and I stand there with my hand still on the doorknob and I listen to the apartment settle around me and I do not think about her face or the way she breathed in when I touched her jaw because if I think about it I will go back out there and undo everything I’ve just done which was the right thing which was the wrong thing which was both at once in a way I do not have a framework for.
Jase and Evan come home at nine.
I hear them at the door, hear the particular rhythm of two people who have been working together for eight hours and have lapsed into the easy silence of people who don’t need to fill the drive home with conversation.
Jase’s voice, low, saying something. Evan’s shorter reply. The sound of jackets being hung up.
Then quiet.
Then footsteps.
Jase appears in the kitchen doorway first.
I am sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of whiskey that I have been working on for the past two hours, which I am aware is not a lot of whiskey and is also not something I do, and the fact that I am doing it is apparently visible enough that Jase stops in the doorway and looks at me with an expression that goes from tired to alert in the space of a second.
Evan appears behind him.
Neither of them says anything for a while.
“What happened?” Jase says.
I wrap both hands around the glass. “Sit down,” I say.
They sit.
I tell them. The same way I told Brielle, plain and without dressing it up, because these are my people and they deserve the same honesty she did even when the honesty reflects badly on me. Weston. The article. The captaincy. What I said to her. The part about keeping her distance from all of us.
When I finish, the kitchen is very quiet.
Jase is looking at the table. His jaw is set in the way it gets when he’s angry, which is rare enough that I notice it every time.
Evan has set his glass of water down with controlled precision.
“You told her to stay away from us,” Evan says. Not a question.
“I said it would be better if—”
“You told her to stay away from us,” Evan says again, and his voice is still even, but there is something underneath it that is not.
“Evan.”
“No.” He looks at me, and for the first time in the years I’ve known him I see something in his face that is not the easy surface version, not the charm or the deflection or the self-deprecating humor, but the thing that has been building since the day he arrived at this station and was told in a hundred different ways that he was the youngest, the least essential, the one whose judgment could be questioned.
“You made a decision for all of us. You decided that your ambition was more important than what we’ve been building here, and you said it to her, and you know what she heard when you said it. ”
I hold his gaze.
“She heard that she’s a problem,” he says. “She heard that wanting things makes her a burden. She’s been hearing that her entire life, and you confirmed it.”
The kitchen is very quiet.
Jase pushes back from the table.
“I’m going to talk to her,” he says.
“She might not want—” I start.
“I know,” he says. “I’m going anyway.”
He goes down the hall. I hear the soft knock on her door. I hear the silence that follows it. Another knock. Then, after a long moment, his voice said her name, low and careful. Then nothing. Then his footsteps came back.
He stands in the kitchen doorway.
“She’s not opening the door,” he says.
Something moves through his expression that I don’t have the right to comment on.
Evan stands up from the counter and walks past both of us without a word, and I hear the front door open and close, and then through the window I watch him cross the street below and disappear in the direction of the gym, because that’s what Evan does with things he cannot talk through yet, he goes somewhere that requires his body to be occupied and his mind to be quiet and he works through it in the only language that currently makes sense.
Jase sits back down.
He doesn’t look at me.
We sit in the kitchen in the silence that is left when all the useful things have been said and there is nothing remaining but the weight of consequences, and I wrap both hands around my glass and look at the table and accept that I have done the right thing by the wrong measure and that knowing the difference is going to cost me something I am only beginning to understand the value of.
The apartment is very quiet.
It is a different quiet from this afternoon.
This one has a shape to it.