Chapter 19
Nineteen
The station never felt stranger than it did on a weekend.
The bullpen looked like a set after the crew had gone home.
Lights on, chairs pushed in, a few jackets left on the backs like the people who wore them might return at any moment.
The air had the flat chill of stale coffee and disinfectant.
In the distance a copier rattled and then gave up.
Somewhere down the hall a door clicked shut and the sound carried too far, like it had been dropped into an empty church.
Erin sat at her desk and pretended her pen strokes meant something.
She underlined, circled, and drew neat arrows between paragraphs in a crash report that didn’t need her attention on a Saturday afternoon.
Her eyes skimmed the same sentence again and again.
None of it stuck. The words slid off her focus like rain off a slicker.
Her phone buzzed across the desk. Jamie’s name lit the screen.
Erin’s chest hitched, then tightened into a knot that felt practiced, like a muscle that remembered an old injury.
She turned the phone face down and set her palm on top of it until the vibration stopped.
She didn’t pick it up. She didn’t breathe for a count of five.
I can’t.
The words had lodged behind her ribs on Friday night and refused to leave.
They felt cool and absolute. Jamie’s voice had not been cruel.
It had broken on the second word. That should have meant something, except Erin couldn’t make it mean anything she could hold.
She had reached up without thinking, brushed a wet lock of hair from Jamie’s forehead, and felt like a live wire in a storm.
Jamie had leaned, or Erin had imagined it, and then the space between them had snapped back into place.
Jamie had stepped away. Jamie had said she couldn’t.
Erin pressed the pen harder than necessary and left a drop of ink where there should have been a clean underline. She capped the pen before she turned the paper into a bruise.
A text banner slid across the top edge of her phone.
Then another. She refused to read them. She pulled a fresh legal pad closer.
She made a list of tasks that didn’t need to be completed until Tuesday.
She numbered each line, then alphabetized it.
She planned a new template for press briefings and added a column for weather notes that she knew she would never use.
She opened the template again and changed the font. Then she changed it back.
The quiet didn’t help. The lights hummed and the hum threaded through her skull.
When she closed her eyes she could see rain droplets clinging to Jamie’s jaw, then moving, then vanishing under the collar of her jacket.
She opened her eyes again and stared at a stapler for a full minute like it might offer an alternate outcome.
Her phone buzzed a second time. Then a third.
She pulled the top drawer open and slid the phone inside before the fourth vibration began, as if she could lock the sound in with the pens and sticky notes and spare batteries.
She shut the drawer and leaned back. The chair squeaked.
The sound felt too loud, like a hand on a mirror.
PIOs do not cross lines. They do not get sloppy, even in the rain, even when someone smiles like that across a table and tells a joke that lands a little too close to the heart.
They do not reach. They do not want. They do not mistake warmth for an invitation.
Erin had told herself those rules for years and believed them more often than not.
Last night she had put her hand on the exception and it had moved away.
By late afternoon the light through the high windows had turned the color of old coins.
Erin stood, stretched until her shoulders popped, and took the long way around the bullpen that didn’t have anyone in it.
She refilled her mug even though the coffee had been sitting for hours and tasted like cardboard.
She drank it anyway, lips pressed to a chipped rim, eyes on the muted TV that cycled B-roll no one had asked to see.
The phone in the drawer buzzed once and went still. Erin counted to twenty, then thirty, and told herself she had learned something. She told herself she could learn it again on Sunday.
Sunday looked the same, only her eyes felt sanded down.
She logged case notes that had already been logged.
She audited a spreadsheet, changed two cells, and changed them back.
She drafted a release about a briefing that wouldn’t happen and filed it under a folder titled Someday.
When she caught her reflection in the dark TV screen she almost didn’t recognize the set of her mouth.
It looked like her father’s when he was trying not to argue. That made her look away fast.
At noon she took a walk around the block without her coat.
The air had that damp spring weight that Boston carried even when it was not spring anymore.
She let the cold touch her bare wrists and tried to think of something other than the way Jamie had said the word can’t.
It was not a rough word. It was not even a loud word.
It had been a thin wire that held everything together.
Erin wanted to hate it. She couldn’t summon that either.
Back at her desk she opened her email even though there was nothing to check.
She sent two notes to herself and flagged both with red.
She typed a message to Jamie that said I’m sorry and then closed the draft before she could add anything else.
Another message formed under her fingers without permission.
I shouldn’t have reached for you. She highlighted it. She deleted it.
She stayed until the edges of the room felt soft and the silence felt like a pressure on her eardrums. Only then did she go home, but only because her body told her it was time.
By Monday evening, the apartment felt like a place she had once lived in and was visiting now. The last smear of light had left the windows. The city moved on the other side of the glass without asking her to come with it. Erin set her keys on the counter and listened to the familiar clink.
Leo trotted in from the bedroom with his favorite toy, a limp canvas fox that had lost one ear and all of its stuffing. He dropped it at her feet and sat with polite expectation, eyes bright. Erin bent and rubbed the line where his skull met his ears. His tail thumped once against a cabinet.
“Hang on,” she said. “We have our Monday thing.”
She had not meant to make it a ritual when she started it.
It had come after a cluster of weeks that had taken more from her than she had planned to give.
She had ducked into a bakery because the smell had been warm and ordinary, and she had bought a cannoli because the person behind the counter had said it was the best thing they made.
She had taken it home and split it with Leo.
He had liked the shell more than the filling.
She had liked the quiet more than anything.
The next Monday she had gone back. Then the next.
She pulled the white box from the paper bag and slid the loop of gold string loose.
The lid lifted with a soft pull. Sugar dusted the edges.
She carried the box to the coffee table and sat on the floor so Leo could feel like they were equals for the ceremony.
He curled beside her and rested his chin on her knee as if to bless the proceedings.
She broke the cannoli in half. He got the larger part of the shell without the filling, because he did better that way. He crunched with delicate enthusiasm, eyes half-closed like this was proof that life could be good. Erin smiled without feeling it land.
Her half tasted exactly like it always did.
Crisp shell. Cream that hit first with sugar and then with something that wanted to be citrus.
Chocolate in small chips so they surprised you instead of insisting.
She swallowed, waited for the familiar lift, and felt only a thickness at the back of her tongue.
She took another bite and managed a small sound that was not quite a laugh.
“Not our best Monday, huh?” she asked Leo.
He lifted his chin a little higher on her knee and looked at her like he had been told a secret. His eyes were too much. She gave him the last bit of shell and listened to his careful crunches until the sound finished and the apartment was quiet again.
Her phone rang from the coffee table. It had been quiet all afternoon, which she had told herself was a good sign. The screen flashed once. Jamie. Erin looked away, then looked back as if the screen itself had tugged her. The call ended. A text followed that she didn’t read. Another call began.
She reached for the phone and stopped with her hand hovering over it. The metal frame threw a narrow strip of light across her fingertips. She closed her hand into a fist and set it on her thigh.
If she answered, Jamie would speak and the ground would tilt.
That was how it always felt when Jamie decided to be gentle.
It was worse than when she was sharp. Erin didn’t trust herself with gentle.
She didn’t trust herself to hear an apology or an explanation or anything that sounded like hope.
She had not earned any of that. She had been careless with her own rules. She had been careless with Jamie.
The call ended. The apartment returned to quiet. Leo shifted and sighed like an old man. Erin rubbed the fur between his eyes with her knuckle.
“Do not look at me like that,” she said. “We are fine.”
Her voice rasped on the last word. She cleared her throat and tried again.
“We are fine.”
The knock came while her final word was still in the room.
It was not a loud knock. It was the kind of knock a person used when they weren’t sure if they should be there.
Erin went still, hand paused on Leo’s head.
She felt him tense under her palm, not with fear, only alertness.
He turned his face toward the door and listened like he had been trained to this very purpose.
A second knock followed, then a third. Erin looked at the phone and saw no delivery notice. No neighbor text. No building alert. The phone buzzed once like it had a thought and then it went still.
“Erin?”
Her name arrived through the door and into her chest. The voice was easy to know. She had no trouble placing it even when it softened like that. She closed her eyes and opened them again. The apartment had not changed.
Leo stood and shook out his coat. He trotted to the door and wagged at the exact angle that suggested moral certainty.
“Traitor,” Erin said, but the word didn’t have heat.
Her body moved before her mind endorsed the plan.
She stood on stiff legs and wiped her hands on her joggers like there was something to clean.
She caught her reflection in the dark TV screen and decided not to look a second time.
She took two steps and then two more. Her heart worked like it was new to the job.
She told herself she could ignore the door and wait it out.
She told herself it would be kind to both of them to pretend she was not home.
Another knock. Softer. Not a rhythm of impatience. A rhythm of please.
“Please,” Jamie said through the wood. “Will you let me talk to you?”
Erin put her hand flat on the door and felt the faint vibration of a city that kept moving whether people inside their apartments wanted it to or not.
She let her forehead rest there too. The cool paint was steady.
She stayed like that and let thirty seconds pass.
Then thirty more. Leo sat at her feet so close that his shoulder touched her ankle.
He pressed closer as if to remind her that her body had weight and her choices did too.
In that minute she tried on three versions of tomorrow.
In the first she didn’t open the door, and Jamie left, and the next time they saw each other it would be under fluorescent lights where Erin knew exactly how to keep her voice even.
In the second she opened the door and told Jamie she was right to say she couldn’t, and the conversation would be clean and boring, and then Erin would close the door and feel like a hallway without pictures.
In the third she opened the door and didn’t know what would happen next, which was the same as saying anything could happen.
That was the part that made her breath go thin.
She thought of the rain on Friday night, the way it had plastered hair to skin and softened edges that didn’t need softening.
She thought of her own hand raised in the wet air, hanging there longer than it should have.
She thought of Jamie’s face when she stepped back and the way regret can look like fear if you glance at it wrong.
Leo bumped her ankle again. He didn’t whine. He never did when she needed him to be a wall.
“All right,” she whispered. She didn’t know which future she had chosen.
She lifted the chain. She turned the deadbolt. The metal sounded bright in the small entryway. She wrapped her fingers around the knob and counted to four.
Then she opened the door.