Chapter 7
Hanna
I'm at Peak Grounds at seven in the morning, on my day off, because I've decided — as a matter of adult decision-making — to walk into this coffee shop, order a coffee from the woman who knows my order, and stop treating it like a referendum on my life choices.
A decision I've been making since Monday.
Peak Grounds at seven a.m. is, it turns out, the following populations: three retirees in a booth complaining about the mayor, a woman in scrubs writing what appears to be a dissertation on her laptop, Nora the barista, and a man behind the counter I don't recognize who's apparently the owner.
The little wooden sign says his name is Micah.
He's early thirties, dark-rimmed glasses, a beard that looks less styled than inevitable, with the specific quiet of a man who hasn't said more than four words in a row since the Clinton administration.
"Morning," Micah says as I come in.
"Morning."
"Black?"
"Black." He pours without requiring any other conversation.
Nora looks up from a croissant tray. "Hey, Hanna."
"Hey, Nora. Cal in this morning?"
"Up at the station," Micah says, sliding the cup across. "Enjoy the coffee."
"Thanks."
I take the coffee, pick the booth by the window because it's the only open one, and sit down with my book — a paperback with a purple cover that Cal's bookshop friend recommended, which I haven't been able to read more than eleven pages all month because every time I sit down with it, my brain goes elsewhere.
Today, at seven-oh-four on Wednesday morning, I'm going to finish chapter three with my coffee, and I'm going to have a nice time.
I read half a page.
The bell on the door rings.
I don't look up. I'm not a woman who looks up every time the bell rings, and I'm going to read my book.
A shadow stops next to the booth.
"Mind if I — "
"I do mind."
Ty sits down anyway. He sits across from me in the booth by the window, sets his own coffee and his own paperback on the table, opens the book, and reads it.
I stare at him. "What are you doing."
"Reading."
"You're sitting in my booth."
"All the other booths are full."
"Then sit at the counter."
"I don't like the counter."
"Ty."
"Hanna." He turns a page without looking up. "You don't have to talk to me. I'm not going to talk to you. Read your book."
He's wearing a gray hoodie and reading glasses. Reading glasses. Ty Brennan is wearing reading glasses at seven-oh-five on a Wednesday morning and I'm trying to work out whether the glasses are new since the academy or whether they're some kind of retroactive attack on my nervous system.
I open my book. I read two words. I close my book.
"What are you reading."
"Hanna — "
"What are you reading, Ty."
He shows me the cover. It's a Le Carré — The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which is a book I've read twice because it's an excellent book, and also because Cal loaned it to me at twenty.
The fact that Ty is reading Le Carré at seven a.m. on my day off is such a specifically Ty Brennan thing that I want to hurl his coffee across the booth and say something extremely unkind about it.
"Good book."
"Yep."
"Have you read it before."
"Three times."
"Fourth reread," I say.
"Fourth reread." He doesn't look up.
"Obsessive."
"Comforting."
"You're a forty-year-old man in a thirty-three-year-old's body."
"Mmhmm."
I open my own book. I read a full page. I don't remember any of what I just read, flip back, try again. My eyes move down the page. I couldn't tell you, in this moment, whether the book is in English.
Ty turns a page.
I close the book.
"Ty."
"Yeah."
"I want to say something, and I want you to let me say it without making a face."
"Okay." He keeps reading.
"This — " I gesture between us. " — you sitting in the booth with me with your Le Carré and your stupid little glasses isn't the same as a break room."
"Okay."
"It isn't colleagues sharing a table. It's a specific, targeted — "
"Hanna." He finally looks up over the rims of the stupid little glasses, with the particular patience I've clocked on his face approximately forty-seven times in the last six weeks. "I'm trying very hard to show you that I can just be in a room with you."
"What?"
"That's all this is."
"I don't — "
"You've been avoiding rooms with me since the moment you walked into Station 7, and I've been letting you, and that's fine, that's fair. I'm just — " He sets the book down. "Demonstrating a baseline."
"A what."
"A baseline. Of coexistence. I sit across from you at Peak Grounds, I don't say anything, I read my book, I leave. You read your book. You leave. Nothing happens. No rules broken. No accidental revelations. Just — " he lifts his coffee " — proof of concept."
"Oh my god."
"That's all."
"This isn't a proof of concept, Ty, this is a man ambushing me at a coffee shop at seven a.m. — "
"It's not ambush. It's — "
"Sit at another table."
"There aren't any."
"Go outside."
"It's thirty-seven degrees outside."
"Ty."
"I'll leave if you want me to leave." He says it evenly, no pressure on it at all.
"Yes."
"Okay."
He starts to close his book.
"Wait." It comes out before I can catch it.
He stops. He doesn't close the book, doesn't move. He just waits.
I stare at my coffee. I stare at the coffee and think about all the bad decisions I've made in my life, and I try to remember the last time one of them happened at a coffee shop, and I can't, and I think maybe this is a precedent.
"You can stay."
"Okay."
"But you don't talk. No book commentary. No — no anything."
"I wasn't going to comment on the book."
"You always comment on books. Cal loaned me a book you'd already read once, and you commented on it for thirty-five minutes at a family dinner."
Ty goes still for a beat. "You remember that."
"I remember everything, Ty."
"Yeah." Very quietly, not looking at me. "Yeah, I know you do."
And there it is. The thing.
It slides into the booth between us the way a cat slides into a lap — without anyone having invited it, nothing dramatic about the way he said it, nothing loaded, flat as he says everything — but it's a sentence with a weight on it, the way some sentences do.
The weight of him knowing me. Of me knowing him.
Of a decade of both of us knowing each other across a distance we built on purpose, and now the sentence is sitting on the table between two mugs of Micah's coffee, and I have to respond, and I don't know how.
I reach for the deflection. I reach for the joke.
On any given day I have a hundred possible jokes at my disposal. The joke about his glasses. The joke about his Le Carré phase. The joke about his hoodie, his reading, his face.
None of them come.
I open my mouth, close it, open it again.
My brain reaches for punchlines and returns empty-handed.
I haven't been unable to find the joke at the moment I needed it since I was fifteen years old and my father's captain came to the door and said there has been an accident.
That was the last time. In the fourteen years since, I've always had the joke.
I cultivate jokes the way other people cultivate gardens. I don't fail at this.
The silence stretches — the way water stretches when you fill a glass past the rim and the surface tension is the only thing holding it in place, a millimeter above the glass, and everyone watching is holding their breath.
I look at my coffee.
I don't look at Ty.
Across the shop, Micah is wiping down the espresso machine.
His eyes aren't on the machine. They're on the booth by the window for one long second before he goes back to the espresso machine, and his face does nothing, and cold horror settles in my chest — because Micah knows.
Micah has always known. Micah, who's served Ty Brennan black coffees every morning for eight years and is now serving me, has been standing behind that counter with the silent awareness of a man watching a very long inevitability finally line up its last pieces.
"Hanna." Ty's voice is very soft.
"Don't."
"I'm not doing anything."
"Yeah." I stare at my cup. "That's the problem."
"Okay."
"It was a good line. You can't just drop a line like that in a coffee shop."
"I wasn't — "
"'I know you do.' That was — "
"I was just — "
"You were just saying a true thing. I know. That's why I can't get a joke to work right now. You're — you're functionally a — you're a — "
I trail off, take a breath, close my eyes. I count backwards from ten, because I have a method, because I've worked on this method for a decade in Portland, and the method works every time. The method isn't working right now.
"Hanna."
"What."
"Breathe."
"I'm breathing, Ty — "
"You're not."
"I'm — "
"You're not." He doesn't push it. He just waits.
I breathe. The breathing, it turns out, is the thing I wasn't doing.
My phone rings.
It rings with the timing of a rescue boat arriving exactly when needed, and I grab it. My mother. I answer.
"Hi, Mom."
"Honey, I'm at the grocery store, did you want — "
"Yes. Yes, Mom. Whatever you're getting is fine. Yes."
"I haven't finished — "
"Whatever. Yes. Great. Thank you. I have to go. Love you." I hang up.
My mother hasn't been hung up on by me in my life, and she will have opinions later, and I don't care. I look up. Ty is watching me, not saying anything, looking — of all things — a little sorry.
"I have to go. I forgot I had a — a thing."
"Okay."
"Don't look at me like that."
"How am I looking at you."
"With sympathy."
"I'm looking at you like a person."
"Stop it."
"Okay."
I stand up, gather my coffee and my book in a single sweep, nearly drop the book, catch it, and walk to the counter. I hand Micah a five-dollar tip bill for a three-dollar coffee.
"Micah."
"Yeah."
"Can I ask you a question." I gesture vaguely toward the booth by the window.
"Hanna." His voice isn't unkind.
"Yeah."
"I'm gonna stop you right there."
"Okay."
"Have a good morning." He goes back to the espresso machine. "Say hi to your mom."
I walk out of Peak Grounds with my face composed, paperback tucked under my arm.
Two blocks down Fir Street I pull over, put my forehead on the steering wheel of my Subaru, and sit there for the specific length of time it takes me to remember that I'm a paramedic and a grown woman with a mother at a grocery store.
I sit up.
Everybody in this town is trying to kill me.
I drive. I don't tell Cal about any of this, because Cal wouldn't understand it, and because he isn't at the house when I get there, and because for the first time in my life I'm going to sit with an unfunny silence and not try to fill it.
I drive to the convenience store by the house to buy my mother a bag of her favorite gummy bears, and let the silence be a silence.
It lasts forty-eight minutes before I call my mother back to apologize for hanging up on her.
Forty-eight minutes is the longest silence of my life.
It's a start.