Chapter 10
Ty
I'm going to tell her.
I haven't decided. I keep telling myself I haven't decided, all the way through shift change Saturday morning, all through truck checks, all through the briefing, all through Beck's standard Saturday reminders about paperwork and the department's current initiative regarding fleet maintenance logs, all through the mid-morning medical that Hanna and Gemma catch on Fourth Street, all through lunch at the kitchen table with Cal next to me rebuilding his tuna sandwich twice because he doesn't believe in a tuna sandwich until he's deconstructed it.
I'm going to tell her.
I haven't decided.
I haven't decided, and I'm going to tell her.
Both of those things are, as of this morning, completely and simultaneously true.
The thing happens around eleven p.m. I'm in the kitchen alone, cleaning up after the post-shift sandwich Harrison made — because Harrison will make sandwiches when he's stressed, and Harrison was stressed at dinner.
The sandwich was excellent but also twelve people's worth, leaving enough bread-and-roast-beef debris on the counter to prosecute a case in.
Everybody has gone to bed except for the third-shift rotation, the station is quiet, the engine bay is dim, and I'm washing dishes at the sink in the light above the stove.
Hanna comes in.
She comes in in her station blues, because she's been on a call with Gemma — a bad one, I heard it on the scanner, a domestic where the wife ended up fine but the husband ended up arrested — and she has the specific exhaustion of a woman who's just finished a call that reminded her why she does the job.
She doesn't say hello. She walks to the fridge, opens it, and stands there.
"What do you want."
"Nothing. I don't know. Food."
"There's roast beef. Left side, second shelf, top container."
She gets it and makes herself a sandwich with the methodical thoroughness of a woman operating mostly on reflex, not paying attention to what she's assembling.
She eats half of it at the counter, leaning over the plate, and drinks water straight from her cupped hand at the tap.
Then she turns around and leans back against the counter.
"Hi."
"Hi."
"Harrison's sandwiches." She tilts her head toward the container.
"Yeah. Therapeutic."
She puts her plate in the sink, and I take it, rinse it, set it in the rack without comment. She doesn't move away. She stands two inches from my shoulder, forearms on the counter, eyes on her hands.
"Do you want coffee? Tea?"
"No. Neither."
"Okay."
"Ty."
"Yeah."
A beat. "I'm really tired."
"I know."
"The call was — "
"I heard it on the scanner."
"Yeah." She exhales through her nose. "You okay?"
"I'm good. You okay?"
"No."
"Okay."
She laughs — short, not quite real, the laugh of a person who's too tired to cry. She rubs her face with her hand.
"Ty."
"Yeah."
"I'm going to say something, and I want you to not make a thing out of it." She's still looking at her hands.
"Okay."
"I miss you."
I stop moving.
All the way. The plate I'm holding stays in my hand. The other hand stays on the dishcloth. My feet stay on the mat. My face, which I've been keeping still for weeks, loses a definite amount of its stillness.
"Hanna — "
"I know, I know — "
"I — "
"I know. That's not — I'm not — I'm too tired tonight to — don't — "
She stops. She closes her eyes. I put the plate in the rack, dry my hands on the towel, and turn toward her.
"Open your eyes."
"Ty."
"Open your eyes."
She opens them.
"I'm going to say one thing," I say. "And then you can say whatever you need to say, including telling me to leave you alone and never say it again. Okay?"
"Okay."
"I was never over you."
She's looking at me.
"I tried. You should know. I tried really hard.
I dated other women. I took vacations with other women.
I had a girlfriend for months, a good woman — an excellent woman, a smart funny woman named Jessica who worked in a hospital and who deserved to be loved by a man who was going to be able to love her fully.
I broke up with her because I wasn't that man, and I knew it, and she knew it, and she told me so on the way out the door. "
"Ty — "
"Let me just finish."
"Okay."
"I tried. I want that on the record. I didn't sit in Copper Ridge for a decade pining for you. I lived a life. A pretty good one. I was a good firefighter. A good friend to Cal. A good son. A good friend when someone need one. I did a lot of things."
"Okay."
"And I was never over you."
My hands are shaking.
I've said everything around the sentence and not the sentence itself.
I look at my hands on the towel, watch them shake.
I've watched these hands do a lot of things in fires and car accidents and in Mrs. Larsen's house and on the porch steps when I didn't get to say goodbye.
I've never watched them do this particular shake.
"Ty — "
"I'm saying it." I look up. "I was never over you, Hanna.
I'm not over you now. I'm never going to be over you.
Whatever this is between us, it didn't go away.
I waited ten years for it to go away, and it didn't. So, it's here.
And I know the rules. I know what you need.
I understand why we said what we said in the kitchen three weeks ago.
But I can't keep making you coffee and pretending.
I can't keep coming to Sunday dinner and pretending.
I can't sit on a couch next to your brother in a — a t-shirt — "
She makes a sound. Laugh or sob. Both.
" — and pretend. I can't pretend anymore. That's where I am."
"Ty."
"That's what I wanted to say."
"Your hands are shaking."
"Yeah."
"I can see them from here." Her voice is very quiet. "Your face is still completely flat, though."
"Yeah."
"How do you do that."
"I don't know."
"It's unnatural." But she's not laughing at me. She's looking at me the way she did at the academy on the night I can't talk about — full, bright, terrifying clarity — and she hasn't reached for the deflection, hasn't started a joke, hasn't found the punchline.
"Hanna. Say something."
"I'm thinking."
"Okay."
"Don't rush me."
"I'm not rushing."
"I can hear you not rushing."
"Hanna."
"Shut up."
Her face is in motion, very small, very contained. Her mouth thinks of and discards things. Her eyes flick once to the coffee pot and back. Her hand, on the counter edge where the laminate has raised from wear, picks at it.
Then she crosses the space between us.
It's one counter panel. Maybe four feet. She crosses it the way she crossed a dorm room a decade ago — without much warning, the manner of a person who's decided and for whom there's no more thinking.
She puts both hands on my shoulders and looks up at me.
"Ty."
"Hanna."
"I need to say something."
"Okay."
"I kept the packing list. For the shirt I mailed you. I kept it for ten years. I found it in a shoebox last month when I was packing to move, looked at it, thought about throwing it out, didn't, put it back in the box, and packed it. It's in my mother's garage right now."
"Okay."
"That's what I wanted to say."
"Okay."
"I miss you." Her hands tighten on my shoulders.
"Okay."
"Ty."
"Yeah."
"Can I — "
"Yeah."
She kisses me.
She kisses me the way she kissed me in the supply closet at twenty-three — like a woman who isn't sure she's made the right choice and is going to make it anyway.
Her hands slide from my shoulders up to my jaw, her thumbs finding the corners of my mouth like she's been missing the specific topography of my face for a decade, which I happen to know she has.
Her hair smells like Harrison's sandwich and the station and the specific shampoo she's been using since the academy.
She's taller than I remember, or I've forgotten how to judge height, or both.
I kiss her back.
I kiss her back with the discipline I don't have, with my hands still smelling like dish soap — one braced on the counter, one on the small of her back over her station blues, over the place where a decade ago I'd put my hand when I wanted her to know I was there.
She knows this hand. She makes a small sound against my mouth that's acknowledgment, and I'm thirty-three years old, and for the first time in ten years I'm kissing the woman I'm in love with and not a stand-in.
She pulls back.
Her forehead is on my sternum, hands gripping the front of my uniform shirt. I can feel her breathing.
"Oh my god."
"Yeah."
"We're at the station." She doesn't lift her head.
"Yeah."
"Cal is sixty feet away in the bunks."
"Yeah."
"We — "
"Yeah."
She steps back with the abrupt motion of a person who needs immediate distance between herself and a fire, leans on the opposite counter, puts both hands over her face, and laughs — the real laugh — and I watch it. I've been very good at discipline for a very long time and I'm done being good.
"I'm going to lose my entire career," she says into her hands.
"You aren't."
"I'm going to — "
"Hanna."
"What."
"Look at me."
"No. I'm going to cry."
"Okay."
"I'm a paramedic. We don't cry at work. It's in the handbook."
"I know."
She looks at me anyway. She's a little bit crying — barely, jaw set, eyes very bright, still half-laughing.
Comedy and emotion integrated in one face, pushing each other out of the way for primacy, landing somewhere in the middle as the expression of a woman who's just made an irrevocable decision in a station kitchen.
"Come here."
"Ty — "
"Come here."
"You come here."
"Fine."
I cross the kitchen in three steps and put my arms around her.
She puts her face in my chest, and I put my chin on the top of her head, and she cries silently against my uniform.
Then she pulls back, wipes her face with her sleeve, sniffs, and pulls herself together the way only Hanna Larsen can — with the sheer physical force of a decision — leaving only the faintest evidence of the tears.
"Okay."
"Okay."
"We're going to — "
The bunk room door bangs open.
We have a second and a half. We use it. Hanna steps back and I turn, very calmly, and resume drying a dish.
Hanna turns to the coffee pot, pours a cup — black, hers — without acknowledging that the coffee pot is empty and she's pouring nothing — and stands at the counter with her back to the doorway, shoulders a line of perfect professional calm.
Derek shuffles in wearing socks.
"Did somebody eat the rest of Harrison's sandwich?"
"No. It's in the fridge."
"Why is it in the fridge?"
"Harrison put it in the fridge."
"Harrison's a saint."
"Harrison's a saint," I agree.
Derek opens the fridge, straightens up with the container, and doesn't appear to notice either of us. He's half-asleep and entirely focused on the sandwich.
"Night, Brennan."
"Night, Derek."
"Larsen." He turns.
"Derek."
"Coffee?"
"Gonna try to sleep," Hanna says.
"With a full cup of coffee."
"Sniffing it."
"You're a strange woman."
"Thank you, Derek."
He shuffles out. The bunk door bangs closed.
Hanna breathes out. "We're going to get caught."
"Yeah."
"That was luck."
"That was Derek being Derek."
"Ty."
"Yeah."
"I have to go."
"Okay."
"We can't — "
"I know."
"We're going to figure this out." Her eyes hold mine steady. "Okay?"
"Yeah."
"Ty."
"What."
"I'm still in."
"Me too."
She leaves with her cup of nothing, walks down the hallway, and disappears into the bunk room.
I stand in the kitchen with my hand on the counter for a long minute. I dry a dish that doesn't need drying, put it away, turn off the light, and sit at the table in the dark. The fridge hums the way the fridge at the academy used to hum. I put my face in my hands.
I laugh once, quietly, into my palms.
It's a real laugh. The first real one I've let myself have in a decade.