He let that sit.
"You go up there, and you tell her the truth. The whole truth. Not the part of it she already heard. The part you didn't say. You tell her you'd been deciding for two months. You tell her about the realtor. You tell her about the boxes. You let her make the call again with the whole thing in front of her this time. And if she still tells you to go after that, then you go, and you live with that. But she chooses with the whole story. Not the version of you that fit on a bank in November."
He held my eye.
"Or you sit in my kitchen at the end of every shift for the rest of your career and turn it over."
The fluorescent buzzed.
In the bay, the senior man called something to the probie, but I didn't catch it.
I sat there with the coffee going cold in my hand.
I had known. Since the first morning I'd come into this kitchen at the end of a shift, and the breath in my chest had been where it had been for the eighteen months before her. Since walking off the BQE wreck at four-thirty yesterday, and not having anywhere to take the feeling of it.
I had been refusing to know for three weeks.
I set the mug down.
"Shane."
"Yeah."
"I'm goin'."
"I know."
"What about the slot?"
He shrugged.
"The slot's the easy part, Ford. The slot was never the part I was worried about for you."
"You're not mad?"
"I'm not mad. I'm not gonna be mad. I'm gonna take it out of your hide in five years when you're sittin' across from me at a Thanksgiving table tellin' me about your kids."
A laugh came out of me that I hadn't made in three weeks.
He saw it. He didn't comment on it.
He picked his mug up and carried it to the sink.
"Go home," he said over his shoulder. "Get a couple hours' sleep. Then drive."
"Yeah."
"And, Ford."
"Yeah?"
"Tell her the whole thing."
"Yeah."
He turned the tap on.
I got up off the stool.
