Chapter 2 #2
The back hallway opened up, and I found him by almost walking into him.
A man in his sixties, beagle tucked under one arm, other hand pressed flat to the wall, moving with the deliberate, terrified care of someone who understood he was lost and was trying not to panic about it.
He was moving away from the door. Deeper in.
I got my arm around him and turned him without ceremony, and he startled hard but didn’t fight me.
“I’ve got you,” I said, loud enough to carry through the mask. “Walk with me. Don’t stop moving.”
He didn’t argue. His breathing was ragged, and his face above the collar was red from the heat, but he was upright, his legs were working, and the beagle was making a sound I’d have found funny under other circumstances entirely.
Jude took his other side, and we moved back through the hallway, the three of us, the fire doing what fire did in the walls around us—spreading, finding the gaps between the studs, the spaces under the floors, the channels that old houses had plenty of and that might as well be roads as far as fire was concerned.
The roar had gotten louder in the time it had taken us to find him.
The ceiling above the kitchen doorway had gone soft-looking and dark, and I gave it a wide berth without breaking stride because I knew what it looked like when a ceiling was deciding whether or not to collapse.
We went through the front door, and the rain hit me like a slap, cold and immediate and extraordinary after the heat inside. The man went to the paramedics, and the beagle went to his wife, and I heard her cry out, something wordless and relieved, but I was already turning back.
The next hour was the job in its most essential form.
Hose lines and water pressure, radio calls, and constant repositioning as the fire found new ambitions.
Shaw worked the left exposure line, keeping the craftsman wet and the gap between the houses from becoming a conduit.
Evers had the roof, calling down observations with the composed precision that made her one of the best reads on a structure I’d ever worked with—where the fire was venting, where it wasn’t, and what the smoke color told us about what was burning and how fast. Jude and I worked the interior lines, pushing back the kitchen, chasing the wall fire, giving ground and taking it back in the grinding, incremental way of a fire that didn’t want to be contained.
It did get contained. That was the job—it usually did, if you stayed ahead of it, if nobody made a bad call, if the exposures held, and the wind cooperated at least partway. The craftsman next door kept its shingles. The colonial on the right lost a fence, and nothing else.
What was left of the kitchen and the back half of the upper floor was another matter.
When it was finally over, I stood in the front yard with water running off my helmet and my shoulders aching, and looked at what remained. The woman in the bathrobe was sitting on the paramedic step with a blanket around her now, her husband beside her, the beagle pressed against his leg.
Evers came to stand beside me, pulling her mask up onto her helmet. She looked at the house for a moment without speaking.
“Good find in the hallway,” she said.
“Jude would’ve gotten him.”
“Sure,” she said, in the tone that meant she wasn’t going to argue about it. She glanced at me sideways, something brief and measured in it. “You good?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m good.”
She nodded once and moved off, and I believed it was exactly as much as she believed it.
Jude appeared at my shoulder, his face carrying the particular tired satisfaction of a call that had gone hard but gone right. He looked at the ruins of the kitchen, then at me.
“Good call on the hallway,” he said.
“You would’ve found him.”
“Maybe.” He pulled his mask up and looked at me sideways. “You were focused today.”
“I’m always focused.”
“You were somewhere else in the truck,” he said. “And then you weren’t. I’m just noting the transition.”
I didn’t answer. He wasn’t wrong, and we both knew it.
The thing about this job was that it burned off everything that wasn’t essential.
Whatever I’d been carrying when I climbed into that truck—the café, the coffee, the way Becca had looked at me when she thought I wasn’t watching—all of it had gone quiet the moment the smoke hit my face.
Not gone. Just quiet. Waiting, patient as it always was, for the moment when there was room for it again.
That moment was apparently now, because as I pulled off my gloves and rolled my shoulders and watched the last of the steam rise from the ruined kitchen, it all came back.
The look on her face when she’d taken the napkins.
The stubborn set of her jaw. The way she’d stood in the rain outside Violet’s before she came in, like she was steeling herself for something.
I was so gone for that woman, it was genuinely inconvenient.
Jude tipped his helmet back. “You know, you don’t have to act like you don’t care. It’s not a crime to want to talk to her.”
“Drop it,” I said. “Please.”
But my mind was already back at Violet’s, where Becca Hartford had stood with wet hair plastered to her cheeks, clutching her tote bag like a lifeline. And even further back—a few months ago in Holloway’s parking lot, with whiskey burning my throat and a proposal I couldn’t stop replaying.
She’d smiled, thinking it was a joke. Enlisted Harper to help put me in her car and tucked me into her bed. She was gone when I woke up, and I’d cleared out of her place as fast as I could.
The radio crackled. I barely heard it.
Same brown eyes. Same stubborn set to her mouth. Same way she pretended she didn’t need me when I knew damn well she did.
I’d told myself a thousand times I’d keep my distance.
Then she broke things off with Travis, and Matt had made us all promise to watch out for her, and now every time I turned around, I was back in her orbit.
Not that I minded. I just wasn’t sure how many more times I could stand that polite, prickly version of her—the one who looked through me like I’d never been her best friend, the one pretending not to remember Holloway’s parking lot.
Every time I tried to bring it up, her eyes would go wide, and she’d find a way to leave.
We climbed back into the truck. The adrenaline had faded, leaving me hollowed out in the pleasant way a hard call sometimes did, like the job had wrung something out of me that had needed wringing.
Jude’s stomach growled audibly.
I looked at him.
“Don’t,” he said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Mom’s,” he said.
“Mom’s,” I agreed.