Chapter Ten Jase
I have excellent timing.
This is something people have said about me my entire life, usually in the context of arriving somewhere at exactly the right moment with exactly the right thing to say. A talent, some have called it. A gift, even.
Standing in the kitchen doorway at seven forty-three in the morning, looking at Brielle Hayes sitting in Maxwell Redwood’s lap at the kitchen table, I am forced to reconsider whether excellent timing is actually what I have.
Neither of them moves for a full second.
Then Max clears his throat. Brielle straightens up slightly. And I become very interested in the coffee maker on the counter behind them, which I absolutely need to get to right now for reasons that have nothing to do with the fact that I walked into something I was not expecting to walk into.
“Morning,” I say to the coffee maker.
“Morning,” says Brielle.
Max says nothing, which, from him, communicates roughly the same information as a five-paragraph essay from anyone else.
I cross the kitchen with what I hope is the energy of a man on a completely routine coffee mission, reach past them both for a mug from the cabinet, and pour myself a cup with the focused concentration of someone performing a very delicate medical procedure.
Then I turn around and lean against the counter and look at both of them, because I’m not actually going to pretend I didn’t see what I saw, and also because Brielle is now looking at the table like she’s considering whether she can reasonably climb underneath it, and I cannot have that.
“So,” I say pleasantly. “How’d everyone sleep?”
Max gives me a look that contains a full year’s worth of warnings compressed into approximately half a second.
I give him my most innocent face in return.
Brielle makes a sound that is trying very hard to be nothing and is almost succeeding, and I decide that I like her even more than I did yesterday, which is saying something because I liked her quite a lot yesterday.
She has slid off Max’s lap by now and is sitting in the adjacent chair with her hands wrapped around a coffee mug and her hair loose around her face and the expression of someone bracing themselves for a conversation they’re not sure they want to have.
I’m not going to make her have it.
Max pushes back from the table. “I need to check in with Weston before he gets here,” he says, with the energy of a man who has decided that the most dignified available option is a strategic retreat, and he takes it without ceremony, squeezing past me in the doorway and disappearing down the hall.
And then it’s just the two of us.
I take the chair he vacated, turning it around and straddling it backwards, forearms folded across the top.
Brielle is still looking at the table. There’s color sitting high on her cheekbones that has nothing to do with the bruise below her temple, which looks worse this morning than it did yesterday, the purple deepening and spreading in the way bruises do overnight when they’ve decided to really commit to the bit.
“Hey,” I say.
She looks up.
“I’m not judging you,” I tell her. “Just so we’re clear.”
She blinks. Something in her face shifts, like she was expecting a different opening.
“I mean it,” I say. “Not even a little bit. Not even in the small private part of a person where they judge things they’d never say out loud.”
She looks down at her mug. “I don't normally do things like that,” she says. “In case that needed saying.”
“It didn't,” I tell her. “But noted.”
She looks up. “You're really not surprised.”
“A little,” I say honestly. “Max isn't exactly known for lap sitting. But surprised in a good way.” I pause. “He stayed in that chair all night, you know.”
Something moves through her expression that she doesn't try to hide.
“I know,” she says quietly.
“That's him,” I say. “He doesn't say much but he shows up. Every time.”
She's quiet, turning her mug in her hands. “I'm starting to see that.”
I nod, setting my mug down. “How are the feet?”
She glances down, as if she’d forgotten about them. “Sore. Better than yesterday.”
“Better than yesterday is relative, given that yesterday you ran through broken glass in bare feet.” I stand, patting the back of the chair. “Sit sideways. Let me take a look.”
She hesitates for a second, then turns in the chair so her legs are angled toward me. I crouch down and start carefully peeling back the medical tape on her left foot, checking the edges of the deeper cuts the hospital dressed.
The laceration along the arch is the one I’m most concerned about, a clean slice from a piece of stained glass that went deep enough to need proper closure.
“This one needs fresh dressing,” I tell her, checking the seal. “The one on the right is fine. Stay there.”
I get up and go to the small first aid kit mounted on the wall near the door, gathering what I need, and come back to crouch in front of her again.
“You don’t have to do this,” she says.
“I know.” I ease the old dressing free, clean the area with practiced efficiency, and reach for the fresh gauze. “But I’m an EMT who carried you out of a burning building yesterday, so I have a vested interest in making sure you don’t get an infection.”
A smirk. “Vested interest.”
“Professional pride,” I confirm. “If you develop complications, I’ll never hear the end of it from Max.”
She makes a small sound that is almost a laugh. I count it as a win and keep going.
“Can I ask you something?” she says, after a moment.
“You can ask me anything.”
She’s quiet for a second, watching my hands. “Why did you stay? At the hospital. You didn't have to do that.”
I finish securing the new dressing and sit back on my heels, looking up at her.
“Somebody had to,” I say.
“That’s not an answer.”
“Sure it is.” I start on the smaller cut on her right foot, more for the sake of checking it than because it needs anything. “You were surrounded by people who were furious at you for almost dying. That seemed like a bad situation to leave someone in.”
She looks at me steadily. “You don’t even know me.”
“I know enough,” I say. “I know that when I carried you out of that building, you asked me not to take you back to them. And I know what a person’s face looks like when they mean something like that.
” I glance up at her briefly. “I’ve seen a lot of faces in a lot of bad situations.
Yours wasn’t the face of a woman who tripped over a cable and accidentally caused a fire. ”
She’s quiet.
“You wanted out,” I say, not unkindly. “And then you got out, in the most dramatic way possible, which honestly I respect. Anyone who runs away from their own wedding through a burning building must have a very good reason for it.”
A long pause.
“I did,” she says finally.
“I know.”
She exhales, and I watch some of the tension she’s been carrying in her shoulders since the moment I first picked her up off that hallway floor ease by a fraction.
“Does it get easier?” she asks. “Making a decision like that and then just living with it.”
I think about this properly, because she deserves a proper answer and not a reflexive one.
“I think it gets quieter,” I say. “The noise around it gets quieter. The decision itself stops feeling like something you did and starts feeling like something you are.” I pause.
“But I’m probably not the most objective person to ask.
I tend to think most decisions that get you further away from misery are good ones. ”
She looks at me for a long moment.
“You’re not what I expected,” she says.
“What did you expect?”
“I don’t know. Someone who would try to fix it. Tell me what to do next. Give me a plan.”
“That’s Max,” I say.
“I know.” Something warm moves through her eyes. “You’re different.”
“We’re all different,” I agree. “Evan’s different, too. That’s kind of the point of having three of us.”
At that, something flickers across her face that she doesn’t entirely manage to conceal, and I file it away with interest and say nothing about it, because now is not the time and also because I already knew, from the moment I walked into that kitchen, that whatever is happening here is bigger than any one of us individually, and I find that I am not as bothered by that as perhaps I should be.
I stand up, stretching out my knees.
“Right,” I say. “You need to stay off these as much as possible today. I know that’s boring, but it’s non-negotiable.” I point at her. “No wandering around the station on a fact-finding mission. No heroics. Sit somewhere comfortable and let people bring things to you.”
She raises her eyebrows. “Is that your professional medical advice?”
“It is.”
“It sounds like something you made up.”
“I went to Harvard,” I tell her solemnly. “For two semesters. Before I dropped out to become an EMT. So technically, everything I say has the weight of a partial Ivy League education behind it.”
She stares at me.
Then she laughs. A real one, not the small almost-sounds she’s been producing since yesterday, but an actual laugh, bright and unguarded, and it does something to the room that I couldn’t describe accurately if I tried.
I feel it land somewhere in my chest and stay there.
This is the thing I have never been able to explain to anyone who doesn’t already understand it.
The satisfaction of making someone laugh when they had no intention of laughing.
When the laugh surprises them as much as it surprises you.
When you can see, just for a second, that whatever weight they were carrying has been briefly lifted, not solved, not taken away permanently, but lifted enough for them to breathe differently.
That is the thing I live for.
I lived for it at seven years old, skinny and terrified on a school playground, making the kids laugh so they’d forget to be cruel.
I live for it now, at twenty-eight, in a kitchen in Brooklyn, watching a runaway bride with bruised feet and borrowed clothes laugh at a joke about my abbreviated academic career.
Some things don’t change.
“Harvard,” she says, still smiling.
“Two semesters,” I confirm. “Pre-med. I was devastatingly good at it.”
“Then why—”
“Because,” I say, “you don’t need a medical degree to help people. You just need to show up.” I shrug. “And I’m very good at showing up.”
She looks at me, and there’s something in the look that is softer and more direct than I know what to do with, so I pick up my coffee mug, drain the rest of it, and put it in the sink.
“You want more coffee?” I ask.
“Please,” she says.
I’m reaching for the pot when the alarm hits.
Three short blasts and then the long wail, and every cell in my body responds before my brain has finished processing the sound. I set the coffee pot down, already moving.
“That’s me,” I say, over my shoulder.
She’s already sitting up straighter, reading the shift in my energy the way someone does when they’ve spent enough time around emergency responders to understand that everything changes the moment that sound starts.
“Go,” she says simply, without drama.
I pause in the doorway and look back at her.
She’s sitting sideways in the kitchen chair in Max’s oversized station sweats with her freshly dressed feet and her loose hair and her coffee mug held in both hands, and she looks like she belongs there in a way that I couldn’t explain and am not going to try to right now.
“Stay off the feet,” I tell her. “Evan's around if you need anything. He's on secondary rotation today, he's not going out with us.”
“Partial Ivy League,” she says, nodding seriously. “Got it.”
I grin at her, and then the alarm goes again, and I go.
Before I hit the stairs I grab two painkillers from the first aid kit on the wall and set them on the counter next to her coffee mug.
I tear the corner off the paper bag from the supplies and pick up a pen and stand there for a second, not entirely sure what I want to say.
Then I just write don’t be a hero and set it on top and go.