6. Beck
SIX
BECK
I went to see Jake on a Sunday.
I'd argued against "firefighter" on the headstone.
Not because it wasn't true, because it was the truest thing about him, but because it was the thing that killed him, and putting it on his grave felt like letting the fire have the last word.
His mother had wanted it. His mother got what she wanted.
I crouched and pulled a few weeds from the base of the stone.
The earth was cold and damp under my fingers.
October had arrived with purpose in Ember Falls.
The mornings were frost-edged, the light slanting lower every day, and the mountains had gone full spectacle, every ridge a different shade of fire.
Fire. Everything came back to fire.
"She called me out," I said to the stone. "In front of the whole crew. Two weeks in and she told me to talk to her like a human being." I sat back on my heels. "You would've loved that. You always said I needed someone who wouldn't take my crap."
The wind moved through the oaks. A leaf landed on the grave, red maple, perfectly shaped, like the mountain was leaving its own offering.
"I don't know what I'm doing, Jake."
Silence. The dead are good at silence. They give you all the space you need to hear yourself think, which is the last thing you actually want.
I'd been thinking about her. That was the truth I'd been holding at arm's length since the festival, since standing in the dark by the bandstand and saying Jake's name out loud because she made it feel possible.
Since watching her bite into a caramel apple with an expression of such genuine pleasure that something inside me shifted along an old fault line.
Lila Webber, with her auburn braid and her hazel eyes and her stubborn, relentless warmth that I kept trying to deflect and couldn't. She hummed while she worked and she argued about kettle corn protocol and she carried her own damage.
I'd seen it, glimpses of something bruised under all that sunshine.
She handled it not by shutting down but by showing up.
Every day. Bright and competent and there.
I was terrified.
Not of her. Of what she represented. Of the idea that you could lose someone, be hollowed out by it, and then your chest could start to fill again without your permission.
Of caring about someone who rode the same rig, answered the same calls, walked into the same burning buildings, metaphorically, in her case, but close enough.
Close enough that the old nightmare had new material.
I drove back to the station. It was 17:00, the start of our overnight shift. The station took on a different character at night, quieter, more intimate, the common room lit by the TV and the kitchen fluorescents, the bunk room a row of shadows.
Lila was already there, sitting cross-legged on the couch with a book.
She'd changed into station sweats and a Charlotte fire department T-shirt that was faded enough to be old and loved.
Her hair was down. I'd never seen it down before, always braided or pinned back.
It fell past her shoulders in waves that caught the lamplight and turned them copper.
I looked away. Went to the kitchen. Started coffee.
"Hey," she said, not looking up from her book.
"Hey."
The coffee maker gurgled. I leaned against the counter and watched it drip. Behind me, I heard the soft sound of a page turning.
The night stretched ahead of us, twelve hours of quiet interrupted by whatever calls came in, which on a Sunday night in Ember Falls could be anything from nothing to a car wreck on the mountain roads.
The station crew was minimal overnight. Me, Lila on the medic side, Cole on the engine, and Ty in the bunk room pretending he wasn't watching videos on his phone.
At 21:00, Cole went to the bunk room. Ty was already snoring. The man could fall asleep in any position, any location, like a golden retriever. The common room was just me and Lila and the low hum of the TV playing some cooking competition neither of us was watching.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
I tensed. Couldn't help it. Questions were dangerous. They required answers, and answers required honesty, and honesty was a door I'd spent two years welding shut.
"Go ahead."
She closed her book and set it on the cushion beside her. "Why did you become a firefighter?"
I blinked. Of all the questions I'd braced for, about Jake, about my hostility, about the look on my face at the festival, this wasn't it.
"I don't know," I said. Then, because that was a lie, "My uncle was on the job. In Asheville. I used to ride along when I was a kid, not on calls, just around the station. I liked the order of it. The structure. Everything had a place, a protocol, a right way to be done."
"You like control."
It wasn't an accusation. Just an observation, offered plainly, the way she might note the weather.
"I like knowing what to do when things go wrong."
She nodded. Drew her knees up, rested her chin on them.
"I became a paramedic because I panicked once.
I was sixteen, working a summer job at a pool, and a kid hit his head on the diving board.
Blood everywhere. Everyone was screaming.
And I just froze. Couldn't move. Someone else got him out.
He was fine. But I spent the whole night thinking about what if he hadn't been fine, and what if I was the only one there, and I couldn't—" She trailed off.
"The next day I signed up for a first aid course.
Then EMT training. Then paramedic school. I never wanted to freeze again."
"You don't," I said. "I've seen you work. You don't freeze."
Her eyes found mine. "Neither do you."
The space between us felt loaded. Not with tension, with recognition. Two people who had chosen this work for reasons that lived in their bones, not their résumés.
"My turn to ask something," I said, and watched surprise move across her face. I didn't ask questions. I didn't engage. This was new territory for both of us.
"Okay."
"Why Ember Falls? You could have transferred anywhere."
She was quiet for a moment. Her thumb ran along the edge of her book cover, a nervous gesture, or a thinking one.
"My fiancé was sleeping with my best friend."
The words came out clean. No wobble, no performance. Like a bone that had been set and was healing straight.
"I found out in April. It had been going on for months.
And the worst part wasn't the betrayal, exactly.
The worst part was that I'd been performing the whole time.
Being the perfect fiancée, the perfect friend, the perfect everything, and none of it mattered.
None of it was enough to make someone choose me. "
Something hot moved through my chest. Not anger, exactly, something more protective, more primal. The idea of someone having Lila Webber in their life and choosing to betray her struck me as the kind of stupidity that should disqualify a person from the gene pool.
"So I left," she said. "Picked a town off a list. Somewhere nobody knew my name or my story or had an opinion about what I should do next. Somewhere I could figure out who I am when I'm not trying to be what someone else wants."
"And?"
"And what?"
"Have you figured it out?"
She smiled, small, real, with a sadness at the edges. "I'm working on it."
The coffee maker beeped. I poured two cups without asking if she wanted one. Set hers on the arm of the couch, close, but not touching her hand. She curled her fingers around it.
"Jake was my partner for four years," I said.
The room shifted. Even the TV seemed to quiet.
"He was loud and messy and he couldn't cook and he quoted movies constantly and he drove too fast." I stared at my coffee.
"He died in a warehouse fire on Birch Street.
The floor collapsed. I was thirty feet from him.
" My throat tightened. I pushed through.
"I tried to get to him. Captain Harding pulled me out. "
Lila didn't speak. Didn't reach for me. Didn't offer platitudes or a sympathetic head tilt. She just listened, with her whole body angled toward me, her eyes steady.
"I don't talk about it," I said. Which was a stupid thing to say, because I was currently talking about it.
"Okay."
"I'm not — I don't know why I'm telling you."
"You don't have to know why."
We sat with it. The grief and the coffee and the quiet station and the sound of Ty's snoring through the wall. My hands were tight around the mug. Lila's were loose around hers. Somewhere between my grip and her ease, there was a middle ground I'd forgotten existed.
At 23:00, we headed toward the bunk room.
The hallway was narrow, lit by a single overhead that buzzed.
We stopped at the same time, mugs still in hand.
Her bunk was on the left, mine on the right, and the doorways were close enough that stopping created a space between us that was smaller than I'd intended.
She looked up at me. This close, I could count the freckles on her nose. I didn't. But I could have.
"Thank you," she said. "For telling me about Jake."
"Thank you for telling me about—" I realized I didn't know his name, the fiancé. She'd never said it. "The idiot."
A flash of surprise. Then a laugh, short, startled, genuine. It hit me somewhere under the ribs.
"Good night, Beck."
"Good night, Lila."
She headed for the kitchen, mug in hand. I stood in the hallway for a moment, listening to the station settle around me. The building creaked. The furnace hummed. Outside, the October wind pushed against the windows.
I should have gone to my bunk. Instead I followed her to the kitchen. She was rinsing her mug at the sink, her back to me, and she didn't turn around when I came in. I set my mug on the counter and reached past her for the drying rack, and my hand landed on hers.
Her hand was warm. Small under mine but strong, paramedic's hands, hands that pulled people back from edges. My fingers curled involuntarily, just a fraction, just enough to feel the shape of her knuckles.
She looked at our hands. Then at me.
I didn't pull away.
She didn't either.
Her lips parted. Not an invitation, exactly. More like a question. And I should have been smart enough not to answer it.
I wasn't.
I closed the distance between us and kissed her, slower than the bandstand, more deliberate, my hand sliding from hers up her wrist to the inside of her elbow, pulling her gently toward me.
She came willingly, her free hand settling on my chest, her fingers curling into the cotton of my station shirt.
She tasted like the peppermint tea she'd switched to after the coffee, and she kissed me back with a quiet intensity that cracked something open behind my sternum.
I deepened the kiss and she made a soft sound, barely there, and my hand moved to the small of her back, fitting her against me.
Her body was warm through the thin fabric and the contact sent heat pooling low in my stomach.
I wanted to push her against the counter.
I wanted my hands in her hair. I wanted to find out what other sounds she'd make.
I didn't do any of those things.
Instead, I pulled back. Slowly. My forehead resting against hers, both of us breathing hard in the quiet kitchen.
Her hand was still fisted in my shirt. My hand was still on her back.
The station hummed around us, and Ty's snoring filtered through the wall, and somewhere in the distance, the October wind rattled a window.
"We can't do this here," I said. My voice was rough.
"I know." Hers was rougher.
Neither of us moved.
Then the building let out one of its old-house groans, and we stepped apart at the same time. She picked up her mug from the counter and held it up like evidence.
"Mug," she said.
"Right."
"Good night. Again."
"Again."
She left. For real this time. I stood in the kitchen with the taste of peppermint on my lips and the ghost of her hand on my chest, and I thought about what Cole had said last week, "Get over it, Rawlings," and what Captain Harding had said, "Jake would've liked her," and what Lila had said tonight, curled on the couch with her hair down and her damage showing. "I'm working on it."
Maybe I could work on it too.
Maybe. If I could stop thinking about the way she'd tasted.