Chapter 2 #2
Every plan I'd come up with for the last year and a half had started with her gone.
Sell the house, because she's not in it.
Box up the recipe cards, because she won't be making the pot roast anymore.
None of the knowing had ever made the doing feel less like I was using her death to get something I wanted.
I looked down the hallway at the boxes I hadn't packed.
Penny lifted her head from the rug.
"Hey, Pen."
She looked at me.
"We might be goin' home."
The next shift, I drove to the station and didn't tell anybody about the call.
The Hartsdale firehouse smelled the way every firehouse I'd ever stood in had smelled: diesel, industrial soap, and coffee that had been on the burner since the night shift signed off.
The light came in high through the bay windows and hit the side of the rig at a slant, making the whole place look better than it was.
I'd been working out of this firehouse for two and a half years. Long enough that Lou, the lieutenant, didn't have to look up from his clipboard to call me by name.
Duke was on his third protein bar of the shift, leaning against the front bumper of the engine with one boot up on the running board, halfway through whatever he was about to make my problem. The wrapper crinkled in his fist every time he took a bite.
"So," he said. "Maddy."
I didn't look up from the compartment latch. "No."
"You haven't met her."
"Don't need to."
"Brother." He pushed off the bumper and came around to my side of the rig, blocking the light from the bay window so I had to step half a foot to the left to see what I was doing.
"She's a librarian. Twenty-eight. Blonde.
Reads books on her lunch break. The kind of girl who'd actually go for a guy like you.
Quiet. Solid. Doesn't talk too much. She'd eat that up. "
"I'm not interested."
"You're never interested." He bit a chunk off the protein bar and chewed it at me like it was an argument. "Cassie was perfect. Jen was perfect. Allie was perfect."
"Allie was your cousin."
He stopped mid-chew. Pointed the protein bar at me. "Allie was perfect. You're impossible."
I was doing the morning check on the engine compartment, even though it wasn't morning, and the check had already been done. It was a habit. Things were either on the rig or they weren't, and I preferred to confirm it myself.
He'd been at this for the better part of a year.
Cousins. Friends. Women he'd dated and decided he wasn't going to date again.
He'd told me he was just trying to be useful, passing along the ones who weren't his type, but the truth was Duke didn't have a type.
Duke had Hartsdale. Half the women under forty in town had walked through Duke Rhodes's life at one point, and most of them still spoke fondly of him on the way out.
Linebacker shoulders, green eyes, easy grin.
Built like a problem women didn't mind having.
I'd watched him pick a woman up at the diner on a Tuesday afternoon by pouring her coffee. He hadn't even worked there. He'd just been standing close to the pot when the waitress was busy. He poured. She laughed. By Friday, they were going to the movies.
"You think there's something wrong with me," he said.
"I do."
"You think I'm shallow."
"I know you're shallow."
"And yet I'm out there meeting women like an adult while you're across the street in the diner three nights a week, eating chicken parm by yourself."
"I like the chicken parm."
"Brother." He stopped in front of me. "I'm serious. There's nothing wrong with you. So what's wrong with the girls?"
It wasn't the girls. The girls had been fine. Cassie. Jen. Allie. All of them were fine.
The trouble was, I didn't know what I was doing with myself yet. The house wasn't sold. The boxes weren't packed. I didn't know where I was going to be in three months. Sitting across a table from a woman and pretending to know what I wanted next felt like a lie I wasn't going to tell.
Duke had never really understood that. He'd told me once, after Cassie, that I was overthinking it.
It's a Tuesday night and dinner, Ford. Nobody's asking you to marry her.
He'd meant it as a kindness. To him, dating was a Tuesday night.
A drink at the bar. A weekend if she was good company.
Nothing serious. He'd never lied to anybody about it.
To me, dating was something you did when you knew what you were offering somebody. I didn't have anything to offer yet.
I shut the engine compartment and wiped my hands on the rag that had been on the running board for two years.
"Maddy's nice," he said.
"I'm sure she is."
"You're hopeless."
"Yeah."
The lieutenant, Lou, walked past with a clipboard. He was six-three, gray at the temples, the kind of man who never had to raise his voice because the first time was always enough. He didn't look at either of us when he said, "Ford. Mendoza wants you on the line tonight. He's swapping with Halsey."
"Copy."
"Don't let Rhodes talk you into anything stupid."
Duke grinned. "I'm getting him a date."
"Like I said."
Lou kept walking.
I almost told him then. Almost said, Shane called. Almost said, I told him to put my name in for B-shift, Engine 295, end of the year. Almost said something that would have ended the morning where Duke and I were just two guys talking about Maddy from the library.
I didn't.
I got off shift at six and was home by six-twenty. Penny met me at the door. I dropped my bag, scratched her ears, and went upstairs to get out of my uniform. I came back down in sweatpants and opened the refrigerator to figure out what I had to work with for breakfast.
That was when I heard the first bark.
It wasn't Penny. Penny had given me one tail-thump from the rug and gone back to sleep. This was coming from outside in the yard, but moving fast, the way a dog moves when it's having the best time of its life.
Then a woman's voice came through the door, sharp and mortified, laughing all at the same time.
"Moose. Moose, no. Moose, I will end you."
I stood there with the refrigerator door open.
"Moose, oh my god, get back here."
I let the refrigerator door fall shut.
The barking did a loop of the yard. I could hear it pass the back fence, come around the roses, and head for the shed.
The woman's voice followed it, closer this time, half a laugh and half a sob.
"Moose. I'm wearing a towel!"
I went to the back door and put my hand on the knob.
Penny had lifted her head all the way up now and was looking at me with the look of a dog who had already decided whatever was happening in the yard wasn't her problem.
I opened the door.
The yellow lab was tearing across my lawn in tight loops, tongue out, having the time of his life. The yellow lab. The one who'd been letting himself in for a week and a half.
The woman was barefoot on my grass, her back to me, chasing him past the roses. Long legs. Wet hair stuck to the back of her neck. Bare shoulders I'd never seen. Freckles across them. A white towel knotted somewhere at her chest, held in place with one fist.
She was too focused on the dog to notice I'd opened the door.
I let myself look. I let myself look longer than I should have.
She heard me eventually and turned.
Collarbones. Throat flushed from running. A face I'd been catching myself watching for two weeks.
Astrid Matthews.
In a towel. In my backyard.