Chapter 31
CAL
February is a month I get through. Other people have months they love. Lily told me once that she loves September, how summer loosens its grip and everything feels like it's starting over.
I don't have a month. I have eleven months that are fine and one that I survive. I keep busy. Take extra shifts. Don't look at the calendar too hard. Get to March.
It's the first week of February now, and the firehouse is uneventful. A slow day, the kind where you clean things that are already clean and reorganize supplies that don't need reorganizing.
I'm restocking the medical kit on the second floor when I hear the bay door open and then her voice, bright and carrying, talking to whoever's on duty downstairs. Then her footsteps on the stairs, fast, taking them two at a time like walking at a normal pace is a waste of perfectly good momentum.
She comes through the door with flushed cheeks and flying hair and that grin that always precedes chaos.
"Hi."
She's already moving toward me before the word leaves her mouth.
I catch her, my arms going around her waist on instinct, and I hold her there a few seconds longer than is smart because she smells like cold air and that shampoo I've started associating with safety, and I'm weak for her in February more than any other month.
"Hi," I murmur against her hair.
I set her down, but she stays close, face tipped up, a smile so warm it almost hurts. I have to take a deep breath to keep from telling her I love her right here in the hallway of a government building.
"Come with me," she commands, grabbing my hand and pulling me down the corridor toward the back office. The chief's office is empty, door open. She drags me inside and pushes it shut behind us with a decisive click.
I lean against the desk and cross my arms and wait, because whatever this is, it's clearly been building since before she walked through the door. She stands between me and the exit, sizing me up with an openness that should be illegal in a workplace.
"Stop that," I tell her.
"Stop what?"
"Looking at me like that."
"Like what?" She tilts her head, the picture of innocence. "Like you're standing there in that uniform looking absolutely sinful and I'm expected to just not drool?"
"This isn't a uniform. It's station wear. A t-shirt and pants."
"A t-shirt that is doing things, Callahan." She gestures at my chest with both hands, emphatic. "Bad, dirty things. To your chest and your arms and my ability to think clearly."
"Trouble…"
"I'm just observing. I have eyes. The eyes are working. The brain is short-circuiting, but the eyes are great."
I laugh before I can stop myself, the sound escaping despite my best efforts to maintain some semblance of authority. She grins at the sound, pleased with herself, same as every time she cracks me open, and takes a step closer. The look in her eyes tells me she is up to no good.
"Behave," I warn her. "We are not having sex at the station."
She shrugs, completely unbothered.
"Not today."
The casual tone, like she's penciling it in for a more convenient time, makes me grip the edge of the desk to keep my hands where they belong.
"So." She hops up onto the filing cabinet across from me, her legs swinging like a kid on a playground. "Why didn't you tell me your birthday is in ten days?"
"Who told you?"
"Your dad, obviously. The man cannot keep a secret from me." She looks enormously pleased with herself, and despite everything, I smile.
"I asked him when your birthday was because I realized I didn't know, and he was delighted to tell me. Like I had asked to see baby photos, which he also showed me, by the way, and we'll be discussing those later."
My smile dips at the edges. The thought of my dad being so carefree around my birthday makes no sense, but this is Lily.
He's a different man around her, especially now that he knows we are together.
He loves us being together so much that he can't contain himself — even when we sit as far away from each other as possible. That’s how insufferable my father is about the whole thing.
"I'm going to have a conversation with my father about boundaries," I say.
"Good luck. I've broken all of them." She kicks her feet against the cabinet, grinning. "February fifteenth. The big three-oh. Callahan, that's huge."
"It's a number."
"It's a milestone. You're leaving your twenties. You're entering a new decade. You're becoming a man."
I give her a look that would make the rookies downstairs straighten up immediately.
"I've been a man for a while."
"Now you're a man man." There's a dangerous glint in her eye that I recognize too late. "I've always wondered what it's like being with an older daddy."
My whole body goes hot and cold at the same time.
"Lily," I grit out. "Rein it in or I will punish you later in ways that will make sitting uncomfortable for a week."
"Speaking of a good time…" She's not even listening, pivoting seamlessly like she didn't just short-circuit every rational thought in my head. "I would like to find a date to celebrate."
"I don't celebrate birthdays."
"I'm aware of what you think you do and don't do." She waves a hand dismissively. "I'm telling you what's happening."
"Lily."
"I'll plan the whole thing. You don't have to do anything. Just show up and be old and handsome and let people love you for one evening."
"I don't want a party."
"Who said party? I said celebrate. Dinner. Cake. The people who matter. That's it. Low key. Callahan-approved levels of low key."
She's so sure about it. So certain that birthdays are things you can just decide to fix by throwing enough warmth at them.
She doesn't know. She doesn't know why February is heavy every year, pressing down harder the closer we get to the middle of the month. I haven't told her because I haven't told anyone who didn't already know, and the people who already know have learned not to bring it up.
"I'm even willing to sacrifice my own birthday," she continues, holding up a hand like she's taking an oath. "To make your big thirty all about you. Completely selfless. I'm basically a saint."
I frown. "When's your birthday?"
"February sixteenth." She grins at me, kicking her legs, looking like she's just handed me a gift. "The day after yours. We're practically twins. Except I'll be twenty-three, which is significantly younger and more attractive."
February sixteenth is not just a date on a calendar. February sixteenth is the morning I walked into my parents' bedroom and found my mother's body still warm, but already still, in a bed she would never get out of again.
Something must change in my face because Lily's grin falters. She's off the filing cabinet and in front of me before I can rearrange my expression into something less telling.
"What's wrong?" Her hands grip my arms, her face tilted up, searching. "Callahan. What did I say?"
I meet her eyes, this woman who shares a birthday with the worst day of my life and has no idea. Who walked into this office buzzing with plans and cakes and celebrations and accidentally placed herself on the exact date I spend every year trying to forget.
"My mom died on February sixteenth," I tell her.
Her face changes in stages — confusion first, then understanding, then the particular pain that comes from hurting someone you love without meaning to.
"Callahan." Her voice is so soft. "Tell me."
"She threw me a party for my eighteenth." The words start coming before I've decided to say them, pulled out of me by the way she's standing there, listening with her whole body.
"She'd been planning it for weeks. The house, the decorations, all of it. She was like that about birthdays. Every year, no matter what, she made it an event. Even when I was too old for it. Even when my friends didn't do house parties anymore."
She doesn't interrupt, just holds on and waits.
"I let her do it because she loved it. She baked the cake herself and made my dad hang streamers and she danced with me in the living room in front of everyone.
And I didn't care that my friends were watching because she was happy.
She said she couldn't believe her only baby was a man.
" My voice catches on the memory. "Kept saying it, and I rolled my eyes every time. "
Her eyes are filling now, but she doesn't blink. She just lets them fill and keeps her hands on me and keeps listening.
"The next morning she didn't come down. She was always up first. Every day of my life, my mother was the first person awake in that house, coffee on before anyone stirred."
I push through the tightness in my throat. "I asked Dad and he said she was tired from the party. He'd gone in early that morning and kissed her forehead and come downstairs and started his day."
The fluorescent light buzzes overhead. Somewhere downstairs, a door opens and closes.
"She didn't stir when he kissed her. He thought she was sleeping." My gaze drops to the floor between us because I can't look at her face while I say the rest. "By ten I went to check on her. It wasn't like her. Even tired, she never slept past eight."
Lily's fingers dig into my arms.
"She wasn't sleeping. She was dead. Aneurysm, they said. No warning, no symptoms, nothing. She went to bed after my birthday party and she didn't wake up. And my dad and I had been walking around the house for hours that morning, eating breakfast, talking, living, while she lay there dead."
Her tears spill over, both sides at once, rolling down her cheeks. She doesn't wipe them, doesn't look away. I reach up and brush them from her face, but new ones keep coming.
"I haven't celebrated a birthday since," I tell her quietly. "Mine or anyone's, if I can help it. The whole month just sits on me. I get through it and then it's March and I can breathe again."
"I'm sorry." Her voice is thick, cracked at the edges. "I didn't know. I wouldn't have pushed if I'd known."
"You have nothing to be sorry about."
"I'm still sorry."
"Don't be sorry. I should have told you sooner." I look at her, this crying, beautiful person holding onto my arms like she's afraid I'll disappear, and guilt moves through me.
"I'm the one who's sorry."
I pull her to me, holding her so close it's probably too rough, but I need to feel her alive against me.
"For what?" she asks.
"For making your birthday a sad thing. February sixteenth should be a good day. It's the day you happened." I press my lips to her hair. "I just made it heavy."
She pulls back, smiling through the tears, and I love her so much I'm weak with it.
"You didn't make it heavy," she whispers, but she's lying to make me feel better, and we both know it.
She stays close, her hands moving to cup my face.
”Your mom sounds like she was incredible."
"She was."
"And she loved birthdays."
"More than anyone I've ever known."
"And the last thing she did on this earth was throw you, her only baby, the biggest one."
I hadn't thought of it that way. In eleven years, I'd thought of February sixteenth as the day she died. The day the house went so quiet. The day my father broke down crying and I realized I had no idea how to help him because I was drowning, too.
I had never once thought of it as the day after she'd spent all her remaining energy making sure her son felt celebrated.
That she had chosen to use the last of what she had on me.
That she had gone to sleep happy and full and proud, and hadn't woken up in pain, hadn't suffered, hadn't been scared.
That she'd had a calm, good death after a day she'd loved.
"You don't have to celebrate," she murmurs, not pushing anymore. "I understand now. We don't have to do anything."
I want to make her happy. I want to say fuck it, throw a party, let her fill my house with people and noise and cake. But I can't. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
February sixteenth is both the day of my mother's death and Lily's birthday. I can't change either of those things. I can't make the grief smaller or the love bigger or the calendar into something it isn't.
But I can hold them both. I can stand in a room where February sixteenth means loss on one side and Lily on the other and let them exist together without one canceling the other out.
"Cake at midnight?" I offer quietly. "Just us. When the fifteenth becomes the sixteenth."
Her face lights up, bright and wet and a little broken still.
"Cake at midnight," she agrees.
The thing that terrifies me isn't loving like my father. I've already accepted that. I've already made my peace with being a Holt man, with loving once and completely and without any hope of recovery. That part doesn't scare me anymore.
The thing that terrifies me is that I already love her the way my father loved my mother, in a way that won't end just because she isn't here anymore.
I'm going to spend the rest of my life knowing exactly what that absence feels like, because my dad has been showing me for eleven years.
I let myself hold her and be held and pretend that March isn't coming, that acceptance letters aren't coming, that the calendar doesn't exist. And I add March to the list of months I hate.