14. Isla
ISLA
I did not let the night sit on it. I woke before my alarm, before the light outside had decided what color it wanted to be, and I already knew exactly what I was going to say.
I had lain awake most of the night turning his words over, the way you turn over a bruise to see how bad it actually is. By the time the sky started going gray, "do not nurse me out of pity" had stopped sounding like an insult and started sounding like something closer to fear wearing a disguise.
Nikolai was at the kitchen table when I came out, both hands wrapped around a mug he was not drinking from, staring at nothing the way he did when he thought nobody was watching, and something in his face braced for whatever I was about to do the moment he looked up and found me crossing the room toward him.
I pulled out the chair across from him instead of the one beside him, sat down, and crossed my arms.
The light coming through the window was the flat gray of a morning that had not decided if it wanted to rain, and somewhere in the walls a radiator ticked as it warmed, the most ordinary sound in the world for a conversation that did not feel ordinary at all.
"We're doing this now," I said. "Not tonight, not eventually. Now."
"I assumed as much."
"Good. Then you already know what I'm about to say, so I'm just going to say it anyway."
He set the mug down, careful, the way he set everything down, like the table might not be able to take the weight otherwise. "Go ahead."
"I've spent three years working burns. Real ones. Grafts that didn't take, kids who screamed when the gauze came off, families who couldn't look at their own husband or father or son without flinching first and catching themselves second."
I thought of a father I had once watched stand in a doorway, unable to make himself walk the rest of the way to his son's bed, love and horror fighting so hard on his face that neither one won.
That was pity. I had seen it up close enough times to draw it from memory without trying, and I had felt it radiating off strangers in waiting rooms so often I could recognize it now by the sound of their breathing alone.
I kept my voice level, the way I would with a patient who needed facts more than comfort. "I know exactly what pity looks like on a person's face. I've watched it happen in real time, more times than I want to count."
"I am aware of your work."
"Then explain it to me," he said. "Because from where I sat, it looked exactly like every version of pity I have spent six years learning to recognize and avoid."
"That's because you've only ever been on the receiving end of the fake kind." I kept my arms crossed, refusing to let the words come out softer just because they were true. "The fake kind needs an audience."
"It needs you to watch it happening so it can feel useful. What I felt in that kitchen did not need you to see anything at all."
"Then you should know I wasn't doing it last night." I leaned forward, elbows on the table, refusing to let him have the easy exit of looking away.
"What you saw on my face was not pity, Nikolai. Not for one second."
He didn't answer right away. I let the silence sit there instead of rushing to fill it, because I had learned by now that rushing him only gave him somewhere to hide.
"Then what was it?" he said finally, and it did not sound like a challenge. It sounded like he actually wanted to know.
"I wanted to know you." I said it plainly, no dressing it up. "That's it, the whole thing."
"Not fix you. Not manage you. Not tend to you like you're one more chart on a clipboard."
I held his gaze so he could not mistake this for something softer than it was.
"The way people know each other when it actually means something."
"That is a generous way to describe wanting to see a stranger's worst scars."
"You weren't a stranger by the time I asked." My jaw tightened at that.
"And don't do that. Don't tell me what I was actually feeling like you had a window into my head I somehow missed."
"I did not mean it that way." A pause, and something almost like frustration crossed his face, aimed more at himself than at me. "I meant it as the fastest way to put distance between what you saw and what I could stand to feel about it."
"I don't care how you meant it. I care what you said, and what you said was that I don't get to decide what my own face was doing."
I made sure he was looking at me when I said it. "You don't get to make that call for me just because it's easier to believe the worst reason than the real one."
Something moved across his face, quick, the kind of thing he usually caught before it showed. He didn't catch it this time.
"You are right," he said.
I had braced for an argument, for the careful, precise deflection he was so good at building on the spot. I had not braced for that.
"I'm right," I repeated, mostly to make sure I had heard him correctly.
"I was wrong to say it." He was not looking at the table anymore. He was looking at me, steady, none of the usual armor in it.
"It was not about you at all. It was about what I needed in that moment, and I used you to get it, and that was not fair to either of us."
I had not expected an apology, not really, not one this plain. Every version of Nikolai I had come to know deflected with logic or silence or a joke sharp enough to close the subject before it opened. There was no joke in this one.
"Thank you," I said, and I meant it, and I let the quiet after it just be quiet instead of filling it with something clever.
The apartment settled into something calmer than I expected from a fight that never quite turned into one. Somewhere past the window a delivery truck idled and pulled away, the everyday hum of a street that had no idea what had just happened at our kitchen table.
He reached across the table then, slow, like he was giving me every chance to pull back before his hand actually got there.
His fingers found the loose piece of hair that always fell out of whatever I'd done with it that morning, and he tucked it back behind my ear with a care that had no business belonging to a man built the way he was.
I did not startle. I had half expected myself to, given how little practice either of us had at this particular kind of gentleness, but my body just let it happen, like it had been waiting for exactly this without telling me.
His thumb traced once along my temple, light, like he was testing whether the gentleness would hold if he leaned any real weight into it at all. It held.
"I am not good at this part," he said quietly. "The part after I have already done the damage."
"You're better at it than you think."
"I have very little practice to compare it to."
"Then I guess we're both learning something new this morning." I turned my face slightly into his hand, just enough that he would know it was welcome. Neither of us said anything else for a moment, and for once the silence between us did not feel like something either of us needed to fix.
My phone went off on the counter, loud and insistent, cutting through it before I could decide whether I wanted the moment to end.
I almost let it ring out. Almost. Then I saw the name on the screen and every soft thing in my chest turned hard and fast in the same breath.
"It's Miles," I said, already moving.
I picked up before the second ring finished. "Hey, what's wrong?"
"Isla." His voice came out wrong, thin and fast, nothing like the easy drawl I'd grown up hearing across a kitchen table exactly like this one. "Isla, I need you to listen to me for one second."
"I'm listening. Slow down."
"A guy came by the station this morning. Said he knew me from a call last year, said he was trying to track down my sister because she treated someone in his family, and could I just confirm her shift schedule so he could catch her at the hospital to say thanks."
"He was maybe fifty, dressed nicer than anyone who actually needs a favor from a fire station ever dresses. Polite the whole time, which somehow made it worse than if he had been pushy about it."
My stomach dropped somewhere below the floor, and I found myself gripping the edge of the counter without remembering deciding to. "What did you tell him?"
"Nothing. Not one word, I swear, but Isla, he knew things anyway. He knew your unit."
"He knew where you work. He knew things about our family he shouldn't have had any way of knowing unless he'd actually looked."
"Did you get a name? A description, anything?"
"He gave a name, but it didn't check out when Delgado ran it after the guy left. Isla, this wasn't someone being friendly. This was someone doing homework."
"Delgado's already trying to pull the security footage from the front lot to see if we got a plate. I just needed you to hear it from me before you heard it from someone else, before you walked into work today not knowing to watch your own back."
My hand had gone cold around the phone. "Okay. Okay, I hear you."
"Are you safe right now?"
"I'm at the station, I'm fine, I've got a whole crew around me. You're the one I'm calling about."
His voice cracked on the last word in a way that told me exactly how scared he actually was, underneath the fast talking. "Somebody's trying to find out where you'll be and when."
I turned around without fully deciding to, and Nikolai was already standing.
My hands were shaking by the time I lowered the phone, small tremors I had not given myself permission to have yet, and some clinical part of me noted it the way I would note it on a patient's chart, adrenaline, untreated, ongoing.
He had not asked who was calling or what had been said. He had listened to exactly half a sentence of my side of the conversation, watched my face do whatever it was doing, and started moving before I had even processed what I needed to repeat out loud.
"Miles, I have to go, I'll call you right back," I said, already lowering the phone.
"Someone went to the firehouse," I told him, the words coming out faster than I meant them to. "They used Miles's name, they knew where I work, they knew things about our family they shouldn't know, and Miles thinks someone is trying to figure out my schedule."
Nikolai was already halfway into his jacket before I finished the sentence, one arm through the sleeve, his face gone into the particular stillness I had learned to recognize as the exact opposite of calm.
"Get dressed," he said. "We are leaving in five minutes."
"Nikolai, what is this? Who would want my schedule?"
"I do not know yet." He checked something in the pocket of his jacket without slowing down, the same fast, economical motion he used on every door he had ever needed to close in a hurry.
"But I intend to find out before whoever it is finds you first."