Chapter 9 Sloane #2
"We need to narrow it down," I said, spreading the victim list across Garrett's coffee table. "Diaz has her team running the arson investigation, and Keene's handling the financial traces. But the more we can give them, the faster this moves."
Garrett nodded, pulling his laptop closer. "The arsonist knows the buildings intimately. Knows which ones to target, when to hit them, and how to control the burn. That's not just research—that's personal."
"So we look for someone who lost more than property. Someone who lost a person." I scanned the names. "Fatal fires. That's where we start."
We worked in silence for a while, sorting through incident reports and news articles, building a shorter list of the dead.
A man in his sixties who'd died of smoke inhalation in a Greenpoint building. A young mother and her infant in Bushwick—faulty wiring, no working smoke detectors. A teenager in East New York who'd been trapped when a fire escape collapsed.
The stories blurred together after a while. So much loss. So much preventable tragedy.
I was cross-referencing the third name on our list when I noticed Garrett had gone quiet.
Not working-quiet. Something else.
He was staring at his laptop screen, his jaw tight, his shoulders rigid with something I couldn't name.
"Garrett?" I set down my pen. "What is it?"
He didn't respond. Just kept staring at the screen.
"Garrett." Softer this time. "What's wrong?"
Silence. Long enough that I thought he might not answer.
Then he turned the laptop toward me.
A news article from seven years ago. The headline: Eight-Year-Old Dies in Apartment Fire.
Below it, a photo of a little girl with blonde hair in braids, smiling at the camera.
"Emma Marsh," he said. His voice was strange. Distant, like he was speaking from somewhere far away.
"I was there that night."
My chest tightened.
"The building had seventeen violations. Faulty wiring that sparked the fire. Blocked exits that trapped residents. Sprinklers that hadn't worked in years."
He still wasn't looking at me. His gaze was fixed on something I couldn't see—a memory, maybe. A moment that had calcified into something he carried on every shift.
"We got the call at 2 AM. By the time we arrived, the fourth floor was fully involved."
I didn't speak. Didn't move. Just waited.
"I found her on the fourth floor." His voice cracked, just barely—a hairline fracture in the control he wore like armor. "Pressed against a wall that was already hot to the touch. Blue eyes full of terror. I got close enough to hear her crying through the smoke. Close enough to reach for her."
"Garrett..."
"The floor collapsed." The words came out flat now. Hollow. "I fell into the stairwell below. The impact knocked the air out of my lungs. And when I realized I was alive, that I was down there and she was still up there—"
He stopped. Swallowed.
"I heard the sounds she made when the ceiling came down. And then silence."
He didn't say anything else. He didn't have to.
"She died because someone decided profit mattered more than her life." His voice had gone hard again. Cold with an anger that had been building for seven years. "Because inspectors signed off on violations. Because the system failed her."
He paused.
"Because I wasn't fast enough."
"That's not—"
"I know." He looked at me finally. His gray-blue eyes were raw in a way I'd never seen before, stripped of the careful control, the professional distance, all the walls he'd built to keep the world out.
"I know it wasn't my fault. The building was too far gone before we arrived. The violations were too severe. There was nothing I could have done."
"But you still carry it."
"Every day."
He looked back at the screen. At Emma's photo, the blonde braids, the smile.
"I went to her memorial service. Didn't tell anyone. I just needed to—" He shook his head. "That's when I started documenting. That's why I've been doing this for seven years. Because Emma Marsh died in a building that should have been condemned, and nobody was held accountable. Nobody cared."
I didn't have words.
I reached across the table. Took his hand.
His fingers were rough with calluses, warm and solid in my grip. He went still at the contact, looking down at our joined hands like he wasn't sure how they'd gotten there.
His hands were different now. Rougher than I remembered. More scars, more calluses—the hands of a man who'd spent years pulling people from wreckage.
He turned his palm up and laced his fingers through mine.
We sat like that for a long time. The case files spread around us, Emma's face glowing on the laptop screen, the city humming outside the windows.
I didn't let go.
Neither did he.
My apartment felt empty when I got home.
I went through the motions of getting ready for bed. Washed my face. Brushed my teeth.
Changed into pajamas that felt wrong after the softness of Garrett's sheets.
Sleep didn't come.
I lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling, and thought about Emma Marsh.
Eight years old. Crying through the smoke. Waiting for someone to save her.
Garrett had gone in. Climbed stairs and fought through heat and gotten close enough to hear her voice. Ten feet from her door. Ten feet from saving her.
And the floor had collapsed.
I thought about seven years of documentation. Seven years of filing reports that disappeared. Sending letters that were ignored. Watching buildings rot while officials looked the other way.
Seven years of trying to get someone—anyone—to care about the systems that had killed a child
He'd never told anyone. Carried it alone, the way he carried everything alone. Building his case in silence. Compiling evidence no one wanted to see. Fighting a battle no one else knew he was waging.
And I thought about what I'd done to him.
The depression I couldn't name. The darkness that had swallowed me after the miscarriage, so complete and so consuming that I couldn't see past it.
I'd convinced myself I was poison, that staying with him would only drag him down, that leaving was the kindest thing I could do.
So I left.
And then I stopped calling. Stopped writing. Let the silence stretch into months and then years because I was too ashamed to break it. Too convinced that I'd already ruined everything. Too afraid to face what I'd done.
I put him through hell.
The realization wasn't new. I'd known it for years, carried the guilt like a stone in my chest.
But sitting in his apartment, holding his hand while he told me about Emma—it hit different. Heavier.
He'd lost me, and then he'd lost her. In the same period.
While I was in DC, trying to put myself back together, he was here watching a child die in a building that should never have been allowed to stand.
And he'd never stopped caring about me.
The newspaper clippings on his coffee table. The food he ordered without asking. The way he'd carried me to his bed and slept on a too-short couch because he couldn't bear to wake me.
I'm sorry. I thought.
The words felt pathetic. Inadequate.
I'm so sorry.
But apologies didn't fix what was broken. They just acknowledged the cracks.
I rolled onto my side. Pulled the blanket up.
Stared at the wall and thought about all the ways I'd failed him. All the silence I could never take back. All the years I'd wasted being afraid when I should have been brave.
Sleep didn't come.
Just the weight of everything I'd done.
And everything I wished I could undo.