Chapter Fourteen Max
I’m up before six.
This is not unusual. I’ve been waking up before six since I was approximately twelve years old, which is when my father decided that discipline was a gift best given early and often, and which is also around the time I stopped being able to sleep past dawn regardless of how late I went to bed or how little sleep I’d had the night before.
My body simply decided at some point that sleeping in was for other people and has held that position firmly ever since.
I lie there in the grey of early morning, looking at the ceiling of my bunk room, listening to the station settle around me. It’s quiet, but someone is moving around in the kitchen above, in light unhurried footsteps.
Not Jase, who moves like a person who played hockey through college and has never fully made peace with the size of his own body. Not Evan, who is constitutionally incapable of being awake before seven on a day off.
I get up.
The shower is cold for the first thirty seconds, and then hot, and I stand under it and think about the day ahead.
There’s paperwork to get through before noon.
Weston wants to talk through the Q4 budget allocation, which is going to be a conversation I’ve been preparing for since September.
The engine needs its monthly check, which I’ve been putting off for two days because every time I schedule it, something comes up.
And there’s Brielle in the admin office.
I turn off the shower.
This is not a complicated thought. She’s there, the office needs organizing, I said I’d help her get her bearings, and that is the full extent of it. There is nothing complicated about any of that.
What would be complicated is everything else.
Weston is watching how I handle this, because that is what Weston does — he watches and he files it away and he makes decisions based on what he sees.
The department liaison has already called once about media exposure, because her name is still in the news and there are people above me who form opinions based on proximity alone.
Twelve years of choices stacked deliberately toward one outcome, and the problem is not that I notice her. The problem is if it shows.
That is not something I can allow.
I towel off, get dressed, and go upstairs.
She’s already in the kitchen.
It’s not yet six thirty, and the station is still mostly asleep, and she’s standing at the counter in a grey hoodie and dark jeans, frowning at the coffee maker with the focused concentration of someone trying to reverse-engineer a piece of technology they’ve never encountered before.
“It’s the button on the left,” I say, from the doorway.
She turns around. Her hair is down and still a little damp at the ends, and there’s a crease on her cheek from the pillow that she hasn’t noticed yet.
“I tried the button on the left,” she says.
“Try it again.”
She tries it again. The coffee maker makes the sound it always makes, a prolonged mechanical complaint followed by reluctant compliance, and begins to produce coffee.
She looks at it, then at me. “It just needed to see you.”
“It’s temperamental,” I say. “You have to mean it.”
She pulls down two mugs, which I note without comment, and we stand there in the early quiet of the kitchen while the coffee brews, the only two people awake in the building as far as I can tell.
We drink it standing at the counter, not saying much, the morning doing its slow thing outside the window.
When the mug is half empty, I go to the refrigerator and take stock of what’s there. She watches me from her spot at the counter.
“You don’t have to cook,” she says.
“I know,” I say, and take out the eggs.”
Jase appears twenty minutes later, drawn by the smell of coffee with the instinct of a man who claims he doesn’t drink it and yet somehow always has a mug in his hand by seven.
He’s in a t-shirt and sweats, hair still completely unconquered, and he stops in the doorway when he sees the two of us and does an extremely poor job of concealing his reaction.
“Well,” he says, to nobody in particular.
“Sit down, Thibodeau,” I say.
He sits down, grinning at his coffee.
Brielle is at the table with her own mug and what appears to be a legal pad covered in handwriting, which she sets to one side when Jase drops into the chair across from her. He leans forward immediately, elbows on the table.
“How'd you sleep?” he asks her.
“I kept hearing voices last night,” she says, frowning slightly. “Coming from somewhere in the walls. I thought I was losing my mind.”
Jase puts his coffee down. “That would be me,” he says. “I had the television on.”
She stares at him. “How? Your room is nowhere near mine.”
“Ah,” he says, with the energy of a man about to explain something he finds genuinely delightful.
“So the thing about this building is that the floors have absolutely no insulation and sound travels in ways that defy basic physics. I spent three months trying to figure out why I could hear every conversation from the kitchen while I was trying to sleep before I realized the vent above my bunk connects directly to the common room.”
She stares at him. “So you can hear everything from the common room.”
“Everything,” he confirms cheerfully.
A beat.
“That's horrifying,” she says.
“Little bit,” he agrees.
I set plates down, the food arriving at the table at roughly the same time Jase finishes the vent story, which feels about right. We eat, the three of us, with the morning coming in through the window and the station waking up around us.
It doesn’t happen often, all of us at the same table at the same time without a call pulling someone away or a shift starting.
Most mornings, someone is already gone or not yet here or eating standing up between tasks.
This arrangement, unhurried and uninterrupted, is rarer than it should be, and I find myself not wanting it to end.
Evan appears at seven fifteen, takes in the scene from the doorway with a single sweep of his eyes, and crosses directly to the coffee maker without a word.
“There’s food,” Brielle tells him.
“I see that,” he says.
“Max made it.”
“I know,” he says, pouring his coffee. “He’s the only one here who can cook without creating a hazard.” He pulls out the remaining chair and sits, reaching across Jase without ceremony to take a piece of toast from his plate.
“That’s mine,” Jase says.
“Was yours,” Evan says.
Brielle is watching them with an expression that has been building since she first sat down at this table.
There’s warmth in it, and something more careful underneath, like she’s still waiting for the part where it turns out not to be real.
Jase catches her looking and raises an eyebrow. “What?”
“Nothing,” she says. “You just.” She stops.
“We just what?” Evan asks.
She looks between the two of them, then at me briefly, then back at her plate. “You feel like people who’ve known each other a long time,” she says. “It’s nice. That’s all.”
Jase looks at her for a moment. Then he says, simply, “You can have that too, you know. It doesn’t go away.”
She doesn’t say anything to that. But her face changes.
By nine, the morning has organized itself into its usual shape.
Evan takes the engine check I’ve been putting off, which I didn’t ask him to do but which he does anyway, the way he often absorbs tasks that need doing without making a production of it.
Jase has a supply run, which takes him out of the station for most of the morning.
Weston is in his office with the door half shut, which means the budget conversation is being delayed by something I’ll hear about later.
From below, through the floor, I can hear Zack's voice in the bay.
Something about the coupling on the secondary hose line, addressed to whoever is within range.
Rory answers, which means Rory is in early.
Rory in early usually means something is going on at home he'd rather not deal with, so he comes here instead, where at least the problems are the kind you can fix.
I've known him long enough to know not to ask.
I find Brielle in the admin office at half past nine.
She’s made more progress than I expected.
The filing cabinets are open, their contents spread across the desk and the floor in organized clusters, each one labeled in her handwriting on torn strips of paper.
She’s cross-legged on the floor between two piles with her legal pad on her knee, and she looks up when I knock on the open door with something that is not quite surprise and not quite the wariness she had three days ago when she arrived here.
“You don’t have to knock,” she says.
“It’s your office,” I say.
She considers that for a minute, and I watch something move through her expression at the word your, quiet and quick, like she’s trying it on and finding that it fits.
“Come in then,” she says.
I come in and look at what she’s done. The system she’s building is logical, more logical than the system that existed before, organized by incident type and date rather than by whatever random principle the previous arrangement was following, which, as far as I can tell, was none at all.
“This is good,” I say.
“Don’t sound surprised,” she says, but she’s looking down at her legal pad, and the corner of her mouth has moved.
I move the chair out from behind the desk and sit. “What do you need from me?”
She looks up. “Weston said you’d know where the digital files are. Apparently, there’s a shared drive that nobody has updated since 2019.”
“That sounds about right,” I say, and pull the desk chair over.
We work through it together, me pulling up the shared drive on the office computer while she cross-references the paper files she’s organized, and it’s surprisingly easy, the rhythm of it, two people who think in systems sitting down to fix one that’s broken.
She asks good questions, precise ones, which tells me she’s been thinking about this since yesterday rather than approaching it cold.
At some point, she says, without looking up from her legal pad, “How long has Weston been captain?”
“Twenty-two years,” I say. “And you’ve been with him for eight.”
“Yes.”
She writes something down. “He respects you.”
I look at her. “What makes you say that?”
“The way he talked about you when we spoke yesterday.” She glances up briefly. “He didn’t say it directly. But it was there.”
I don’t say anything to that.
“Is it mutual?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, after a moment.
She nods, looking back at her pad. “Where does it go from here?” she says. “For you.”
“Captain,” I say. “When Weston retires. That's the plan.”
She nods. “Is it what you want? Or just what's next?”
The question lands with more precision than I was expecting. I look at her across the desk, at the focused, unhurried way she’s waiting for the answer, and I find myself thinking that she asks questions the way she listens, completely and without an agenda.
“Both,” I say finally. “I think they’re the same thing for me.”
“Because of your father,” she says. Not a question.
“Partly,” I say. “He built something. I want to build something too. Not the same thing. Mine.” I pause, which is more than I usually give a sentence like that. “This station. These people. That’s worth building toward.”
She’s quiet for a second, looking at something on her legal pad that she’s not really reading.
“I think,” she says, “that you already have it. The thing you’re building toward.” She looks up. “You haven’t stopped moving long enough to see it.”
I hold her gaze.
“What about you?” I say.
She looks back down. “That’s a longer conversation.”
“I have time,” I say.
Her expression changes, and it is almost the beginning of an answer. I lean forward slightly without thinking about it, and she opens her mouth—
My radio goes off.
The sound of it fills the small office. I reach for it before the dispatcher finishes the first sentence.
It’s a large structure fire two blocks east.
I have to go.