Chapter 2
The apartment still didn’t feel like home.
Jade set down another box—books, this time—and surveyed the living room with the critical eye of someone who had moved too many times in too few years.
Six weeks in Phoenix Ridge, and she was still living out of cardboard.
The couch faced the wrong direction, the bookshelf stood half-empty, and three pothos plants clustered on the windowsill, their leaves reaching toward the gray afternoon light like they weren’t quite sure they belonged here either.
She could relate.
The kitchen counter held the remnants of dinner: takeout container, wooden chopsticks, and a mug of green tea long since gone cold.
She’d meant to unpack tonight, really unpack, not just shift boxes from one corner to another.
But the case files Chief Marten had given her sat on her coffee table, and Jade had made the mistake of opening one.
Now, it was past seven, the spring rain drumming against the windows, and she was three files deep into the Phoenix Ridge Department’s officer roster.
Jade carried her cold tea to the microwave, reheated it, then returned to the couch.
The files were organized alphabetically, each one a neat summary of service records, incident reports, and psych eval notes.
She’d read through Thorne, Riley, a solid officer, handling stress well, recently engaged to a firefighter.
Then Kowalski, Brianna, a veteran of twelve years, steady as they came, no red flags.
And then Shaw, Maddox.
The file was easily twice as thick as the others.
Jade flipped it open, though she’d already skimmed it twice.
Maddox had multiple commendations, excellent performance reviews stretching back five years, and specialized training certifications in K-9 handling, crisis negotiation, and active threat response.
Every incident report was written with the same careful precision.
Maddox was thorough and emotionally airtight.
No cracks visible in her armor.
But the underlying pattern was there, clear to anyone who knew how to look for the clues.
The frequency of weapons-involved calls had increased over the past four months.
There were three domestics with firearms in the last month alone, two barricade situations, and an active shooter response that had gone textbook-perfect but still must have cost her something.
Everything cost something.
Jade turned to Chief Marten’s handwritten note that was clipped to the inside cover of the folder. One of my best. Worried she’s burning out. She won’t admit it or ask for help but needs it anyway.
Yeah. Jade had met a hundred Maddox Shaws in her career.
They all wore the same expression: controlled, competent, and generally fine.
They handled their calls and filed the reports, and they showed up on time and did the work and never once admitted that the work was tearing them apart from the inside.
She’d been one of them, once.
Jade closed the file and reached for her tea, letting the warmth seep into her palms. Outside, the rain picked up, wind rattling the loose window frame she had kept meaning to ask to be fixed.
The apartment felt too quiet, too empty.
She should finish unpacking. She should call her mom, who’d been leaving concerned voicemails about whether Jade was settling in okay.
She should do anything other than sit here thinking about a woman who clearly wanted nothing to do with therapy.
Instead, she thought about the meeting in Chief Marten’s office.
Maddox had walked in like she was bracing for ambush, her shoulder set and expression neutral.
Military bearing, obvious even in the Phoenix Ridge PD uniform.
She’d assessed the room in seconds, noting the exits, occupants, and threat level.
Jade had clocked it immediately because she’d done the same thing for years after coming home.
Then Maddox had sat down, spine straight, hands resting on her thighs, and Jade had seen the control it took to stay that still, the effort behind the calm.
She’d been beautiful, too, in that hard-edged way that made Jade’s stomach tighten.
Dark hair cropped short, sharp jaw, eyes that tracked everything.
Attractive in a way that Jade had learned not to notice in professional settings, except she’d noticed anyway.
And then Maddox had opened her mouth claiming she didn’t need debriefing and the call went fine, and Jade had recognized the script. The same lines she’d heard from a dozen other officers who thought needing help meant failing at the job.
The same lines she’d told herself before too.
Jade exhaled forcefully, set down her tea, and stood, pacing to the window.
Rain blurred the streetlights below, turning Phoenix Ridge into watercolor smears of yellow and gray.
Somewhere out there, Maddox Shaw was probably doing exactly what Jade had done after her first therapy mandate: ignoring it, resenting it, white-knuckling through the weekend until she had to show up again.
Jade had read the rest of Maddox’s file after the meeting.
Deployment history: Marine Corps, multiple tours with classified details, then an honorable discharge.
She’d joined the Phoenix Ridge PD eight years ago and worked patrol for three years before transferring to K-9.
Partner: Zeus, a five-year-old Belgian Malinois.
The record noted their bond as “exceptional” and their success rate as “outstanding.”
What the records didn’t note was how Maddox’s entire body language had shifted when Chief Marten mentioned Zeus, how her rigid posture had softened just slightly, just enough for Jade to catch it.
How she’d said, “He’s good at his job,” with more warmth than she’d used for anything else in that office.
That was the way through her armor. Maddox Shaw didn’t trust people, but she trusted her dog completely. It was something. Not much, and definitely not a weakness, but something.
Jade moved from the window and returned to the couch, picking up the file again and studying the service photo clipped inside the front cover.
Maddox stared back at the camera with the same neutral expression she’d worn in the office, giving nothing away.
But Jade had learned to read what people rarely said, and she noticed the tightness around Maddox’s eyes, the set of her jaw, and the way she held herself like she was already braced for the next hit.
You’re carrying something, Jade thought. Something heavy. And you think you have to carry it alone.
She knew that weight intimately, had carried her own version for years after Marcus Lambert had died on a field stretched while she’d been trying to save someone else.
She had carried it through three tours, through her discharge, through a relationship that had crumbled under the pressure of her hypervigilance and her nightmares and her inability to stop feeling everything so intensely.
“You’re too much,” her ex had said. “You care too much and feel too much all the time. It’s exhausting.”
Jade closed the file and set it aside, then reached for the box she’d been avoiding all evening, the one marked personal in her own handwriting. She pulled back the flaps and stared at the contents: deployment photos, commendation certificates, and a folded flag.
And there, tucked in the corner: a photo of Marcus Lambert’s daughter at his memorial service, holding a folded flag of her own.
Jade had made the right call. Triage was about who you could save, and she’d saved three soldiers that day instead of one. She knew the math, understood the logic, had made peace with the decision years ago in a therapist’s office not unlike the one she now worked in.
But she still kept the photo. She still thought about him and his family. And she still carried the weight of choosing.
That’s what Maddox didn’t yet understand, that the weight didn’t disappear just because you made the right call. That doing your job well didn’t mean it didn’t cost you something of yourself.
And that sometimes the strongest thing you could do was admit you needed help carrying it.
Jade gingerly closed the box without unpacking it and returned it to the corner with the others. Not tonight, maybe not for a while. Some things you kept packed away, not because you were avoiding them but because you’d learned to live with them sealed up tight.
She gathered the files—Thorne, Kowalski, Shaw—and stacked them neatly on the coffee table. Tuesday. She had until Tuesday to figure out how to reach someone who didn’t want to be reached.
The rain eased outside, softening to a steady patter. Jade finished the last dregs of her tea, now lukewarm again, and looked around the apartment. It still didn’t feel like home and probably wouldn’t for a while. Fresh starts never felt easy at first.
But she learned something in the Army, something she carried into every therapy session: you didn’t need to feel ready to do the work; you just needed to show up and start.
Tuesday, Maddox Shaw would show up because she had to. Jade would be ready because that’s what she did. She showed up for people who wouldn’t show up for themselves, even the ones who didn’t think they needed her.
The weekend passed in the quiet rhythm of settling into a new pace.
Jade unpacked three more boxes, hung curtains in the bedroom, and took a long run along the harbor trail that left her legs burning and her mind clear.
She called her mom—yes, Phoenix Ridge was good; yes, she was meeting people; no, she wasn’t working too much.
Sunday evening, she meal-prepped for the week and reviewed her session notes to prepare for the week ahead.