Chapter 18
Shane
Zoe arrived with Millie and her mom about twenty minutes after I called to update them.
Zoe's face was tear-streaked and terrified. She ran past me without seeing me and disappeared into Maya's room. Millie hesitated at the door, caught my eye, mouthed thank you, then followed her in.
I waited.
Hours passed. I'd been hoping one of them would come out to give me an update, to tell me something, anything. I wasn't close enough this time. The nurses wouldn’t tell me anything beyond “stable condition.”
Brian sat on the chair beside me, stretched his legs out like we had all night. Garrett leaned against the wall, arms crossed, watching the hallway with that quiet intensity he always carried.
Neither of them said anything about why I was still here. About why I was sitting in a hospital waiting room at two in the morning for a woman who'd ended things, who'd closed the door in my face, who wasn't my girlfriend or my family or anything I had a right to claim.
That's the thing about my crew.
They show up.
They don't need explanations.
Around midnight, Detective Diaz found us in the waiting room. She looked as exhausted as I felt, her jacket wrinkled, coffee cup in hand.
"Thought you'd want to know," she said, keeping her voice low. "The kid's talking. Tommy Vickers. He's been cooperating since they brought him in."
I sat up straighter. "What did he say?"
"The other schools were never random. He was working up to her. To Ms. Cummins." Diaz took a sip of her coffee. "Practice runs. Building his nerve. He told us he'd been watching her for months. Knew her schedule, knew she stayed late, knew which nights the building would be empty."
My stomach dropped.
"Every time he tried to go through with it, he couldn't. So he'd hit another school instead.
Burn something else. Tell himself next time.
" Diaz shook her head. "The fire at P.S.
112 tonight—that was his diversion. He called it in himself, knew it would pull every unit in the district. He wanted her alone."
Nine years of rage, and he still couldn’t face her.
Not until tonight.
"He could have killed her," I said.
"Yeah. But he didn't." Diaz met my eyes. "From what the responding officers said, she talked him down. Held his hand while the building burned around them. Kid was sobbing when they brought him out." A pause. "That's not nothing."
She left to get a statement from Maya when she was ready.
I sat back in the chair and let that sink in. Tommy had spent months circling Maya like a moth around a flame. Too afraid to confront her. Too angry to stop. And when he finally stood in front of the woman he blamed for everything, she'd reached out her hand.
That was Maya.
Even when someone wanted to destroy her, she saw the broken kid underneath
"She's tough," Brian said finally. "She'll be okay."
I didn't answer.
The ER doors swung open, and Dr. Ava Rothwell walked through. Auburn hair pulled back in a messy bun, no makeup, wearing scrubs that had seen a long shift. The kind of face that didn’t smile easily—or often.
Brian straightened in his chair.
"Briggs." Ava's voice was clipped. Professional. "You're not on the approved visitor list."
"I know."
She studied me for a moment. Something shifted in her expression. Not warmth, exactly, but something close to understanding.
"She's stable. Oxygen levels are back to normal. We're keeping her overnight for observation." A pause. "She's lucky you got there when you did."
"Is she awake?"
“She’s awake.”
Ava glanced at the closed door, then back at me.
“She’s also asked that you don’t come in.”
The words landed like a punch to the chest.
Brian's hand found my shoulder. Squeezed once.
Ava was already turning away when Brian said, "Thanks, Rothwell."
She paused.
Didn't look back.
"Torres." Just his name, flat and dismissive, but I caught the way her shoulders tensed before she pushed through the doors.
An hour later, Millie emerged. She spotted me in the corner, hesitated, then walked over. Her eyes were red.
"Shane."
"How is she?"
"She's okay. The doctors said she can go home tomorrow." Millie shifted on her feet. "She, um—she asked me to come out here."
My chest tightened.
"Okay."
"She wanted me to thank you. For coming. For getting her out." Millie paused. "But she said she's not ready to see you. She needs some time."
The words landed heavy.
I nodded slowly. "Okay. Tell her—" I stopped. What was there to say? "Tell her I understand."
Millie lingered. She looked like she wanted to say something else but didn't know if she should.
"What?" I asked.
"I called you," she said quietly. "When I saw the smoke. I know I should've called 911 first, but I just... I thought of you. I knew you'd come."
"I'll always come."
Millie nodded. Looked at her shoes. "She's been crying a lot. The last few days. Before all this." She glanced up. "I don't know what happened between you two. But... I hope it works out."
"Me too."
She went back inside.
Brian stood. "Come on. I'll drive you home."
"I'm fine."
"You're not." Brian's voice was gentle but firm. "Also, you’re not doing her any good sitting here like this."
Garrett pushed off the wall. "He's right. She knows you stayed. That's enough for tonight."
I looked at the door one more time. Then I followed my brothers out into the cold.
Two weeks passed. I went through the motions at Engine 295.
Drills. Maintenance. Calls that blurred together. A kitchen fire in Woodside. A car accident on the BQE. A false alarm at a nursing home, where the residents kept asking if I was the one from the calendar.
I did my job. I was competent. Professional.
I felt hollow.
The crew saw it. They didn't say anything at first. Firefighters aren't big on emotional conversations. But Brian watched. Garrett watched. Even Captain Rodriguez pulled me aside after a call and asked if I needed time off.
"I'm fine, Cap."
"You're not fine. You're functional. That doesn't mean you're okay."
I didn't argue.
Brian found me in the apparatus bay one night, staring at my phone. No new messages.
"You need to talk to her."
"She doesn't want to talk." I shook my head. "I'm not going to force her. She knows where I am. She knows how I feel. The rest is up to her."
Brian was quiet for a long moment. “What if she never comes back?"
I didn't have an answer.
I went to Zoe’s school at pickup time, just to check on her.
She saw me leaning against my truck across the street. She hesitated, then looked around like she was checking if anyone was watching. Then she crossed over to me.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey." She shifted her backpack on her shoulder. Guarded. Wary.
"How are you doing?"
She looked away. "I don't know. Scared, I guess. About my mom. About Tommy. About everything."
"That's normal. What happened was scary."
"Is he going to jail? Tommy?"
"I don't know. Maybe. I heard your mom’s been talking to lawyers. About getting him help instead."
Zoe nodded slowly. "She does that. Tries to help people even when they hurt her."
Something in my chest twisted. "Yeah. She does."
We stood in silence for a moment. Kids streamed past us, laughing, shouting—living lives that hadn’t been touched by fire or fear.
"She won't talk about you," Zoe said quietly.
I looked at her.
"She doesn't say your name. She changes the subject whenever I bring you up." Zoe met my eyes. "But she kept the flowers. The daisies you gave her. They’re dead now. But she won’t throw them away."
I swallowed hard. I couldn’t find words that wouldn’t come out broken.
"I have to go," Zoe said. "Millie's waiting."
"Yeah. Okay."
She started to walk away, then stopped and looked back.
"For what it's worth? I think she's being stupid." Zoe shrugged. "But she's my mom. So."
She disappeared into the crowd.
I stood there for a long time, thinking about the dead flowers that Maya refused to throw away.
That night, I went home, opened my phone, and scrolled through my social media.
The photos. The calendar shots. The comments from women I didn’t remember—women whose names I’d never known.
So hot. Call me. When are you doing another calendar?
This was the reputation that had cost me Maya. The Playboy. The calendar firefighter. The guy who hooked up and moved on.
I couldn't erase the past. But I could stop feeding it.
I deleted the apps.
All of them.
Instagram. Facebook. Twitter.
Gone.
The next morning, I found Rodriguez in his office before my shift.
"Cap. Got a minute?"
He looked up from his paperwork. "Briggs. How you holding up?"
"Fine." I wasn't, but that wasn't why I was here. "I wanted to let you know that I want to be taken off the calendar permanently."
Rodriguez set down his pen. "You sure? The foundation uses those sales for—"
"I'm sure."
He studied me for a long moment. "This about the teacher?"
I didn’t say anything, but I knew he knew the answer.
He nodded. "Alright. I'll let them know."
"Thanks, Cap."
I turned to leave.
The article was still out there.
The photo. The comments—calling Maya desperate, calling her a clinger, calling her a single mom who got lucky. Every time someone Googled my name, that's what they'd find.
I couldn’t undo it.
But maybe I could bury it.
I thought about the reporter from the fire scene. New York Times. Professional. She’d asked the right questions. If anyone could write something that told the real story, not the tabloid version, but the truth, it might be her.
It was a long shot. She covered arson, not firefighter love lives. But I was out of options.
I found her byline online. Sloane Harper. Investigative reporter. A string of serious pieces: city corruption, housing fraud, police misconduct. Not exactly puff pieces about reformed playboys.
But there was a contact email at the bottom of her bio. I stared at it for ten minutes.
Then I wrote to her.
We met at a coffee shop in Midtown.
Sloane was already there when I arrived, laptop open, leather messenger bag taking up the chair beside her. She looked up when I approached. Green eyes assessing, giving nothing away.
"Shane Briggs." She didn't stand. Didn't smile. "I have to admit, I was curious."
"Thanks for meeting me."
"You said it was about the school fires." She gestured to the seat across from her. "I'm covering that story. What do you know?"
I sat. "I know who set them, and why."
That got her attention. She closed the laptop. "I'm listening."
I told her about Tommy. About Maya. About the connection between the arsonist and the woman I loved. The teacher who’d reported his abuse nine years earlier. The target he'd been building toward. I told her about the surveillance, the profile, the escalating pattern.
Sloane took notes. Asked sharp questions. Didn't interrupt when I stumbled over the harder parts.
When I finished, she sat back and studied me.
"That's a story," she said. "But it's not why you emailed me."
I exhaled. "No."
"The article. The photo." Sloane's voice was neutral. "You want me to write something that fixes your reputation."
"I want you to write something true." I met her eyes.
"I'm not the guy in that article. I haven't been for a long time.
And Maya..." My voice caught. "She's not some desperate single mom who got lucky.
She's the strongest person I've ever met.
She raised a kid alone, built a career from nothing, and she's about to have her life torn apart because some tabloid needed clicks. "
Sloane was quiet for a long moment.
"I don't do puff pieces," she said finally. "I'm not going to write 'Firefighter Hero Is Actually a Good Guy.'"
"I'm not asking you to."
"What are you asking?"
I leaned forward. "Write the real story. The arsons. Tommy. Maya. All of it. When this breaks, and it's going to break, I want the truth out there. Not some spin about the calendar firefighter rescuing his damsel. The actual truth."
Sloane tapped her pen against her notebook. Those green eyes were unreadable.
"You know I'll have to verify everything. Talk to your crew. Your captain."
"Fine."
Something shifted in her face. Just for a second. A tightness around her eyes, a flicker of something that looked almost like pain. She covered it quickly, but not quickly enough.
I didn't know what nerve I'd hit. But I'd hit one.
Sloane wrote something in her notebook. She didn't look up. "I'll be in touch."
She was packing up her bag before I could respond. But at the door, she paused and looked back.
"For what it's worth," she said, "the woman in that photo? Natalie Vance? She has a reputation. Anyone who actually reported the story would have found that out in five minutes." A pause. "Whoever wrote that article wasn't interested in the truth. They were interested in traffic."
She was gone before I could thank her.
2 AM. The station was quiet.
That hollow quiet between calls, when most guys were sleeping, and I couldn’t even close my eyes. Brian found me in the apparatus bay, sitting on the bumper of the engine, staring at nothing.
He dropped down beside me. He didn't say anything at first, just sat.
"Rodriguez told me about the calendar," Brian said finally. "You're really out?"
"Yeah. I'm done being that guy."
Brian nodded slowly. "She might never know you did it."
"Doesn't matter. I'll know."
We sat in silence. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. Somewhere in the station, someone was snoring.
Running into fire was easy.
Waiting to see if she'd ever open that door again?
Turns out standing still takes more courage than running in.