Never Alone (Never Letting Go #2)

Chapter 1

Cole

I'd made peace with a lot of things. Not her. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

The thought surfaced the way it always did: uninvited. I shoved it back down and went back to the tack strips along the baseboard, working the pry bar under each one until the wood gave with a small crack and came up clean.

I'd been at the house on Ashford since five, working on the front bedroom, cutting the old carpet into strips, rolling and hauling them out to the truck bed in the gray quiet of early morning. The floor underneath was oak, beat up but solid.

The crew had been asking, since I'd bought the place, why I'd put money down on an abandoned house that could have ghosts in it.

I told them what was true on paper. A fixer-upper in a good neighborhood went for less than half what a finished house would, and if you did the work yourself, you walked away with a home worth twice what you'd put into it.

For a thirty-four-year-old who'd just made lieutenant and had no plans to live anywhere else, the math was the easiest part of the decision.

That was the version I gave them. The truth was simpler. I'd wanted something to build that wasn't a scale model—something with rooms in it, something that would still be standing in fifty years.

I checked the time. Just past eleven. If I left now, I'd have time to shower before the barbecue.

I pried the last tack strip up and dropped it in the bucket, swept the staples and the carpet dust into a pile by the door, and locked the house behind me.

Drove home with the windows down and the dust still in my hair.

Stripped, showered, and found a clean shirt in the closet that didn't smell like the station.

My phone buzzed against the dresser while I was buttoning it.

Jamie

Swing by Mrs. Thompson's on your way?

I'd texted back "Yeah" before I'd finished reading the message. That was how it worked. Jamie ran the Reeves household the way Sam ran Station 33. If she needed a cake picked up on the way, you picked up a cake.

Mrs. Thompson's bakery sat wedged between a flower shop and a tailor who'd been dying a slow death since I was a kid. The building leaned a little to the left. The sign above the door had lost two letters, and nobody had replaced them.

Last time I'd been in here was for Aunt Jenna's birthday cake. Quinn had called ahead and asked Mrs. Thompson to make a German chocolate with the coconut frosting Aunt Jenna had grown up on.

A bell jingled when I opened the door.

Inside, it smelled like butter, sugar, and something yeasty rising in the back, warm enough that the windows had fogged at the corners.

Mrs. Thompson wasn't at the counter. The woman who looked up was someone I hadn't seen before. Small. Dark-haired. Blue apron with a smudge of flour on one hip.

She smiled at me.

"Pickup for Reeves," I said.

"Reeves," she said. "Right. One second."

She disappeared through a swinging door and came back with a white box tied in twine. She set it on the counter with both hands, carefully.

"Wait—one more thing." She stepped back through the door and returned with a small paper sack. "Mrs. Thompson wanted Sam and Jamie to have these. She made it fresh this morning."

I pulled out my card.

"Oh. It's already been paid for."

Jamie. Of course.

I put it away. She slid the receipt across the counter. Her fingers came close to mine without touching.

"Have a good one."

"You, too."

I got the cake settled on the passenger seat, the bag of extras tucked beside it, and sat there for a second with my hand on the key.

There was something about her smile.

I'd seen it before. On calls, mostly. The one that went on before the door opened and came off after you left. Women who smiled like they were holding the door shut with it.

I shook the thought off. I was probably reading into it. It was a bakery. People smiled at customers.

I turned the engine over and pulled out.

Sam and Jamie hosted whenever the rotation gave A-shift and B-shift the same Sunday off.

They lived on a quiet street in a house that had been theirs long enough to look like them: porch chairs worn in at the seats, a hose coiled loose by the front steps, Jamie's planter by the walk that she kept alive through sheer stubbornness.

I parked behind Ethan Davis's truck, took the cake and the paper bag from the passenger seat, and went up the front walk.

Megan opened the door before I'd raised my hand to knock.

"There he is," she said. "Look at you, Lieutenant. Get in here."

Megan was Davis's mother. She and Jamie had been best friends since they were girls. The friendship was older than I was. She took the cake out of my hands before I'd cleared the doorway and tilted her head down the hall. "Everybody's out back."

I followed her in. She turned into the kitchen with the cake and the bag, and I could see Jamie at the cutting board with Sean's wife Carol, both of them laughing at something I'd missed. Jamie looked up as I passed.

"Hey, kid."

"Hey, Jamie."

The back porch opened onto the yard, and for a second, I just stood there.

Sam and Jamie's sons, Jack and Ben, were on the grass with Sean's two daughters, all four of them taking turns rolling a tennis ball at Biscuit.

Biscuit was eleven now and didn't run for anything.

Sam and Jamie had adopted her for Rosie when Rosie was old enough to take care of a dog.

The owner had been having a hard time placing her—she'd been the runt of the litter—until Rosie saw her, and that had been the end of the discussion.

Rosie was away at college now, and Biscuit had stayed.

The grill was at the far side of the yard, and it had three captains around it.

Sam on the tongs. Danny across from him with a beer.

Tyler at Sam's shoulder, laughing at something Sam had said.

Elena was crossing the grass toward them with three cold ones in her hands, the way she always did, because she'd been married to Tyler long enough to know what the three of them wanted before they thought to ask.

Sean was at the cooler, restocking it from a fresh case. He looked up as Elena passed and handed her one without breaking the conversation with whoever he was talking to.

The rest of the crew was scattered around the yard. Davis and his brother, Keith, at one of the folding tables. Martinez nearby, beer in hand, mid-story. Hutch was at a niece's something. I'd lost track of which.

I'd been worried, on the drive over, that the day was going to feel like a production, with all eyes on me. It didn't. It felt like every other barbecue at this house for the last decade, which was the highest compliment I could give it.

Aunt Jenna was at the serving table on the porch, arranging a stack of napkins into something tidier than they needed to be. She looked up when she heard me come out, set the napkins down, and crossed to me.

She had been married to my father's brother. After my father died, she and my cousin Quinn had more or less been family. My mother was her own situation. And my older sister—

I'd come home from school, and the house would be empty and quiet, and after a while, I'd start walking the six blocks to Aunt Jenna's instead.

She hugged me—both arms, hard, a little too long. Then she pulled back and looked at me the way she did when she was about to say something she'd thought about on the way over.

"Your father would have been proud of you."

I didn't have anywhere to put that. I didn't try.

The screen door swung open behind us.

"Lieutenant!"

Quinn came out with a stack of plates in one hand and the silverware caddy in the other, her phone tucked under her arm against her side.

Twenty-six, not quite my height. Two and a half years as a paramedic.

She'd called me the night she passed her last board.

She'd talked through the relief and the weight of it for half an hour and I'd listened.

When we'd hung up I'd sat on my apartment floor and thought about Aunt Jenna—twenty years in an ER—and about Jack Donovan going back into a building he wasn't supposed to be in, for a woman and a little girl he didn't know.

Quinn had been eight years old. She remembered enough.

She'd become a paramedic for both of them.

"Don't," I said.

"I will though."

"I know you will."

She set the plates down on the table next to the napkins, slid her phone out from under her arm and into her back pocket, and reached for the silverware caddy.

Aunt Jenna squeezed my arm once. "I'll be back. I forgot the rolls."

She crossed the porch and went back inside.

"So," I said. "Where's your boyfriend?"

Quinn set the caddy down, slow, and gave me the look she gave me whenever I did this. "Hiding from you."

"Where actually?"

"At the hospital. He's a resident. He's pulling a thirty."

"How do you know he's telling the truth?"

"Cole."

"Just saying."

Quinn had been dating Will for almost a year. I'd met him twice. He was fine. That was as far as I was willing to go.

"So. Where's yours?" Quinn picked up a fork from the caddy and pointed it at me.

"Where's my what?"

"Your girlfriend."

I gave her a look.

"What? You don't get to do this to me without me getting to do it to you."

The people who knew made a whole thing out of the fact that I hadn't dated. Quinn had asked me once, straight-faced, if I was waiting for a sign from God. I'd told her I was waiting to meet someone who wasn't going to waste my time. She'd laughed and told me that was worse.

Maybe it was.

My mother had run off with one man after another, none of them good for her and none of them a good father for me. I'd learned by watching what kind of man I didn't want to be. The kind who treated love like a thing he could pick up and put down.

I looked at love the way some people looked at a house. You didn't buy a house you were going to sell in a year. You didn't sign a thirty-year mortgage on a place you didn't want to live in. Love was what you built on top of the choice to show up every day and keep showing up. That was what it was.

I wasn't opposed to it. I just wasn't going to fake it.

If I ever met someone, really met someone, I'd want what Sam and Jamie had. Until then, I wasn't going to pretend.

The afternoon moved the way these afternoons always moved.

The kids ate on the grass with Biscuit working her way through them, taking what they handed her until Megan crossed the yard with the look of a woman who had raised two boys and was not about to let an eleven-year-old golden retriever eat anything she wasn't supposed to.

Then Sam called for a toast.

He stood at the head of the table with Jamie at his side, his arm around her waist. The yard quieted.

"I want to talk about Cole," he said.

He walked the room through the long version of how he knew me.

The sixteen-year-old who showed up for a ride-along with his backpack still on one shoulder.

The firefighter who took the harder shifts without being asked.

The engineer who knew the rig better than the men who'd worked on it.

The man, now, on his way to fire captain, even if he wouldn't say so himself.

He raised his beer.

"To Lieutenant Weston."

The crew raised their drinks and said it back.

Aunt Jenna squeezed my arm. Quinn hugged me from the other side and reminded me, in case I'd forgotten, that I'd be addressed as “Lieutenant” from here on out.

Jamie set the cake out. Congratulations, Lt. Weston! in blue piping. Mrs. Thompson's. The same one I'd carried in from the truck.

I ended up at one of the long tables with a plate in front of me and most of the crew around it.

"How's the place coming?"

Keith, the younger of the Davis brothers, was an architect. He'd drawn up the plans for my kitchen and made me widen the doorway over my objection, the way he always did—not an argument so much as a closed door. I'd widened the doorway, and he'd been right. He'd been helping quietly ever since.

"Front bedroom's down to subfloor."

"Original under the carpet?"

"Oak."

"Good."

Sean leaned in from the seat next to mine. "Hold on. You bought a house?"

Sean had been at 33 before I came on. He'd left after the Carolina Furniture Depot fire, gone up to Greenville to work in his brother's supply shop. He'd met Carol up there. When he came home with her, his brother had helped him open his own store in Havensworth.

"Couple of months ago."

"And you didn't think to come see me?"

"I figured I'd come when I had a list."

"Come anyway. Whatever you need for it, bring me the list, and I'll cut you a price." He clapped my shoulder. "Tools, lumber, fixtures. Anything."

"Thanks, Sean."

"So." Martinez was on the other side of the table, beer in hand. "Three bedrooms. Any plans to fill that, Lieutenant? Or are you fully committed to living with the ghosts?"

"I'd be happy to introduce you to them when the place is finished."

The table laughed.

"No, thank you, Lieutenant. There's a reason I don't watch horror films."

Elena leaned forward across her plate. "Are you actually doing all the work yourself, Cole? You're not hiring anyone?"

"I prefer it that way."

Sam clapped me on the shoulder. "When the place is done, you're hosting the next barbecue. Just let us know if you need help with anything in the meantime."

Everyone had something to say about it. Half of them at once. Martinez said he was bringing sage.

I looked around the table. Sam at my shoulder. Sean across from me. Davis and Keith leaning over their plates. Martinez pretending to be afraid of a house. Elena watching the whole thing with the small, steady amusement she watched everything with.

Aunt Jenna and Quinn were at the next table over with Carol. Jamie was carrying out a second round of something from the kitchen. Jack and Ben were back on the grass with Biscuit, tossing the tennis ball she still wasn't going to chase.

I'd lost my parents twice—once to death and once to whatever my mother had become. What I had instead was sitting around me in this yard and had been the whole time.

I was fine alone. I just hadn't been alone in years.