Chapter 10 Jamie
Jamie
"He discouraged me."
The words came out harder than I intended.
Loretta poured coffee while I talked. The kitchen was quiet without Rosie.
She was at preschool until the afternoon, and the house felt too big in her absence.
I wrapped my hands around my mug and told Loretta about Sam.
How he'd confirmed everything Megan and Danny said.
How he'd agreed the system was broken. How he'd gone quiet when I told him I wanted to do something about it.
"He told me Havensworth doesn't like outsiders."
Loretta set down the coffee pot. She didn't respond right away. Instead she pulled out the chair across from me and sat, her own mug cradled between her palms.
"He said that?"
"More or less."
She was quiet for a moment, studying me with that look she got when she was deciding how much truth someone could handle.
"That boy has been avoiding conflict since he was twelve years old," she said finally. "His daddy taught him that. Keep your head down. Don't make waves. Don't give anyone a reason to come at you."
I knew about Sam's father. Everyone who grew up in this neighborhood knew, even if no one talked about it directly.
"He's not trying to dismiss you, Jamie." Loretta's voice softened. "He's scared for you. There's a difference."
I don't need him to be scared for me. I need him to not make me feel like I'm crazy for doing this.
"Sam has spent his whole life not rocking the boat," she continued. "You're asking him to capsize it. That's not nothing." She paused. "You need to give him a minute to figure out what kind of man he wants to be."
Maybe Loretta was right. Maybe I'd been too hard on him. Sam could take all the time he needed to figure out what kind of man he wanted to be. But I wasn't going to wait for him to decide before I got started.
By evening, the kitchen table had disappeared under paper.
Rosie was asleep down the hall. Loretta had handled bath time and bedtime while I cleared the dishes, and now the house was quiet in that particular way it got after dark. Just the hum of the refrigerator and the occasional creak of old floorboards settling.
My laptop was open in front of me. Jenna's card was propped against my coffee cup where I could see it. I'd been at this for hours.
LODD classification criteria varied by state, but the federal standards were clear.
Death had to occur in the line of duty, during response to an emergency, as a direct result of job-related activities.
Jack's death checked every box. He'd been on shift.
He'd responded to a structure fire. He'd died from complications of smoke inhalation sustained during that response.
The only reason the city could deny it was the insubordination angle. He'd defied a direct order when he went back into that building.
But I'd found precedent. Other departments, other states. Firefighters who'd made judgment calls in the field, who'd prioritized civilian lives over protocol, who'd been honored for it instead of punished. The difference wasn't the action. It was how the department chose to frame it.
Havensworth had chosen to protect itself.
I pulled up the incident reports I'd found through public records requests.
Staffing numbers for the past five years.
Response times. Mutual aid requests, or the lack of them.
The picture that emerged was damning. Crews running short-handed shift after shift.
Stations operating in silos. Communication systems that didn't talk to each other.
Megan had called it fragmentation. That was generous. It was chaos dressed up as tradition.
I made notes in the margins of a printout. Drew lines connecting dates and decisions. Built a timeline of choices that had led, step by step, to my brother going back into a burning building alone.
No one had pushed. For decades, no one had pushed.
I jumped when the phone rang. It took me a second to find it buried under the papers. Mark's name glowed on the screen.
"Hey."
"Hey yourself." The warmth in his voice made me close my eyes for a second. I hadn't realized how much I'd missed the sound of him until I heard it. "How's Havensworth treating you?"
"Still standing." I leaned back in my chair and stretched my neck. "How's New York?"
"Cold. Gray. Missing you." That made me smile. "What are you up to? You sound tired."
I looked at the papers spread across the table.
"I'm working on something," I said. "For Jack and for Rosie."
"What kind of something?"
"They're calling Jack's death insubordination so they don't have to pay out his benefits. Rosie deserves what he earned, and I'm going to make sure she gets it."
"That sounds serious."
“Yeah.”
“Do you need me to come down?”
It would be nice to have him here. But Mark had a business to run, and I wasn't going to ask him to put his life on hold for a fight that might take months.
"No, I think I have it handled."
"Alright," Mark said. There was a smile in his voice, but something underneath it too. "I'm starting to feel like you don't want to come back home to me."
I laughed. "Don't be ridiculous."
I was about to ask him about the deal he'd been working on when I heard an unfamiliar voice in the background. "Where do you keep your glasses, Mark?"
"Who's that?"
"Oh, I have some friends over." Mark's voice shifted, like he was moving the phone. "Everyone say hi to Jamie."
A chorus of voices came through the speaker, slightly muffled. "Hi! We miss you!"
I chuckled despite myself. "You have fun there then."
"Alright. I miss you."
"I miss you too."
I set the phone down and stared at it for a moment. Mark had friends over. There was laughter and voices and the easy rhythm of a life that was continuing without me in it.
I tried to picture it. The living room where we'd wasted entire Sundays, breakfast turning into brunch, neither of us bothering to get dressed. The kitchen where we'd burned pasta sauce and laughed about it. The view of the city lights from his bedroom window.
I missed it. I missed him.
But I was here in Havensworth, in the house where I grew up, surrounded by evidence of everything this city had gotten wrong.
There was work to do. I couldn't be thinking about escaping back to New York—not when Jack's death was still being called insubordination, not when Rosie still hadn't gotten what she was owed.
I reached for my coffee and pulled the laptop closer. The timeline needed more detail, and I still had gaps in the incident reports. If I could just find the original dispatch records from the night of the fire, I could—
The doorbell rang.
Who would come at this hour?
I pushed back from the table and walked to the front door. Through the window I could see Sam on the porch, his hands shoved in his jacket pockets, his shoulders set like he was bracing for something.
"I'm in," he said when I opened the door.
He looked at me for a long moment. There was something different in his face, like something that had been churning had finally settled.
"Whatever you need. I'll help you,” he added.
I thought about what Loretta had said that morning. She'd told me to give him a minute to figure out what kind of man he wanted to be.
He'd figured it out.
I stepped aside and let him in.