2. Beck
TWO
BECK
She hummed.
That was the first thing I noticed about Lila Webber that I wished I hadn't.
Not the auburn hair or the freckles or the way she smiled like she was running for mayor.
The humming. She did it while she checked the rig, while she inventoried the med kit, while she organized the jump bag with quick, sure hands.
Some melody I couldn't place, something folksy, maybe, or something she'd made up.
It threaded through the quiet of the bay like a thing that belonged there.
I caught myself listening for it during morning checks.
Tracking the melody, and it changed daily, sometimes hourly, as if she had an internal soundtrack that shifted with her mood.
Tuesdays were something upbeat, almost pop.
Wednesdays were slower, more folk. The day after a hard call, she hummed something low and bluesy that I felt in my teeth.
I hated that I was paying attention to this.
I hated that my brain had allocated resources to the project without my consent.
It didn't belong there.
Nothing about her belonged there.
I pulled the compartment door open harder than necessary and counted oxygen tanks. Six. Good. Full. I logged it on the clipboard with handwriting that had gotten worse over the past two years, tighter and smaller, like my body was trying to take up less space even on paper.
Jake's locker was fourteen feet behind me.
I didn't have to look to know it was there.
I felt it the way you feel a draft, something cold in a room that should be warm.
The tape residue where his name had been.
I should have put a new nameplate on it months ago.
Captain had mentioned it twice. I hadn't done it.
And now she was here, this woman with her sunshine and her humming, assigned to be my partner on the rig, and every time I looked at her I saw the empty space where someone else should have been standing.
"Lieutenant?" Her voice carried from the other side of the ambulance. Professional. Warm. The kind of voice that probably made patients feel safe. "I reorganized the trauma supplies. Hope that's okay. The layout wasn't matching the county protocol update from June."
I came around to her side. She'd rearranged the compartments, gauze and hemostatic agents within arm's reach of the door, splints reorganized by size, the BVM repositioned for faster grab. It was better. Objectively, measurably better than the system I'd maintained for two years.
"It's fine," I said.
She waited a beat, like she expected more. When it didn't come, something flickered across her face, gone before I could name it, and she went back to work. Back to humming.
I retreated to the common room and the incident reports that needed filing. Paperwork was good. Paperwork didn't hum or have freckles or rearrange things with hands that clearly knew what they were doing.
Because that was the problem, wasn't it?
If she'd been incompetent, this would be easier.
I could have gone to Captain Harding with concerns.
Cited safety issues. Requested her transfer.
But in two days of watching her work, I had exactly zero professional complaints.
She was fast, thorough, and calm. She'd introduced herself to every regular at Rosie's within forty-eight hours and somehow already knew that Mrs. Patmore's cat was named Lord Byron and that the hardware store owner, Frank, had a bad knee he refused to see a doctor about.
She was good. And that bothered me more than anything.
The tones dropped at 14:07, the electronic two-tone alert that snapped everyone to attention like a switch had been flipped. I was already on my feet and moving.
"Engine 7, Medic 7, motor vehicle accident, Highway 9 and Pine Ridge Road. Two vehicles involved, possible entrapment."
I grabbed my helmet. Lila was beside me in the bay, already pulling on her jacket, and we moved in the efficient parallel tracks of people doing a job they'd done a thousand times, except we'd never done it together, and every motion felt like a dance where I didn't know my partner's steps.
Cole had the engine rolling. Ty and Sadie were geared up. Lila climbed into the passenger side of the medic unit and I took the wheel, and we pulled out behind the engine with lights and siren cutting through the quiet afternoon.
"Dispatch, Medic 7 en route," Lila said into the radio, and her voice had changed. The warmth was still there but sharpened now, focused. All business.
The accident was a fender-bender that had ambitions of being worse.
A pickup had clipped an SUV on the curve where Pine Ridge met the highway, the same curve that collected accidents like loose change.
The pickup driver was out and walking, holding his neck with the dramatic flair of someone already composing a voicemail to his lawyer.
The SUV driver, a woman in her forties, was still in the vehicle, airbag deployed, dazed but responsive.
"Ma'am, I'm Lila, I'm a paramedic with Ember Falls Fire. Can you tell me your name?"
I was pulling equipment. I heard Lila's voice through the open door of the SUV, steady, conversational, the kind of tone you'd use with a friend over coffee, except she was assessing pupil response and palpating a cervical spine while she talked.
"Debra. Debra Hoffman. Did I — is my car —"
"Debra, your car's going to be fine, and more importantly, so are you. I need you to hold still for me, okay? I'm going to put this collar on. It's just a precaution, nothing scary."
She had the C-collar on in seconds. Smooth. No fumbling. She talked the whole time, and it wasn't nervous chatter. It was calculated, each word designed to keep the woman calm and oriented.
"Beck, board and straps," she called without looking back.
I brought them. Our hands worked in the tight space of the vehicle, her stabilizing, me positioning the board, the choreography of extrication that required trust because one wrong move could turn a bruised neck into a severed spinal cord.
She guided Debra onto the board with the kind of patient authority that couldn't be taught. You either had it or you didn't.
She had it.
We loaded Debra into the medic unit. Lila started an IV, took vitals, called the report into Mercy General with crisp, efficient language.
I drove, and in the rearview mirror I could see her, gloved hands moving with purpose, that red braid swinging as she reached for supplies, still talking to Debra in that warm, grounded way.
The pickup driver turned out to have a strained neck and bruised ego. Ty and Sadie handled him. We cleared the scene by 15:30.
Back at the station, I backed the medic unit into the bay and went through the post-call checklist on autopilot.
Restock. Clean. Decon. Log. The routine was a rope I could hold onto, hand over hand, and it kept me from having to think about the fact that Lila Webber had just handled her first call at Station 7 like she'd been here for years.
"Good call out there." Cole was leaning against the engine, arms crossed. He had that look, the one that said he was about to be insightful, which I never appreciated.
"It was a fender-bender."
"Spinal precaution on a restrained occupant with airbag deployment and mechanism for cervical injury. That's not nothing. And she was smooth."
"She was adequate."
Cole's eyebrow went up. One eyebrow. He'd perfected the art of saying entire sentences with a single eyebrow. This one said, You're full of it and we both know it.
"I've got reports to write," I said, and walked away from his eyebrow and everything it implied.
In the bunk room, I sat on the edge of my bed and pressed my palms against my eyes.
The room was dim, quiet. Two rows of narrow beds with navy blankets pulled tight.
Jake's had been the one by the window. Someone else slept there now.
Ty had moved to it six months ago, and I'd said nothing because saying something would have meant explaining why it mattered.
My phone was on the nightstand. I picked it up, scrolled to Jake's contact. Still there. I'd never deleted it. His face grinned at me from the tiny circle, blond hair, crooked nose from a football injury in high school, that idiot grin he wore like armor.
Two years, three months, and eleven days since the warehouse on Birch Street. Since the floor gave way. Since I heard the sound, not a crash, not an explosion, but a groan, like the building was tired of standing. Since I came out and Jake didn't.
I put the phone face-down on the mattress.
Captain Harding found me in his office an hour later, where I'd gone to file the incident report. He didn't knock. Captains don't.
"How'd she do?"
"Fine."
He settled into his chair like a man who had all the time in the world. "Beck. I know this isn't easy."
"I didn't say it wasn't easy."
"You didn't have to. You've been wound tighter than a drum since I told you about the transfer." He leaned forward, elbows on the desk. "She's good. You know she's good. And Station 7 needs a full crew. We've been running a paramedic short for eight months."
"I know the staffing numbers."
"Then you know this isn't optional. She's your partner. You ride together, you run calls together, you trust each other on scene." His voice softened. "Jake would've liked her."
Something hot and sharp twisted behind my ribs. I stood. "Are we done, Captain?"
He looked at me for a long moment. Tired. Patient. The way a father looks at a son who keeps touching a hot stove.
"Get over it, Rawlings. That's an order."
I left his office and walked through the common room, where Lila was sitting on the couch with Ty and Sadie, her boots kicked off, her feet tucked under her, laughing at something on Ty's phone.
She looked up as I passed. Our eyes met.
Hers were hazel. I hadn't noticed that before, or maybe I had and refused to file it away.
There was something in them that wasn't the performance of warmth she'd given me yesterday. Something more careful. Assessing.
I looked away first.
In the bay, I stood in front of Jake's locker. The empty nameplate space stared back. I pressed my thumb against the tape residue, felt the tacky pull against my skin.
She was competent. She was capable. She was here, and she was going to stay, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it.
And somewhere under the resentment, under the grief that sat on my chest like a second ribcage, something worse. The smallest, most traitorous flicker of relief that the rig wouldn't feel so empty anymore.
I shut it down. I was good at that.
I went to the kitchen, poured coffee that had gone bitter hours ago, and drank it black.
The burnt taste was a kind of penance. Through the pass-through window, I could hear Lila laughing again, a real laugh, unguarded, the sound of someone who hadn't learned yet that some doors were better left closed.
She'd learn.
Or I would. That was the thing I kept turning away from, the possibility that Lila Webber, with her humming, her freckles, and her ruthless competence, wasn't the one who needed to learn something.
That the lesson was mine. That the wall I'd built wasn't protecting me from loss but keeping me from life, and that the woman on the other side of it, laughing in a room full of people who already liked her, was not the enemy.
She was the evidence that the world kept turning, kept producing people worth caring about, kept insisting that closed doors were an invitation to knock.
Or she wouldn't, and that would be worse.