3. Lila
THREE
LILA
Two weeks into my new life, and Ember Falls was doing its best to adopt me whether I was ready or not.
"Egg white omelet with spinach and tomato, side of whole wheat toast, coffee black," she said, sliding the plate across the counter before I'd even sat down. "And don't make that face. I'm memorizing, not surveilling."
"That's exactly what a surveiller would say."
She laughed and topped off my coffee. "How's the station treating you?"
"The station's great. The crew is great." I wrapped both hands around the mug. "My partner thinks I'm a plague sent to punish him for sins in a past life."
Rosie's expression shifted into the knowing look of someone who'd lived in a small town long enough to have context for everything. "Beck Rawlings."
"You know him?"
"Honey, I know everyone. Beck's been coming in here since he was a probie, that's what, eight years now? Used to come in with Jake. They'd take that corner booth and argue about football for an hour." She paused, wiping the counter with a cloth. "He hasn't sat in that booth since."
The omelet suddenly needed a lot of attention from my fork. I'd heard pieces of the Jake story from Ty and Cole, enough to know there'd been a fire, a collapse, and that Beck had walked out alone. Nobody gave me details. The subject had a fence around it.
"He'll come around," Rosie said, with the confidence of a woman who'd watched this town go through a few things. "Just give him time."
Everyone kept saying that. Give him time.
As if I had an infinite supply of patience and a total absence of pride.
As if being treated like an inconvenience didn't poke at wounds I'd brought with me from Charlotte, the feeling of being not quite wanted enough, of being the person who could be replaced, left behind, overlooked.
But Rosie's smile was kind, and the omelet was good, and the morning light through the diner window turned everything the color of honey. So I ate, and I smiled back, and I shoved the rest of it down where it couldn't bother me.
This was my specialty, the shoving. I'd developed it into an art form over twenty-eight years.
Pack the hurt into something small and dense, shove it below the waterline, and keep the surface bright and buoyant.
Garrett used to say I was "relentlessly positive," which I'd taken as a compliment until I realized he meant it as a diagnosis.
As in, you're so busy being sunny that you never deal with anything real.
As in, I've been sleeping with your friend for three months and you didn't notice because you were too busy being fine.
But fine was functional. Fine got you through shifts and morning routines and the process of rebuilding a life from the floorboards up. Fine was the raft, and I wasn't ready to look at what was underneath the water.
Station days had a rhythm I was learning to love.
Morning drills, equipment checks, lunch that Cole somehow made gourmet despite a firehouse kitchen.
Afternoon training or maintenance. In between, the calls, and they were different here than Charlotte.
Fewer of them, but more varied. A diabetic emergency at the elementary school.
A hiker with a broken ankle on the Blue Ridge trail.
A grease fire at the Tap Room that Ty put out with the extinguisher while the bar owner, a burly man named Hank, looked like he might cry over his ruined fryer.
I liked the work. I liked the crew. I liked the way the mountains changed color every afternoon, the light doing something new each time, and how the air tasted different here. Cleaner, thinner, with an edge of wood smoke now that September was leaning into October.
What I didn't like was the wall.
Beck and I worked together the way two people work together when one of them has decided the other doesn't exist. He was professional on calls.
I'd give him that. He never undermined me, never questioned my clinical decisions, never did anything I could point to and say, "That.
That's the problem." He was just absent.
Physically present and emotionally on another planet.
He spoke to me in monosyllables. He didn't look at me when he didn't have to.
In the common room, he sat as far from me as geometry allowed.
It was Thursday, and we were running training drills in the yard behind the station. Ty had set up a scenario, a simulated car accident, Sadie playing the patient with theatrical commitment and a truly impressive fake head wound courtesy of some moulage kit she'd gotten off the internet.
"Sadie, you're supposed to be semiconscious, not giving a monologue," Cole said.
"I'm a method actor. My character has things to say before she loses consciousness."
I was working the med side of the drill, running through the steps with the efficiency that came from three years of doing this for real in a city where car accidents were a daily event. Beck was overseeing from the side, clipboard in hand, stopwatch running.
"Airway's clear, C-spine stabilized, initiating IV access," I narrated my steps for the training record.
"You skipped the secondary survey," Beck said.
I stopped. Looked up at him. "I did a rapid trauma assessment. The secondary survey comes after initial stabilization and transport, per protocol."
"In Charlotte, maybe."
"Per NREMT protocol. Per state protocol. Per every protocol."
He held my gaze. His jaw was doing that thing, the tightening, the micro-clench that was his version of expressing emotion. "Just run it again."
Something snapped. Not loudly. More like a rubber band that had been stretched for fourteen days finally reaching its limit.
I stood up. Stripped off my gloves. The yard went quiet. Sadie, still in her fake blood, propped herself up on her elbows to watch.
"You know what? No." My voice was steady, which surprised me because my hands wanted to shake.
"I ran the protocol correctly. You know I ran it correctly.
If you have a legitimate training note, I'll take it.
I'll take it all day. But if this is just you finding reasons to make me feel like I don't belong here, then at least have the honesty to say so. "
Beck's expression didn't change. That maddening blankness.
"I'm not going anywhere," I said. "So you might as well talk to me like a human being."
The silence stretched. Ty had frozen mid-bite of an apple. Cole had his arms crossed, watching Beck with an expression I couldn't read.
Beck looked at me for three full seconds. Then he clicked the stopwatch, made a note on his clipboard, and walked away. Through the bay door. Gone.
I stood there in the September sun with fake blood on my knees and a lump in my throat that I refused, absolutely refused, to let anyone see.
I'd been dismissed before. By Garrett, who'd explained his affair with the calm rationality of someone returning a defective product.
By Mackenzie, who'd texted sorry, it just happened as if months of deception were a weather event.
I wouldn't let Beckett Rawlings and his silence be the thing that finally broke me open in a parking lot in front of people I was trying to impress.
"Well," Sadie said from the ground, "that was more dramatic than my head wound."
Ty let out a low whistle. "Webber, you've got guts. I've worked with the man for four years and I've never told him off."
"That wasn't telling him off," I said, pulling on fresh gloves. "That was setting a boundary. Now, are we finishing this drill or what?"
We finished the drill. I scored perfectly. Beck didn't come back.
Ty found me afterward, sitting on the back bumper of the engine, peeling off the moulage from my knees with more force than strictly necessary. He sat beside me, close but not too close, and offered me half a granola bar with the wordless generosity of someone who'd learned to read rooms.
"He's not a bad guy," Ty said. "For the record."
"I didn't say he was."
"He's a wrecked guy. There's a difference. Bad guys don't care. Wrecked guys care too much and don't know what to do with it, so they turn it into concrete and build walls." He paused. "That was surprisingly insightful. I'm going to write it down."
I laughed despite myself. The granola bar was stale and the afternoon sun was warm on my back and Ty Brennan, for all his chaos, had a kind of accidental wisdom that landed when you needed it to.
That night, I couldn't sleep. My apartment was quiet in a way Charlotte never had been.
No sirens, no traffic, just the occasional creak of old wood and the distant sound of wind in the trees.
I lay on my secondhand mattress and stared at the ceiling and tried not to replay the look on Beck's face when I'd confronted him.
Nothing. That was what I'd seen. Nothing at all.
No, that wasn't true. For half a second, before the wall came down, there'd been something else. Surprise, maybe. Or the edge of something sharper. As if nobody had called him on his behavior in a long time and he'd forgotten that people could.
At 11:40, I gave up on sleep and went to the station.
I had a key now. All crew did, for the nights they slept over between shifts.
The building was dim, the bay lights off, the engine and medic unit hulking shadows.
I went to the kitchen for water and was halfway through the common room when I heard it.
Footsteps above me. The roof.
I stood at the bottom of the stairwell that led to the rooftop deck. The door at the top was cracked open, and through it came the smell of night air and the faintest sound of... was that music? No. Just the wind and the creak of an old metal chair.
He was up there. I knew it the way I knew my own heartbeat, some instinct that recognized the shape of someone else's insomnia.
I put my hand on the railing. Considered.
Then I took it off, filled my water glass, and went home.
Some doors you don't open until you're invited. Even the ones, especially the ones, you can hear someone sitting behind, alone in the dark, not wanting to be found and maybe not wanting to be lost, either.
I walked home under a sky swollen with stars. In Charlotte, you couldn't see them. Too much light, too much noise, too much of everything. Here, the Milky Way stretched overhead like a river of chalk dust, and the air smelled like fallen leaves and the coming cold.
My apartment was dark and drafty and mine.
I crawled into bed and pulled the quilt up, a quilt I'd bought at the thrift shop on Maple Street, hand-stitched in a pattern of interlocking circles that the shop owner said was called "double wedding ring," which was such a spectacular irony that I'd bought it on the spot.
Tomorrow I'd go back to the station and face Beck Rawlings and his wall and his silence and his two-word sentences. I'd do my job. I'd be good at it. I'd smile at Rosie and trade banter with Ty and learn Cole's white chicken chili recipe and wait for Sadie to decide I was worth her time.
I wouldn't chase a man who didn't want me. Not again.
But I wouldn't run from one either.