10. Elias
ELIAS
Three days.
Three days of Morgan in my life, and I barely recognize it.
She comes to the cabin after her shifts and makes things in my kitchen with ingredients she brings in a paper bag from the market.
Cookies one night. Soup the next. Last night she made banana bread from a recipe she knew by heart, and the cabin smelled like sugar and warmth for hours after she left.
She doesn’t leave until late. Sometimes she doesn’t leave at all.
When she stays over, I drive her to work.
She sits in the passenger seat with her hiking boots on the dash and my thermal pulled over her T-shirt because the mornings are cold and she refuses to bring a proper jacket.
I teased her about that once, and she laughed and said she’d rather wear mine. So I stopped mentioning it.
I still come into Sugar Moon at 6:30. I still sit at the window table.
But now when she brings my coffee, she lets her hand rest on my shoulder for a second as she sets it down, and I spend the next twenty minutes thinking about that hand and all the places it was last night.
I have to stare very hard at my mug to keep my face from giving me away.
Alicia knows. She doesn’t say anything to me, but I catch the looks she gives Morgan when she thinks I’m not watching—the grin she barely bothers to hide. I don’t mind. Let her grin. Let the whole town know. I don’t care anymore.
That should scare me. It doesn’t, and that’s what scares me instead.
The call comes in on a Thursday.
Structure fire on the east side of town—residential—reported smoke coming from a second-floor window. We roll out fast. Engine, ladder, full crew. I’m geared up and moving before the address even fully registers, because this part of me still works the way it’s supposed to.
The training doesn’t leave. The muscle memory doesn’t fade. You can spend four years running from what you did, but your body still knows how to do the job.
We arrive, and the smoke is thick and black and pouring from the upstairs window. The family is already on the lawn—mom, dad, and two kids—and the mom is screaming something about the dog.
Before anyone can react, one of the kids breaks free and runs toward the front door. He’s maybe eight years old, skinny and fast and so terrified he doesn’t hear his mother screaming his name.
He’s through the door before anyone can grab him, and the crew captain is calling assignments, but I’m already moving because the kid is inside and the smoke is getting worse, and this is the thing I’m built for. The thing that almost destroyed me once.
I go in.
The visibility is bad. Smoke down to my knees within ten seconds, and I drop low and move fast through the first floor.
I can hear the kid somewhere above me, coughing, calling for the dog.
The stairs are intact. I take them two at a time and find him in a bedroom at the end of the hall, curled around a beagle that’s shaking so hard I can feel it through my gloves.
“I’ve got you,” I say. “We’re going out.”
He won’t let go of the dog. I don’t make him. I pick up both of them—the kid and the beagle—and I carry them down the stairs and out the front door and across the lawn to the engine where the paramedics are waiting.
The mom grabs the kid. The kid grabs the dog. Everyone is okay. Everyone is breathing and crying and alive.
I walk behind the engine, pull off my mask, put my hands on my knees, and try to breathe.
The shaking starts in my hands and moves up my arms and into my chest. It’s not the fire. The fire was routine. Bad smoke, sound structure, manageable heat. I’ve been in a hundred fires worse than that one.
The shaking is because of the kid. Eight years old, running into a burning building, and I went in after him and got him out, and it worked. This time it worked.
But the only thing my body remembers is the time it didn’t.
Chaz Monroe. Forty yards from the safety zone. My call. My position. My fault.
I lean against the engine and close my eyes, and I can feel it all happening again.
The wind shifting. The radio crackling. The sound of someone screaming my name through the smoke.
I replay the whole thing, every second of it, and then I do what I always do.
I replay it again with different choices.
What if I’d read the terrain differently? What if I’d pulled the crew back ten minutes earlier? What if I’d been standing where Chaz was standing and he’d been the one who walked away clean?
The crew captain finds me behind the engine and tells me good work and claps me on the shoulder.
I nod. I say something that sounds right.
I go through the rest of the shift on autopilot, packing up, checking gear, filling out paperwork.
My hands are steady by the time we get back to the station, but the rest of me isn’t.
I keep thinking about Morgan.
Not the way I’ve been thinking about her for three days—the warm, soft way, the way that makes the cabin feel like a place someone actually lives.
I’m thinking about her the other way. The way that asks what happens when she’s counting on me and I make the wrong call.
The way that asks what happens when she’s forty yards from safety and I’m the one who put her there.
She gives everything. That’s who she is.
She gave her childhood to her mother, she gives her days to the bakery and her evenings to anyone who asks and her nights to me now.
And she does it without keeping anything back because that’s the only way Morgan knows how to love.
All in. Everything she has. No reserves.
If I fail her, there’s no safety net. She doesn’t keep one. She’ll fall all the way, and it’ll be because she trusted me enough to let go of everything else.
I can’t be that person. I wasn’t built for it. I was built for reading terrain and making calls and being steady under pressure, and the one time it actually mattered, I got it wrong and a twenty-two-year-old kid spent six months in a burn unit.
I don’t go to the cabin after my shift. I go to the cabin and I don’t text Morgan and I don’t drive to Sugar Moon the next morning.
I sit on the couch where she sat wrapped in my flannel that first night and stare at the kitchen counter where I held her three nights ago, and I can still smell the banana bread and the cocoa powder, and I tell myself that this is the right thing to do.
Letting her in was the mistake. Not because she’s wrong or I’m wrong or any of the easy reasons people use when they want to walk away from something that matters.
Because I know how this ends. It ends with her depending on me the way Chaz depended on me, the way my crew depended on me—and me standing in the wreckage, wondering how I got it wrong again.
She’s better off without someone whose judgment burns people.
My phone buzzes.
Morgan: Missed you this morning. Everything okay?
I stare at it. My thumb hovers over the screen.
I could type something. Anything. I could tell her about the fire and the kid and the way I shook behind the engine.
I could drive to her apartment and stand in her doorway and let her look at me with those brown eyes and tell me I’m fine the way I always tell her she’s fine, and maybe I’d believe it the way she never believes it.
I set the phone facedown on the couch.
The cabin is quiet. The kind of quiet I used to need. The kind that used to feel like safety and now just feels like the sound of a man who is very good at being alone and very tired of it.
I don’t answer her text.