Chapter 1
Hanna
Present Day
Copper Ridge, Montana
"Cut it out," I tell it.
My heart keeps doing the thing.
The coffee is from Peak Grounds, the little shoebox-sized shop at the corner of Pine and Third with the green awning and the owner who never speaks.
I stopped there on my drive in because I told myself I needed caffeine and I told myself I wasn't stopping there in order to delay my entrance at Station 7 by six and a half minutes, and both of those things were lies, but at least they were lies I didn't have to say out loud.
The woman behind the counter had the coffee ready before I said a word. I didn't know her. She knew me. She had sleeve tattoos and the kind of eye contact that would make a police interrogator nervous, and she said, "You're back," in a voice that was flat and true and didn't require my response.
"I'm back."
"For real this time?" she asked.
I stared at her. "I was here twice, three months ago."
"For real this time?" The patience in her voice belonged to a woman who'd asked this question of other people's sisters before.
"For real this time."
"Good." She slid the coffee across the counter. "Black."
"How did you — " I didn't finish.
"Cal told me."
"Cal knows my coffee order?"
"Cal talks. He's a talker."
This was, I'd later come to learn, the defining feature of my brother.
The talking. The endless, cheerful, oblivious, well-meaning, infuriating talking.
But in that moment, at seven forty-seven a.m., with the sun coming up yellow over the ridge, I paid with exact change, because the woman behind the counter looked like the kind of person who would respect exact change, and walked out with my cup.
Her name, the hand-lettered sign on her apron said, was Nora.
I was going to like Nora, I could already tell.
That was a problem. I hadn't come back to Copper Ridge to like anyone new.
I had come back because my mother had a scare that turned out to be nothing, which is the Larsen family phrase for a thing we don't discuss, and because I had used every excuse in my arsenal for not moving home, and I had run out.
Portland wasn't going to hold me anymore.
My mother is sixty-four and alone, my brother is thirty-three and also alone, and I was the only one left to come back, so I came back.
I didn't come back for him.
I didn't come back for Ty Brennan.
I've rehearsed this sentence in my head for four months, and I'll rehearse it for the rest of my life, if necessary, because it's the operating principle of my current existence, and it isn't optional.
I didn't come back for Ty Brennan.
The coffee is hot. The station is in front of me.
Above the roll-up bay doors, the brick facade says STATION 7 in letters old enough that two generations of Copper Ridge firefighters have retouched the paint.
The engine sits gleaming inside the open bay, chrome and red, and there's a man in turnout pants and a black t-shirt leaning into the hood of it with a rag, and my brain decides, helpfully, to inform me that the man is Ty.
It's not. It's a guy with curly hair and a Deluca name patch. Deluca sees me. Deluca waves. Deluca, I'll come to understand, waves at everything.
I wave back like a functional adult. The coffee goes in the trash on my way through the doors. I can't walk in with a coffee from a shop every firefighter in Copper Ridge already has an opinion about. I don't want to look like a woman with allegiances, yet.
The locker room smells like men who run into buildings for a living, which is to say: soap, coffee, old turnout gear, and a specific mid-shift sweat that's actually not unpleasant if you grew up in this kind of house.
My dad smelled like this. I can identify rubber boots and Speed Stick from three rooms away.
"Larsen!"
Cal materializes in the doorway, broader in the shoulders than he needed to be this year, which is the only way Cal has ever grown into anything, and he crosses the room in three long strides and lifts me off the ground in a hug that rattles my teeth.
"Put me down, you ape." The words go into his collarbone.
He sets me down. He keeps his arm around my shoulder like I'm a lottery ticket he's afraid to lose. "Welcome to Station 7."
"I said put me down."
"She's here, everybody!" He keeps his arm exactly where it is.
"This is my little sister. This is Hanna.
She's a paramedic. She was Portland FD's best, and she's ours now, and if any of you clowns give her a hard time I'll make your lives hell, and before you make any jokes about it being hell already, I want you to know that my baseline for cruelty is actually very high. "
"Cal, I love you — "
"She speaks for herself just fine, by the way, so you don't have to be gentle — "
"Cal."
" — just don't be a bunch of idiots — "
"Calvin. Larsen. Stop talking."
He stops. His face breaks into the grin he had when he was eight years old and won the church raffle for a stuffed bear that was bigger than he was. My brother, ladies and gentlemen. Thirty-three years old and emotionally right now: eight.
"Sorry." His grin says otherwise. "I'm excited."
"I'm aware."
"Okay. Okay." He turns me by the shoulder, like a tour guide, and starts pointing. "That's Derek Kowalski, Big Jim’s kid — "
"Hi, Derek."
"Hi!" Derek has a mustache that's a year older than it should be. "Welcome. I run the gossip network. You can bring your concerns to me. Also, I have opinions about your love life, unsolicited, of course."
"Thanks, Derek."
" — that's Jose Rivera, he's our engineer, don't touch the pump panel, don't touch the rig, don't touch Rivera — "
Rivera doesn't look up from whatever he's writing on a clipboard. "Good morning, Larsen. Welcome."
" — that's Harrison, he's the lieutenant, he's a deeply unimpressed man, don't take it personally — "
Harrison raises one eyebrow at me. It's a whole sentence. The sentence is I'm unimpressed, but respectfully so, welcome aboard.
" — that's Mason Deluca, he's our probie, he waves at everything — "
"Hi again!"
" — and that over there — " Cal pivots. His arm comes off my shoulder.
His whole body turns the direction of the man at the lockers on the far wall, and my heart does the thing again, harder this time, because I know what's coming.
I've known since Cal told me in February that Ty had made senior firefighter and was still at Station 7.
I've had four months to prepare for this. None of it helps.
" — that's Ty Brennan. Ty, come over and say hi to Hanna. You haven't seen her since forever."
I keep my face still.
Ty turns around.
I've spent ten years in the business of not thinking about Ty Brennan, and I thought I had made a lot of progress.
In the academy, Ty was twenty-three and had skinny shoulders and a crooked nose from some fight he refused to talk about.
That Ty, I could handle in memory. I had packaged him neatly.
I had filed him under Foolish Things Hanna Did at Nineteen.
This Ty isn't him.
This Ty is thirty-three years old, and broader through the chest, and the nose is still crooked, but now it suits him, his eyes are the same eyes, and the eyes are the problem, because the eyes see me seeing him, and that half second when our eyes meet across the locker room — in front of my brother and Derek and Rivera and Harrison and Deluca and a dying fluorescent bulb — is a small private detonation that nobody else in the room catches.
I keep my face still.
"Hanna." He crosses the room the way he does everything — slow and deliberate — and sticks out his hand.
"Hi."
"Welcome." His hand is a firefighter's hand. I saw it do any number of things, none of which I can think about right now, at nine in the morning, in front of my brother, who's still grinning like a pleased idiot.
"Thanks."
I shake his hand. It's a handshake. A professional handshake between two professionals who haven't previously met, but we have met, and this is fine.
"Ty and I roomed together at the academy," Cal announces, to me, in case I needed a refresher on the single worst piece of information about my life. "He's basically my brother. He's family."
"Right."
He grins. "You'll love him and you know it."
"Sure." My heart stops for a full beat as I stare at Cal, trying to read his face — to see if he knows about Ty and me, or if it's just a common thing to say about your best friend.
Ty drops my hand. I drop my hand. We both pretend our hands were doing nothing just now.
He lifts the coffee pot off the shared counter and tips it toward the room. "Coffee?"
"Sure," Derek says.
"Thanks," Harrison says.
Cal holds up his cup. "Yeah, top me off."
"Hanna?"
"I'm good."
"You sure?"
"Had some already."
"You take it black, right?" Cal keeps going, because my brother, my lovely oblivious gremlin of a brother, can't leave a silence alone to save his life. "She takes it black. Always has. Mom says she's a savage."
"Mmhmm."
Ty doesn't look at me. Ty pours a mug. Ty holds the mug out toward me. It's black. It's filled exactly to the three-quarter mark, which is how I like it. I haven't told anyone at this station how I like my coffee. I haven't drunk coffee in front of Ty Brennan in ten years.
I take the mug.
"Thanks."
"Yep."
Cal beams. Cal doesn't notice anything. Cal has never noticed anything, in the history of Cal, and this is going to be the thing that wrecks me.
Over Cal's shoulder, I catch Rivera watching.
Rivera looks down at his clipboard and writes something on it.
It's nothing.
The tones hit before I can put my coffee down. Medical call, possible cardiac, six blocks over at the assisted-living place on Juniper. I grab my kit. Cal grabs turnout gear and hands it to me — gear I don't technically need for a medical call.
We're on the road in under ninety seconds. Gemma meets me at the ambulance and we ride together. She's got strawberry-blonde hair coming loose from a bun and the kind of smile that would make a stone trust her.
"Larsen! Nice to see you again."
"Gemma. Cal's told me all about you."
She climbs in after me. "He's told me about you too. Half of it's wrong. You don't actually have a black heart, do you?"
"I've never claimed to have a black heart."
"He's writing you a lot of checks, is what I'm saying."
"He loves me."
She glances at me sidelong. "He's very proud."
"Yeah, that, too."
Gemma tips her chin at me, the look of a woman reading the room and not needing anyone to confirm it. "First day is the hardest day."
"It is."
"Mm."
"I'm steady."
"Okay."
The call goes fine. An elderly woman at the assisted-living place with chest pain that turns out to be acid reflux. Gemma and I work it clean. The shorthand between us is natural, the way it is with any competent paramedic, and we're back in the rig inside thirty-five minutes.
When we roll back into the bay, Ty is standing at the open doors of the engine, talking to Rivera. He stops talking. His eyes cut to the ambulance, then away, then back to Rivera. Rivera keeps talking like nothing happened. Rivera is rapidly becoming my favorite.
I get out of the rig. My knees are weirdly unsteady — first-day jitters, adrenaline shakes, nothing more.
The mug is still where I left it in the kitchen. Half full. Still a little warm. I take a sip. He made it exactly the way I take it.
"Larsen!" Cal calls from down the hall. He's my brother — why can't he call me by my name? "Come meet Beck before he loses patience. He's got paperwork for you."
"On my way."
I set the mug down on the counter. I look at it. It's a white ceramic mug with a small chip in the lip. It's a mug, just a mug, and this is totally fine.
"Just coffee." Out loud, to nobody — or maybe to myself.
Behind me: "Yeah."
I don't turn around. Ty is in the doorway. I know because I can see his reflection in the window in front of me.
"Is that all it is?"
His reflection tips toward me. "Is what all?"
"Is it just coffee."
A smirk crosses his face in the glass. "It's just coffee, Hanna."
"Okay."
"It is what it is."
"Okay."
He's quiet for a second. Then: "Welcome to Station 7."
"Thanks."
"I'll see you on shift."
"Yeah."
I hear him walk away. I don't turn around. I finish the coffee before I go find Beck, because I'm a woman who finishes what she starts.
It's a lie, but I'm committed to it.