Chapter 15
CALDER
“Calder?” Elena’s voice reaches me through the haze.
I blink, and the kitchen comes back into focus. Table, chairs, fluorescent lights, alarm still sounding overhead. Elena still across from me at the table, her hands folded, and her face more alert than frightened.
I force myself to let go of the table. “Routine test.” My voice comes out flatter than I want. “They said they were doing it tonight.”
She keeps her eyes on my face, not my white-knuckled hand or my shoulders, and if she notices my shallow breathing, she ignores it. “That’s good to know,” she says.
The alarm cuts off a few seconds later, leaving a ringing echo in its wake.
I expect us to pick up our conversation about the school, but instead, Elena tilts her head and says, “T.J.’s had nightmares recently. Not every night, but more than a few times.”
She changes the subject with such a light touch, I almost don’t notice.
I sit back in my chair, relaxing a couple of clenched muscles. “About the fire?”
“Not overtly, but I think that’s the cause.
” Her eyes stay on mine, calm and curious, but not prying.
“He doesn’t usually want to talk about them in any detail.
Sometimes he wakes up upset and can’t explain why.
” She wets her lips once. “I wondered if you knew any techniques that help with … stress responses, I guess.”
Stress responses.
Not trauma, not PTSD. Not what just happened right in front of her.
“Consistency helps,” I say. “Routine at bedtime, lights the same, noise the same, if you can manage it. Something solid for him to focus on when he wakes up. Not just comfort, but specific things.”
“Like what?”
I focus on the table between us. “Counting things. Naming objects in the room. Cold water on his hands. Focused breathing, if he’ll do it.”
“Grounding,” she says. When I meet her eyes, she nods slightly. “That’s what Tyler used to need when he came home wound tight after training or deployment. He wouldn’t always say much, but there were things he did. Routines.”
There it is. The man who’s been here in the room with us, whether she mentions him or not.
“What kinds of things?” I ask.
“He liked structure.” A faint smile crosses her face, then fades. “Lists and order helped. Physical tasks. He’d reorganize the garage, clean tools that were already clean, go for runs after dark, check locks twice.” She looks down at her hands. “Sometimes three times.”
I know that life too well.
“When T.J. has a bad night, I find myself doing the same things with him, giving him concrete details, telling him what day it is, where he is, what’s going to happen in the morning.”
“That’s good.”
She looks back up at me. “It’s best when I stay calm.”
I almost say that’s true of everything, but instead, I say, “Kids probably read tone before they understand words.”
Her eyes stay on mine. “Adults do, too.”
She says it softly, and it still hits the mark.
For a second, I consider changing the subject back to the school and pretending the alarm didn’t bother me. Pretending nothing bothers me. But then I’d be lying in answer to a question this woman is too kind to ask.
“I knew the fire alarm was coming, and it still unhinged me.”
“I thought it did,” she says gently.
I trace invisible patterns on the table with my finger. “Sometimes my body reacts before my head does. It hasn’t happened much for a while, but I had a bad reaction on a house fire call a few days ago.”
Her expression doesn’t change. There’s no pity or sympathy there, only a calm understanding.
“It used to be worse … before.” I don’t know why I keep talking. Maybe because she isn’t pushing, and like Buck and Weston, she’s someone who understands, at least to some extent.
“What helps you … when you notice it happening?”
No one’s ever asked about it that way. Not are you okay or why do you think it happens. Not do you want to talk about it. What helps.
I run my thumb over an old scar on the side of my index finger. “Movement, structure, focusing on specific tasks, and knowing what comes next.”
“Similar to your advice for T.J,” she says. “I’ll give those a try for his nightmares.”
“Buck ran drills with me after that call. He used the trigger words over and over, so I could keep moving through it.”
Her brows draw together. “That sounds brutal.”
“It was useful.”
“Yeah? It helped?”
I shrug. “Enough that I kept going.”
“That’s good.” She gives me a small smile. “Tyler used to say progress doesn’t always look the way people want it to.”
I’m silent for a moment because the words hit hard in a couple of different ways. “I don’t like needing the adjustment,” I say eventually.
“No, I wouldn’t imagine you do.”
The way she seems to understand gets to me. “I’m supposed to be able to handle stress,” I tell her.
Her mouth softens in a way that makes my chest go tight. “I’m a principal. I manage hundreds of children and adults full of strong opinions. I can handle stress, too, but that doesn’t mean I handle every kind of stress the same way.”
She smiles again, with her soft, warm eyes, and I make the mistake of looking at her for too long.
The lighting in the kitchen has a yellowish cast, and it should be unflattering, but it isn’t.
Beneath her unbuttoned coat, the stretchy shirt she’s wearing follows the full shape of her breasts in a way that makes me drag my eyes back to her face a second too late.
Shorter strands of hair have escaped her braid, and I have a wild urge to brush them away from her temples.
All of this makes it hard to remember that I’m supposed to be keeping my distance.
Instead, I’m sitting across from her, telling her things I don’t tell anybody unless they already know the damage firsthand.
“I should get back,” she says, without making any move to do so. “It’s getting late. Mae would probably let T.J. stay up forever if I’m not there to supervise.”
I clear my throat and reluctantly push my chair back. “I’ll walk you out.”
Snow has begun falling while we’ve been inside, dusting the parking lot with a thin layer of white. She starts to say goodbye at the door, but I walk her to her SUV.
“Thank you,” she says after she clicks her lock open.
“For what?”
“For the suggestions about the school, and for all the rest of it.”
I don’t have a good response to that, so I just tell her to drive safely.
One corner of her mouth lifts. “It’s barely a minute down the road.”
“I know, but the roads will be slick.”
Her smile lingers for half a second longer, then she opens the door and gets in.
I stand there until her headlights sweep across the lot and turn toward town, then I get in my truck and follow her anyway.
It’s not far to Mae Whitaker’s house. Just two short turns and a short stretch of road lined with dark trees. The porch light is on, waiting for Elena, and there’s a warm glow coming from the front window.
I stay parked by the curb until Elena gives me a slight wave and disappears inside.
Back at the station, I’m still keyed up, though in a different way than before. I try to work through it, wiping surfaces, checking nozzles, recoiling lines, and restocking cabinets, but the tightness in my chest persists.
The station felt too large when I first arrived, and now the space seems too tight, so I go outside. The snow has stopped, but it left another clean layer, covering our earlier footprints and tire tracks. The temperature’s dropped enough that my breath is visible.
It’s a quiet night, and I circle the station’s perimeter slowly, hands in my coat pockets, scanning more out of habit than expectation.
On the side of the lot facing the school, I stop when I come to a disturbance in the snow. Narrow tire tracks, freshly made, though no one’s in sight.
I follow the trail to where the vehicle came in off the side access, rolled along the outside edge of the lot, and stopped just beyond the strongest wash of the security lights, where the trees thicken.
From this spot, there’s a clear line of sight to the front bays and the station’s entrance without being obvious from the road.
I crouch for a better look at the tread patterns, which are too narrow for one of the engines and wrong for a pickup. The tread is wide and clean, and the vehicle had enough weight to press through the fresh snow without slipping.
Straightening, I look out into the dark, where nothing moves. The school’s lot is empty and still.
The tracks continue a few feet, then double back the way they came in, but it’s not the trail of someone turning around in the wrong place. Someone sat here on purpose.
I take out my phone and photograph the tracks from different angles. The sheriff’s department has been on the lookout for unfamiliar cars in town. This could help.
When I text the images to Buck and Weston with a brief explanation, Buck answers first, then Weston a minute later, both of them telling me they’re on their way.
I get back in my truck and circle by Mae’s house again, where the street is clear, and the snow around the property is undisturbed.
It’s a relief, except for the part of me that wants to march up to Mae’s door, bring Elena and T.J. out, then take them to my house and lock them away until there’s no such thing as danger.
I won’t do that, but there’s also no way I’m going to make myself keep my distance.