Chapter 3
Beck
The realtor arranged childcare---Mrs. Delgado, a neighbor who apparently runs an informal daycare and bakes too much. Her house smells like cinnamon and laundry detergent.
Ivy's already claimed a spot on the floor with two other kids and a bucket of Legos by the time I've finished signing the emergency contact form.
Mrs. Delgado pats my arm. “She'll be fine, Captain. First day jitters are normal.”
My jaw tightens. “I'm fine.”
Her smile says she doesn't believe me.
I make it halfway to the station before the reality fully hits: there's a woman living in my house.
Not a stranger I invited, or vetted, or agreed to. A stranger who paid a deposit I never authorized, moved in last night while I was staring at the ceiling on my side of the wall, and is right now either sleeping or making coffee in a kitchen I've never seen.
I park my truck, sit there for a beat longer than I need to. My hands grip the steering wheel. A woman I've never met is living in my house. Sleeping under my roof.
The tension climbs my spine. I force my fingers to release the wheel and grab my gear. A full shift of firefights doesn’t wait for a man to sort out his domestic situation.
Station 7's day room smells like drip coffee and someone's ambitious chili---the kind that's been simmering since dawn and will either be amazing or a health code violation.
The coffee pot gurgles. Morning light slants through the windows, dust motes floating.
My shoulders tense. This is the moment---new captain walks in, crew decides if he's worth following or just another badge collecting a paycheck.
The floor creaks under my boots. Every head turns. The weight of their assessment settles across my shoulders like turnout gear.
Four of my crew are already at the long table. Kowalski's positioned himself at the head. Tran's on his phone, or pretending to be, Deluca's got two coffee mugs and seems genuinely torn about which one to drink. Reyes, the youngest, watches me cross the room—not aggressive, just waiting.
They all straighten when I reach the counter.
A chorus of "Captain" comes back at me, polite and even, which tells me everything.
They've done this before. Probably stood in this same room when Hendricks walked in for his first shift and ran the same calculation.
New captain, unknown quantity, no verdict yet.
Chief Rodriguez catches me in the hallway before the morning brief. "Crew's tight," she says, watching my face. She's good at reading them. "They ran well under Hendricks. Just need to see you're not coming in to tear it down and rebuild it your way."
"I'm not," I tell her.
She holds the look a moment longer, then nods and moves on.
My chest loosens fractionally. Not approval, not yet, but not dismissal either. Progress.
The first test arrives before the coffee's done. Kowalski leans toward Tran at the far end of the table and starts in on a call from last month—some tactical decision Hendricks made. His voice carries. He wants it to. He doesn't look at me while he talks, which is its own kind of look.
I top off my mug and don't turn around. "Kowalski."
The talking stops. "Captain."
"You've got opinions about that call." I face him then, because this particular conversation requires it. "Good. Bring it to me. I actually like talking through it."
He blinks, recalibrates, and nods once — slow, like a man who wasn't expecting that answer and is deciding whether to trust it.
Equipment check. Reyes moves through his report fast enough to skip two items. I let him finish before I say anything—how you handle the correction matters as much as the correction itself.
"Run it again," I say, keeping my voice level.
Reyes's teeth grind. He runs it again, hitting every item this time, and when he's done Deluca sets down his coffee mug and gives me a look across the room—brief, assessing. Recalculating.
The knot between my shoulders eases slightly. Firm but fair. Hendricks's crew needs to see I'm not here to tear things down.
Reyes nods once. Grudging respect, maybe. Or at least recognition that I'm not an asshole.
I'll take it.
The call comes before lunch: kitchen fire on Birchwood. The address crackles through the radio. The crew moves---practiced, efficient, no wasted motion. Engine roars to life beneath me.
By the time we pull up, the fire's out. Smoke drifts from broken windows, acrid and chemicals. The homeowner stands on the lawn, arms crossed, wearing the particular expression of someone rehearsing their story for insurance.
I assess the scene in thirty seconds. Burn pattern starts at the stove, spreads to the cabinets, stops at the ceiling. Electrical or negligence. That’s for the insurance company to decide.
The air tastes like burned plastic.
We clear the structure, working through each room methodically, and I watch my crew the way I always watch a crew I'm still learning — not for what they do right, because that's expected, but for how they handle the small decisions nobody's watching.
Tran opens a cabinet beside the hood and finds a hot spot the homeowner didn't know about. He soaks it and moves on without comment, doesn't check to see if I noticed. Taking care of the job, not performing it.
On the ride back, I miscalculate.
Kowalski fills the quiet with something about the morning, and before I've thought it through I crack a joke about grease fires and homeowners already texting the local news. What follows is the silence of someone who just mispronounced a word they should've known.
Reyes finds the passing guardrail deeply absorbing. Tran develops a sudden and absorbing interest in a loose thread on his sleeve. Deluca makes a sound that might be a cough.
I turn back to the windshield and watch the road go by.
Peak Grounds sits on the corner of Main and Juniper. From half a block away it smells like roasted coffee and pine in exactly the ratio that makes a person feel briefly better about their choices.
Inside there's warm wood paneling, mismatched mugs on open shelving, and a chalkboard menu featuring a drink called The Widow-Maker and two competing seasonal specials I'm not going to say out loud in uniform.
The barista's name tag reads Micah. He's attentive in the way of someone who lets other people do the talking—still hands, patient eyes, a focused quiet that doesn't need to fill the space.
"Black coffee," I say when I reach the front. "Large."
He reaches for a cup but doesn't fill it yet. He looks at me instead, with the mild expression of someone checking a detail against an existing file. "Captain Delano."
"We've met?" I ask.
"No," Micah says, filling the cup now at a pace that suggests he's in no hurry to reach the end of this.
"But Chief Rodriguez comes in every morning, and Mrs. Delgado mentioned you to Hazel on Tuesday, and Hazel's approach to information is — " he pauses, weighing it, "— generous.
Single dad, transferred from Seattle, the in-law suite situation.
Dark coffee, no sweetener. The caramel latte you turned down at the welcome meeting closed the case. "
He sets the cup on the counter. I have my card out and I'm angling it toward the reader when he waves it off.
"First one's on the house," he says. "By the second you're just a regular, and we move fast here.
" He's already reaching for the next order when he adds, without looking up: "Your new tenant's a paramedic, by the way.
Transferred from Denver — apartment flooded, needed a place fast. Either very brave or very desperate, and either way she's going to be interesting. "
I pick up the cup and walk out while I still know more about myself than he does.
The two women at the outdoor table are deep in conversation when I pass — fleece vests, drinks the size of their heads, the easy rhythm of people who've been talking like this together for years. The wind shifts, and the words reach me before I've registered I'm hearing them.
"—seen the new fire captain yet?" the first one is saying.
I slow without stopping.
"I saw him at the gas station on Tuesday," the second one says. "He's very tall."
"Right? And that jaw." A pause that sounds like a thoughtful sip. "He's got the whole tragic handsome thing. You know the type — like something happened to him. My cousin looked like that for a solid year after his divorce."
My stride picks up.
"Somebody really ought to take him a casserole," the first voice continues, carrying clear across the gap. "He looks like he hasn't had a proper meal since — oh, at least 2012. And a hug. He definitely needs a hug. That poor man."
"Do you think he'd accept one from a stranger?"
"I think we'd have to find out."
I round the corner and press my back against the brick wall of the building and stand there for a moment with my coffee.
Tragic handsome. Documented casserole emergency. Unsolicited hug candidate. The woman said that poor man in a voice full of genuine feeling, which is somehow worse than if she'd said it to be funny.
The drive home takes me along the back edge of town, past the river trail turnoff and through streets that don't feel entirely like mine.
The house looks the same from the outside as it did this morning — porch swing, window boxes, the side yard tree dropping leaves onto the path in a way someone is eventually going to have to deal with — but there's a car in the drive that wasn't there when I left.
It's small and dark, riding noticeably low in the back under the weight of what looks like every object a person owns.
The car is pulled neatly to one side of the drive, leaving room for mine without being asked to.
The lamp in the suite window is on.
I pull in and cut the engine and sit there looking at the lit window. Last night a stranger moved her life into my house while I was on the other side of the wall. This morning I left before sunrise. Now I'm back, the lamp is on, and someone I've never met is already home.
The kitchen is clean when I walk in, exactly as I left it, but I look at it differently anyway — with the eyes of someone trying to see what a stranger already has.
The corner of the counter where I leave my keys.
The cabinet above the fridge that doesn't close all the way.
The space that was just mine this morning and isn't, quite, anymore.
I wipe the counter. It doesn't need it. I wipe it again.
Then I open the spice cabinet for no reason I'm willing to examine and stand there looking at the arrangement.
Alphabetical would be more logical than what I've got. Thyme should sit between the paprika and the turmeric. The rosemary is in the wrong spot entirely, and whoever put it there — me, unpacking in a hurry — clearly wasn't thinking.
I'm reaching for it when I catch myself.
The last time I reorganized the spices, Vanessa was standing in the kitchen doorway telling me she wanted a divorce, and I spent forty-five minutes creating perfect alphabetical order while she waited for me to say something that mattered.
She stopped waiting eventually. I remember finishing the rack and then standing in front of it for a long time, looking at something I'd made completely correct that didn't help anything at all.
I close the cabinet.
I'm still standing there, working out what a reasonable person says to a stranger who is now their tenant, when the back door to the suite opens and someone steps out onto the shared section of the porch. I’ve heard movement in there, but I’m just seeing her for the first time.
She's barefoot on the cold boards, a mug held in both hands, a jacket pulled over a uniform like she made it halfway through the decision to go somewhere and stopped.
Her hair is dark and curling at the ends the way hair does when it's dried without any help, loose around her face in a way that looks less like a choice and more like she stopped arguing with it.
She stands at the porch railing with her weight on one hip, looking out at the yard, not moving, both hands around the mug — the way people stand when they're not ready to go back inside yet and they know it.
She doesn't see me through the kitchen window.
Then she does.
It's a small recalibration, nothing dramatic — a slight shift, a blink — and then she smiles, wide and immediate and with no apparent effort at moderation, and lifts the mug in my direction in a gesture that covers the distance between us like she's been doing it her whole life.
My first instinct, landing before I've formed the thought properly: trouble.
By the time I've crossed the kitchen and opened the back door, a second instinct has arrived and it is considerably less professional.
"You must be the tenant," I say. “I see you’re all moved in.” I spy some empty boxes next to the door of the suite.
She blinks once, and the smile adjusts into something that is trying not to become a grin. "Oh — hi. I was going to knock." She lets a beat go by. "You looked busy. With the spices."
My jaw tightens. She saw that.
She shifts the mug to her left hand and offers me her right. "Gemma Lockhart."
Her grip is firm and she holds eye contact while she does it.
"Beck Delano," I say.
"Captain Delano," she says, easy, like she's just confirming something she already knew, which means Micah got there first. Or someone Micah knows, which in this town amounts to the same coverage.
The back door bangs open behind me.
"DADDY IS THAT THE NEW PERSON."
Ivy arrives at full velocity, T-Rex in hand, socks losing traction on the boards, and inserts herself directly between me and my tenant with the total certainty of a child who has never once doubted her own welcome.
She tips her head back and looks up at Gemma with the frank, unhurried appraisal of someone who has not yet learned that staring requires an apology.
Gemma looks back down at her, and it isn't the careful brightness adults perform when they're trying to seem good with kids.
It's the real thing — she's actually glad to see her, in the uncomplicated way of someone who finds a six-year-old turning up on a cold porch with a plastic dinosaur to be an entirely reasonable and welcome development.
Six weeks is the original lease term.
Standing on my own back porch in my work clothes, looking at the woman my daughter is already smiling at, I have the quiet and unwelcome sense that six weeks is going to be a very optimistic number.