2. Bryson
brYSON
She's a problem.
My ex-wife told me I was emotionally unavailable.
She said it during our last fight—the one that ended with her packing a suitcase and me watching her go without saying a single word to stop her, because I didn't have any words.
I never had the right words. Claire wanted someone who could give her poetry and I could only give her my hands, my time, the engine I rebuilt from scratch in the garage on weekends so she'd have a reliable car.
She wanted words and I gave her oil changes, and eventually she decided that wasn't enough, and I agreed with her because it was easier than admitting the truth: that she just wasn't the person I could be available for.
Then Bree Atkinson walks into my station and laughs—this full-body, room-filling, impossible-to-ignore sound that hits every corner of the bay and bounces back like a ping in sonar—and the sealed thing cracks.
I find out her name from Ty, who volunteers information like it's a public service. "Bree Atkinson. Kindergarten teacher at Ember Falls Elementary. Two blocks from the station. Brings cupcakes to every community event. Single, in case you were wondering."
"I wasn't."
"Sure." Ty grins in that way of his that makes me want to throw a wrench at him. "You just stared at her for twenty minutes because you were doing a safety assessment of her cupcake structural integrity."
I don't dignify that with a response. I go back to the hydraulic system and I absolutely do not think about the fact that Ember Falls Elementary is two blocks from the station and I drive past it every day after shift.
I think about it.
I catch myself driving past it the next afternoon.
Slowly. The parking lot is full of small cars and one yellow Volkswagen Beetle with a bumper sticker that says My other car is a magic carpet and I know—I just know, instantly and irrevocably—that it's hers.
Of course she drives a yellow Beetle. Of course she has a bumper sticker about magic carpets.
Of course everything about this woman is bright and warm and impossible to ignore, and of course I'm the idiot sitting in his truck in traffic staring at a parking lot like it contains the answers to questions I didn't know I was asking.
I pull into the station lot and sit in my truck for three minutes, hands on the steering wheel, engine off.
I'm losing my mind.
She hasn't come back. There's no reason she would—the cupcakes were delivered, the fundraiser isn't until Saturday, she has no business at Station 7.
I should be relieved. Instead I'm rechecking the supply inventory with the vague notion that maybe we're low on something that might require a community volunteer to help organize, which is the most pathetic justification for wanting to see a woman that I've ever constructed, and I've been divorced so the bar is already low.
Tanner finds me in the kitchen that night, staring at the cupcakes she left in the station fridge. There are seven left. I haven't touched them because touching them feels like something. I don't know what. Something I'm not ready for.
"Just eat the cupcake, Bryson," Tanner says from the doorway. He's using his lieutenant voice, the calm one that means he's choosing not to make fun of me, and I hate him for the restraint because mockery would be easier to handle than patience.
I eat the cupcake. It's chocolate with vanilla buttercream and it's perfect.
Not too sweet, not too dense, the frosting-to-cake ratio calibrated by someone who understands that balance matters.
She made these with her hands. The same hands that were gripping cupcake trays while her hip pressed against my palm.
I eat three more cupcakes and I go to bed and I stare at the ceiling and I think about a woman in a yellow Beetle who smiled at me like I wasn't terrifying, and I know—the way I know when an engine's about to fail, the way I know by sound alone what's broken before I open the hood—that I'm in trouble. Deep, structural, load-bearing trouble.