Chapter 12 Liam
Liam
Some calls you shake off by the next shift. Some follow you home and sit in the passenger seat while you drive, quiet and heavy, refusing to leave. This one climbed into my chest and stayed.
Something about Riley lingered. Her laugh—unexpected, unguarded. The way she’d looked at me over dinner, like she was seeing more than the joke, like she was weighing something she hadn’t decided to name yet.
But during the call, there was no room for that.
The thought burned off under the bite of diesel in the air, the familiar weight of my helmet settling into place.
Muscle memory took over. Gloves on. Straps tight.
Cal’s voice cut clean through the noise, sharp and grounding, and I moved without thinking, climbing into the engine as the world narrowed to heat and speed and orders.
For a while, that was all there was.
“MVA with entrapment. Semi versus minivan. State patrol’s on scene, requesting extrication.”
Semi versus minivan. The words landed wrong, sat heavy in my chest. I’d worked enough accidents to know what that meant. The physics of it. A forty-ton truck against three thousand pounds of steel and glass and the soft bodies inside.
Nobody spoke on the drive. The engine’s rumble filled the silence, punctuated by the occasional crackle of the radio.
I watched the mile markers flash past in the darkness and tried not to do the math.
Tried not to think about the time of night, the stretch of highway, the kind of family that would be driving a minivan at 2:47 in the morning.
Road trip, maybe. Trying to get somewhere before the kids woke up. Let them sleep through the boring part.
My hands wouldn’t stay still. I pressed them flat against my thighs, feeling the rough fabric of my turnout pants, grounding myself in something solid. Breathe in. Breathe out. Compartmentalize. That’s what they taught us. Put everything in a box, deal with it later, do the job now.
The box wasn’t holding.
We were first on scene. The reality was worse than dispatch suggested. It always was.
The semi had jackknifed across both lanes, its trailer twisted at an angle that shouldn’t have been possible.
Flares dotted the asphalt like fallen stars, their red glow casting everything in a color I’d never be able to look at the same way.
State patrol had blocked off the road, but there was nowhere for the other cars to go anyway. The wreckage filled the world.
And the minivan. God, the minivan.
Accordion-folded against the truck’s cab, the front end compressed to half its length, the back doors blown open from the impact. The smell hit me first. Gasoline and copper and something burnt—rubber maybe, or plastic, or something I didn’t want to name.
Car seats visible through shattered windows. Two of them. One pink, one blue.
For a single, terrible second, I couldn’t move. My boots were welded to the asphalt, my lungs refusing to expand, every worst-case scenario I’d ever imagined converging on this one stretch of highway. I thought about Mia. About how small she was. How breakable.
I shoved the thought away. Moved without thinking.
Extrication tools. Triage protocols. The systematic assessment of who could be saved and who was already gone.
Owen worked beside me, his face grim, his hands steady.
Cal directed traffic, coordinated with the paramedics, kept the scene from descending into chaos.
The mother had been thrown clear somehow. She was found twenty feet from the wreckage, conscious and screaming, trying to crawl back toward the minivan on hands and knees. Glass embedded in her palms, blood running down her arms, and still she crawled. Still, she screamed their names.
“My babies. Please. Please, my babies—”
I had to keep moving. Couldn’t stop. Couldn’t let her screams land anywhere they might take root.
The truck driver sat on the guardrail, uninjured, staring at nothing. His hands shook so badly he couldn’t hold the water bottle someone had given him. It kept slipping, falling, rolling away. He didn’t seem to notice. Just kept staring at the minivan like he could undo it if he looked hard enough.
Somehow, I understood the feeling.
We saved most of them. The truck driver, checked for shock, handed off to the troopers for questioning. The mother, stabilized enough to stay on scene, refused to leave until she knew her children were safe.
The boy in the blue car seat was crying when we pulled him out, this thin, reedy wail that cut through everything else.
His pajamas had trucks on them. Little cartoon semis, red and blue and yellow, printed on flannel.
I held him for thirty seconds while the paramedics prepped the stretcher, and he grabbed my turnout coat with both fists and wouldn’t let go.
I’d never heard a more beautiful sound than that crying. It meant alive. It meant saved. It meant one thing that didn’t break tonight.
The girl in the pink car seat didn’t make it.
After that, time stopped behaving the way it was supposed to.
Everything came in fragments, sharp and disconnected.
Gloved hands moving too fast. The paramedics loading the survivors, their faces already closed off.
The mother’s scream tearing straight through me—raw, animal—until it broke apart into sobs, then into a silence that felt heavier than the noise had been.
Owen’s hand found my shoulder. One squeeze. Grounding. Then it was gone.
The coroner’s van arrived without urgency. No lights. No sirens. No rush. There was nothing left to rush for.
I stood at the edge of it all while the scene slowly dismantled itself. Tow trucks. Brooms. Paperwork. The highway reopening lane by lane, cars creeping past like this was just another delay in their night. Like something irreversible hadn’t just happened here.
My hands wouldn’t stop moving. In my pockets. Out again. Arms crossed, uncrossed. Dropped uselessly at my sides. I couldn’t find a place for them. Couldn’t find a shape for myself that felt right.
Then I saw it.
A shoe in the debris. Small. Pink. Too clean for where it lay. Butterflies stitched along the side—tiny purple ones, glitter still catching the light like it hadn’t gotten the message yet. It sat there in the glass and twisted metal, waiting.
Someone should pick it up, I thought. Someone should—
The thought cut off, lodged hard in my throat.
Because there was no one left to give it back to.
“Murphy.” Cal’s voice came low and close. “Truck’s loading. Time to go.”
I nodded. Didn’t trust myself to speak. Turned my back on the shoe and climbed into the engine with the rest of the crew.
The ride back to the station stretched on forever. No one talked. The silence pressed in, thick enough to choke on. I watched the mile markers slide past in reverse—the same ones I’d counted on the way in—and I couldn’t stop replaying it.
The pink car seat. The butterflies stitched into the shoe. The way the boy had grabbed my coat and held on, like if he let go the whole world would come apart.
Hours later, back at the station—showered, changed, sitting on a bench outside because the fluorescent lights felt like too much—I still couldn’t shake it. Every time I blinked, the images were there. On a loop. The shoe. The car seat. The mother on her knees in the glass.
I pulled out my phone.
4:58 AM
Riley would be asleep. Mia too. The ranch would be quiet and dark and safe—everything where it belonged. Nothing shattered. Nothing missing.
I almost called anyway. Just to hear her voice. Just to remind myself that somewhere in the world, the people I loved were still whole.
I didn’t.
Some calls leave marks. You learn that early. You learn how to carry them, how to let them harden into something you can work around. That’s the job. That’s the deal you make when you put the gear on.
But some calls cut deeper than others.
And sitting there in the thinning dark, watching the sky start to pale toward morning, I knew this one wasn’t going to fade. I’d carry it with me for a long time—quiet, heavy, and permanent.
Back at the station, 4 AM.
The crew moved through post-call rituals in silence. Gear cleaned and stored. Equipment checked and restocked. The engine washed down, hoses re-racked, everything returned to its proper place. Order from chaos. Control where there had been none.
I showered until the water ran cold. Stood under the spray with my eyes closed, trying to wash off the smell of smoke and gasoline and copper. Trying to scrub the images from my brain the way I scrubbed the grime from my skin.
It didn’t work.
The smell always stayed. It settled into your hair, your pores, the seams of your clothes—like a reminder of the job you couldn’t wash off. And the memories of the ones you didn’t save lodged deeper still, carried not on the body, but somewhere heavier. Permanent.
Cal called a debrief. His voice stayed steady as he walked us through the call—what went right, what was out of our control.
No room for mistakes and no space for second-guessing.
We’d followed protocol, moved as fast as humanly possible, done everything by the book. We’d saved everyone who could be saved.
But sometimes, some people couldn’t be reached.
And when that happened, it never felt like enough.
The crew filtered out slowly. Owen clapped me on the shoulder, said something I didn’t quite catch. Someone mentioned breakfast at the diner. I shook my head. Couldn’t stomach the thought of food, of fluorescent lights and cheerful waitresses and the normal world going on like nothing had happened.
I should go home. The ranch needed tending. Dawn feeding was in an hour, and the horses didn’t care about multi-vehicle accidents or pink car seats or the way grief could hollow you out from the inside.
Riley and Mia needed… something. I just wasn’t sure yet what that was.