Chapter 6
Cal
One week. Seven days of Lucy in my apartment, and my entire life had rearranged itself around her presence without my permission.
I started making breakfast before my shifts during her stay.
Nothing fancy, just eggs and toast, and of course, a coffee in the way she liked it.
I'd be at the stove by six, cracking eggs into the pan I'd bought years ago and barely used, listening for the sound of movement down the hall.
The guest room—the one that had been empty for years until she came.
She'd appear in the kitchen doorway while I was cooking, still half-asleep, hair mussed from the pillow. The sun was barely up, but she didn't have to leave for another hour. One of the small changes since she'd moved in—later shifts, no more walking to work in the dark.
She watched me flip eggs and didn't say anything, and somehow that silence felt more comfortable than any conversation I'd had in years.
No need to fill it with small talk just to perform. Just two people existing in the same space, sharing the same air, letting the morning come in slow.
I'd slide a plate across the counter to her. She'd say thank you in that quiet way she had, like she still wasn't used to someone making her breakfast. We'd eat standing up, leaning against opposite counters, and sometimes our eyes could meet.
When I came home from shift, she'd have dinner ready.
I wasn’t sure when it started. Maybe the second night.
I'd walked through the door expecting the apartment to be empty, expecting to microwave something frozen and eat it standing over the sink the way I'd done for three years.
Instead, I'd found her at the stove, stirring something that smelled like garlic and tomatoes.
The house was warm and alive in a way it had never been when it was just me.
"You didn't have to do this," I'd said.
She'd shrugged without turning around. "I was hungry. Figured you might be too."
We ate pasta that night. Stir-fry the next. A surprisingly good chili on Wednesday that she said was her mother's recipe, passed down through three generations of women who believed that food was love and love showed up even when you didn't feel like it.
We'd eat at my small kitchen table, the one I'd bought three years ago when I moved in, telling myself I'd have people over for dinner, host the crew for poker nights, build some kind of life outside the station.
I'd never used it for anything but stacking mail.
Now there were placemats. Napkins. Two chairs pulled up close enough that our knees almost touched underneath.
We talked about everything except Mateo.
But when the conversation drifted to the things she loved, something in her shifted.
She’d come alive. Like, for example, she told me about the books she’d read.
Mysteries, mostly. She said her favorite kind was the kind where you could figure out the ending if you paid real attention.
She’d tell me about plot twists she’d seen coming and others that had genuinely surprised her, her hands moving as she talked, her face animated in a way I hadn’t seen before.
And as for the movies she loved, they were old ones, mostly—black-and-white classics her mother had introduced her to, watched on Sunday afternoons with popcorn, blankets, and nowhere else to be.
She could quote whole scenes from Casablanca.
She could do a passable impression of Katharine Hepburn that made me laugh every time.
Also, she shared a secret with me: she used to watch terrible reality TV when she couldn’t sleep.
Dating shows and cooking competitions and people buying houses in places they’d never been.
She’d describe episodes to me in elaborate detail, complete with commentary on the contestants’ poor choices, and I’d pretend to be horrified—secretly adding the shows to my own watch list so I could follow along.
She’d tell me about her favorite students from when she taught second grade.
She’d light up as she talked about them, a different kind of brightness than I’d seen anywhere else.
Marcus, who couldn’t sit still but drew the most beautiful pictures—elaborate landscapes with dragons and castles and a little stick figure she eventually realized was supposed to be her.
Sofia, who cried every day the first week and then became the class leader, organizing the other kids like a tiny general. Jayden, who struggled with reading until something clicked in February and suddenly couldn’t stop, who’d stay inside during recess just to finish one more chapter.
She talked about them like they were her own kids.
Like she still knew what they were doing, how they were growing, whether Jayden had kept reading and Sofia had stayed bossy and Marcus had kept drawing his dragons.
Her face went soft with the memory, soft and sad at the same time, and I understood why she'd quit.
Not because she didn't love it. Because she loved it too much to do it while she was broken inside.
Because standing in front of a classroom full of seven-year-olds, all that hope and possibility, would have reminded her every single day of the future she'd lost. The kids she and Mateo were supposed to have. The life that had been taken from her.
I didn't say any of that. Just listened. Just let her talk until she was done, and then asked another question, because I'd learned that sometimes the best thing you can do for someone is give them permission to open up.
When I could finally speak, I told her about my worst calls. The funny ones, not the hard ones.
Like the story of the guy who got his head stuck in a wrought-iron fence trying to retrieve a frisbee.
We'd had to cut him out with the jaws of life while he apologized over and over, insisting he'd done it before with no problems, that the fence must have shrunk somehow.
His wife had stood on the sidewalk filming the whole thing, already planning to post it online.
Or one of the women who called 911 because her cat was stuck on the roof.
We'd rolled out, set up the ladder, started climbing, and the cat had looked directly at us, yawned, jumped down to the porch railing, and strolled inside through the open window like nothing had happened.
The woman had offered us cookies. We'd accepted.
Also, about the time that Liam accidentally sprayed Owen with the hose during a training drill.
Full blast, point-blank range. Owen had stood there for a solid three seconds, water streaming down his face, too shocked to react.
Then he'd taken off after Liam, and Liam had run, and the two of them had chased each other around the station for twenty minutes while the rest of us placed bets on who would catch who first.
She laughed at my stories. Really did it, the kind that made her whole body shake and her eyes squeeze shut, and her hand come up to cover her mouth like she was trying to hold in.
The kind of laugh that transformed her face, chased away the shadows, made her look like someone who had never learned what it meant to lose people you really love.
I found myself saving up moments from my shifts. The weird calls, the almost absurd ones that made even the veterans shake their heads and say Well, that's a new one. I'd file them away in my mind, rehearse how I'd tell them, imagine the way her face would change when she heard them.
I was always thinking about jokes to make her laugh, or what I could offer in exchange for that sound.
My apartment had never felt so alive.
I lived there for six months. Six months of silence and routine and the particular emptiness of a space occupied by someone who was just passing through, who'd never bothered to make it a home.
I had furniture but no photographs. Dishes but nothing on the walls.
Everything functional, nothing personal.
Now there were her books stacked on the coffee table. Her jacket draped over the back of a chair. Her shampoo in my shower, something that smelled like vanilla and honey, and every morning I breathed it in and pretended I didn't notice.
Then there was laughter within these walls, constant conversation, the delicious smell of cooking, the sound of someone else’s footsteps, and the strange, terrifying comfort of not being alone.
I'd forgotten what that felt like. Or maybe I'd never really known.
"You look different."
Liam’s voice cut through my thoughts. I looked up from the equipment I’d been checking, the same gear I’d been hovering over for ten minutes without really seeing it. The apparatus bay was quiet, late-afternoon light slanting through the open doors, dust motes suspended in the air.
"What?"
"Different." He leaned against the engine, arms crossed, that sharp gaze fixed on my face.
Liam had this way he stared at you like he could see straight through whatever story you were telling yourself.
It made him a good firefighter but an exhausting friend.
“Lighter, maybe. More distracted, definitely. Sleeping better, Cap? Or is someone keeping you up?”
"I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I kept my tone even, eyes back on the equipment.
"Sure you don't." He didn't smile, but I could hear it in his voice. That knowing tone he got when he'd figured something out and was just waiting for you to catch up. "That’s why you’ve checked that regulator three times and didn’t notice the strap was twisted."
I looked down. He was right. The strap was looped wrong, tangled in a way that would have cost precious seconds on a call. A rookie mistake—the kind I hadn’t made in fifteen years. One that could cost a life.
While I untangled it, I kept avoiding his eyes.
"I'm fine."
"You keep saying that." He pushed off from the engine, took a step closer. "You know what I've noticed about people who keep saying they're fine? They're usually the opposite of fine."