Chapter 13
Lucy
Three weeks with Gabrielle, and I'd forgotten what silence felt like.
My life had structure and routine then. Feedings every three hours, like clockwork.
Cal's coffee appearing on my counter before his shifts, still hot, fixed the way I liked it without me ever having to ask.
The weight of Gabrielle in my arms as I brought her to the station, the crew gathering around like she was the most fascinating thing they'd ever seen.
Joanna had told me not to worry about shifts for now. "Maternity leave," she'd called it, waving off my protests. "Unofficial, but real. The café will survive. You focus on that baby."
I'd tried to argue—I needed the money, couldn't afford to just stop working—but she'd fixed me with that look she had. "Cal already talked to your landlord. Rent's covered for the next two months. Before you get mad at him, I told him it was a good idea. You can fight with him about it later."
I hadn't fought with him about it. I was too tired, and too grateful, and somewhere along the way I'd stopped keeping track of what I owed these people. The list had gotten too long to carry.
I was sleeping in fragments, two hours here, three hours there, catching rest whenever she did. I should have been exhausted. In truth, I was, but underneath. But underneath the tiredness was something I hadn't felt in years.
I’ve found a purpose.
Gabrielle needed me. Not in the abstract way that customers at the café needed coffee or Joanna needed help with the morning rush. She needed me, specifically, in a way that was terrifying and wonderful and exactly what my mother would have wanted me to find.
I changed her diaper at 6 AM, talking to her the way I'd started doing, narrating everything like she could understand. "Okay, little one. Clean diaper. Then breakfast for both of us. Then maybe we'll go see the guys at the station, what do you think?"
She stared up at me with those dark, unfocused eyes, her tiny fist waving in the air like she was considering the proposal.
"I'll take that as a yes."
The station had become a second home.
I hadn't planned it that way. The first time Cal suggested I bring Gabrielle by, I'd hesitated.
The firehouse felt like Mateo's space, a place full of ghosts I wasn't sure I was ready to face it.
But Cal had that look in his eyes, the one that said he knew I needed to get out of the apartment, needed to be around people, needed to remember that the world was bigger than four walls and a crying baby.
So I went. And the crew had adopted us both before I'd even made it through the door.
"There's my girl!" Liam appeared the moment we walked in, abandoning whatever he'd been doing in the kitchen to crouch in front of the carrier.
He had this thing he did with Gabrielle, this series of increasingly ridiculous faces that somehow always made her smile.
Today he crossed his eyes and puffed out his cheeks like a blowfish, and she rewarded him with a gummy grin that made his whole face light up.
"She smiled! Did you see that?" He looked up at me like he'd just witnessed a miracle. "That's three days in a row. I'm telling you, she's a genius."
"She's three weeks old," Riley said, passing by with a stack of files. "She can barely see your face."
"She can see enough to know greatness when she encounters it."
Riley rolled her eyes, but I caught the corner of her mouth twitching.
Owen appeared from somewhere, quiet as always, and lifted Gabrielle from the carrier with hands that knew exactly what they were doing. He cradled her against his chest, one broad palm supporting her head, and she settled into him like she'd known him her whole short life.
"Hey there, little one," he murmured. "You getting bigger every day, aren't you?"
Something about the way he held her made my chest ache. The gentleness in his big hands. The soft voice that didn't match his solid frame. He would have made a good father, I thought. Maybe he would, if he found the right one, someday.
Riley drifted back over, her sharp edges softening the way they always did around Gabrielle.
She'd been the one to teach me the swaddling technique that finally got the baby to sleep through more than two hours at a time.
Had shown up at my apartment three days after I'd brought Gabrielle home with a bag of supplies and a list of tips she'd learned raising her sister.
"How are you holding up?" she asked now, her voice low enough that the others couldn't hear.
"I’m actually sleeping. Cal has been helping with the night feedings, letting me drift for a while."
Riley glanced across the bay to where Cal was checking equipment. Something flickered in her expression that I couldn't quite read.
"He's good at that," she said. "The helping. Whether you ask him to or not."
I didn't know how to respond to that, so I just nodded.
"If you ever need anything," Riley continued, "you call me. I mean it. Middle of the night, doesn't matter. I know what it's like, doing this alone."
"Thank you." I meant it. Coming from Riley, who guarded her time fiercely because she had so little of it, the offer was no small thing. "Really. That means a lot."
She nodded, and something in her expression softened.
"I'm not alone, though," I added, the words coming out before I thought about them. "Not anymore."
Riley's eyebrows lifted slightly. She glanced across the bay again, her eyes lingering where Cal was still checking equipment. When she looked back at me, there was a small nod, as if she were agreeing with what I’d just said.
"No," she said, that almost-smile appearing again. "I guess you're not."
I watched them while I was still there during Cal's shift. They were my accidental family, a gift from fate. I felt so good that it made me try to remember the last time I’d felt this way.
Liam was trying to make Gabrielle laugh, this time with a new face that involved waggling his eyebrows and making ridiculous sounds.
Owen had retreated to fix something, his version of showing love, quiet and practical.
Riley was teaching me a new technique for burping, her hands sure and steady as she demonstrated.
And Cal was there. Always there, even when he was across the room. I could feel his attention like something tangible, the way he tracked my movements, and how he noticed when I needed help before I asked for it.
Doc Martinez had stopped by the last day for Gabrielle's checkup. She was healthy, growing well, and hitting all her milestones. He'd asked about the foster certification process—the home study, the interviews, all the bureaucratic steps between emergency placement and something more permanent.
"It's early," he'd said, "but if you want to keep her long-term, we should start building the file now. The court will need to see stability."
"A two-parent household isn't required," he'd said carefully, "but when the time comes for permanency hearings, it does help. Judges like stability."
I'd nodded like it didn't mean anything. Like I hadn't immediately thought of Cal standing beside me at the courthouse. Cal's name on the paperwork. Cal's hand in mine as we made Gabrielle officially ours.
Ours. Not mine. Ours.
When had I started thinking that way?
I didn't have to ponder. I already knew the answer, even if I didn't want to admit it.
I'd started thinking that way the night he brought her to me. The moment he stood behind me in the café and said, ‘She needs you.’ And every time I felt his breath against my hair and knew, with sudden, terrible clarity, that I didn’t want to do this without him.
That I didn’t want to do anything without him.
Joanna came to visit me at the station around lunchtime, arms full of takeout containers. She had always looked after me, and this was no different, even now, with the unofficial maternity leave she’d quietly carved out for me.
"Heard you were here," while she was setting the food on the kitchen table she started saying. "Figured you could use real food instead of whatever these guys were going to feed you."
"Hey," Liam protested. "My cooking is—"
"A war crime," Owen finished. "We all remember the eggs."
"That was one time!"
Joanna ignored the bickering and pulled me into a hug. "How are you, honey? Really?"
"Good." And for once, I meant it. I was being honest. "Tired, but good."
She held me at arm's length, studying my face. "You look different. Lighter."
"I have a baby. I'm definitely heavier."
"That's not what I mean." Her eyes were doing that thing they did, seeing past the surface to whatever was underneath. "You look like someone who's starting to remember how to live."
I didn't know what to say to that. But I thought about it all through lunch, watching Liam steal food from Owen's plate and Riley pretend to be annoyed and Cal sitting across from me, his eyes meeting mine every so often with something warm and unguarded in their depths.
Amidst the mess, I felt good. I found myself thinking that maybe Joanna was right. Maybe I was remembering, and finally learning how to live again.
That evening, I sat on my couch with Gabrielle in my arms, watching the sunset paint the mountains gold through the window.
The apartment felt different when she came. Fuller. The corner where the crib stood, the bottles drying on the counter, the soft blanket Cal had found somewhere that Gabrielle loved. Evidence of a life being built, piece by piece, out of nothing.
My mother would have loved this. Would have loved Gabrielle, would have held her for hours, would have sung the lullabies she used to sing to me.
I could almost see her there in the rocking chair that didn't exist yet, her face soft with joy, saying I knew you'd find your way back, mija. I always knew.
The impulse to call my mother still hit me sometimes, muscle memory from thirty years of reaching for the phone whenever something good happened. Then I was hit by the hollow reminder that she wasn't there to answer.