34. Brooks
Brooks
“Once pride stops being useful, all that’s left is honesty.”
— Brooks
The drive back from the church basement is immensely quiet.
Sophie is asleep before we even start moving, her head tilted at an impossible angle against her car seat, the green glitter bows in her hair catching the weak, rhythmic pulse of the dashboard lights.
In the passenger seat, Ember is staring out the side window. She isn’t rigid anymore—the sharp, defensive posture she held all week at the bakery has softened into something resembling a truce—but she isn’t leaning across the console either.
I tap the steering wheel, the leather cold under my grip.
“Sophie’s going to be impossible to wake up for school tomorrow,” I say, trying to break the heavy silence. “She’s got this thing about not wanting to put her socks on.”
Ember glances over, then back to the window. “She just needs a deal. Tell her if she wears the socks, she gets to pick the song in the truck.”
“I tried that. She picked the same song for three days straight. My brain is turning into bubblegum.”
Ember lets out a short, airy laugh. “At least it’s not the one about the singing squirrels.”
For a second, things feel almost normal. Not fixed. Definitely not fixed. But familiar enough that my chest loosens a little.
I glance over at her at the next stop sign. “You know she’s doing it on purpose now, right?”
Ember finally looks at me. “Doing what?”
“Torturing me.”
A tiny smile pulls at her mouth. “With squirrels?”
“With that one specific squirrel song, yes.”
“She’s five.”
“She’s strategic.”
That gets another quiet laugh out of her, softer this time, and I swear the sound hits me harder than it should. I didn’t realize how quiet my life had become until right now.
“I just… I keep looking at her, and then at everything else, and I realize how much I was holding my breath.”
“Holding your breath for what?”
“For you to leave,” I admit, the words feeling clumsy. “I spent months, honestly, thinking it was just a seasonal thing. Like you’d pack up the second the first frost hit and head back to wherever you came from.”
Ember turns her head toward me. “We’ve had this conversation, Brooks. You made your assumptions about me pretty clear.”
“I know,” I say. “But the absurdity of it is finally sinking in. I look at you now—I see you in the bakery, I see you with the neighbors, I see you in the line at the post office—and it’s like… the town feels different. It’s like the place wouldn’t even recognize itself without you here.”
She goes quiet.
“I feel like such an idiot. I spent so much energy bracing for you to leave that I forgot to actually ask you to stay. I was so busy protecting myself from an exit that hadn’t even happened yet that I missed the fact that you were already building a life here. My life.”
She doesn’t answer right away. I keep talking because if I stop now, I probably won’t say any of this.
“You come in here with your little glitter boxes and your plants and your music playing at seven in the morning, and Sophie gets attached to you in like… two seconds.” I shake my head once. “Then I get attached to you, which is somehow worse.”
Her eyes flick toward me.
“I kept thinking eventually you’d wake up and realize this town’s too small. Or too boring. Or I’m too much work.”
“Brooks—”
“No, seriously.” I let out a short laugh that doesn’t sound amused at all. “You know what my plan was? Keep everything casual enough that it wouldn’t destroy me if you left.”
“And how’d that work out for you?”
I huff out a breath. “Terrible. Obviously.”
The truck goes quiet again. I can feel her thinking beside me.
Part of me wants to take it all back because I sound insane. Too intense. Too late. But another part of me is just… tired.
Tired of pretending I don’t love her. Tired of acting like losing her didn’t crack something open in me this week.
“I look back, and I can’t even believe I convinced myself that was the right thing to do. It’s insane. You belong here. I can’t even picture this house, or this town, or my own damn life, without you in it.”
I pull into my driveway. I kill the engine, but I don’t turn off the headlights. I just grip the wheel, staring at the front of her porch.
“I’m not going to ask you to forgive me for that stupidity tonight,” I say, turning to look at her. “I know I have to earn that. But I’m ready to be whatever you need me to be, as long as you’re the one telling me what that is.”
I get out, my boots hitting the wet driveway, and carefully lift Sophie out of her seat.
When I turn back around, Ember is already stepping out of the passenger side, her shoulders hunched slightly against the drizzle.
“Ember,” I say, my voice rougher than I mean it to be.
She stops by the front fender of the truck, her yellow sweater dampening under the mist. “Yeah, Brooks?”
“Please,” I say. “Don’t go to sleep yet. Just… wait up for me. Please. Give me twenty minutes to put her down and change out of the blues. Just wait.”
Pride is a funny thing.
Feels enormous right until the moment you realize you’d trade every ounce of it just to keep someone from walking away.
“I know I don’t really have leverage here.” That earns me a tired little exhale through her nose. “But I’m asking anyway.”
Ember looks at me for a long second. “You always get like this when you’re scared?”
“Apparently.”
“You get bossy first.”
“Yeah.” I nod once. “Trying not to do that anymore.”
She looks at the way I’m holding Sophie, then up at my face. Her lips press into that straight line—the one that tells me she’s calculating the risk—but then her eyes soften just a fraction at the corners.
“Twenty minutes,” she says quietly. “Then I’m locking the door.”
She turns and walks across the grass toward her dark house, her sneakers squelching in the mud, her silhouette disappearing under the yellow porch light before she slips inside.
I don’t take twenty minutes; I take twelve.
I lay Sophie down on her mattress and pull the quilt up to her chin. I strip off the uniform shirt with the badge and the heavy leather boots, pulling on an old, faded gray sweatshirt and a pair of worn boots from the mudroom.
The screen door to her kitchen isn’t locked. I push it open, the small click of the latch sounding like a starter pistol in the quiet house.
Ember is sitting at her kitchen island, a fresh mug of tea between her hands, though she isn’t drinking it. She’s taken off her sneakers, her bare feet tucked under her thighs on the bar stool. She looks small in the big house, but she looks entirely complete.
I stop at the edge of the linoleum, my hands buried in the front pocket of my sweatshirt.
“I’m sorry,” I say into the silence.
Ember doesn’t look up from her mug. “You said that already, Brooks.”
“I said a lot of things already because I was panicked,” I say, taking two slow steps forward until I’m standing at the end of the counter. “But I didn’t say the right ones.”
Ember lifts her head, her gaze meeting mine.
“We have been having this conversation a million times, Brooks,” she says, her voice strained.
“I know you were scared. I figured that out about three minutes after coming home. But understanding why you locked me out doesn’t change the fact that you did it.
You didn’t talk to me. You just decided my fate for me. ”
“I know. I don’t expect you to just forget that because I sat on a bench.” I lean against the counter for a second and scrub a hand over my face. “I keep replaying it in my head. Every conversation. Every stupid thing I said. I really am sorry.”
The quiet between us stretches out, but it’s different now. Then, the corner of her mouth gives a tiny, involuntary twitch.
“You really did look ridiculous on that bench, you know,” she murmurs. “Theo looked like he was delivering a death warrant every morning. I thought he was going to faint into the sourdough on Tuesday.”
A small laugh leaves my throat, the tension in my chest easing just enough for me to breathe. “Theo is a good guy. He just takes orders literally. I told him to make sure you got the shift report.”
“The neighborhood relations act, Brooks?” She tilts her head, her curls shifting over her shoulder. “You looked up town bylaws just to find a reason to tell me what Sophie’s hair looked like?”
“I didn’t look it up. I made it up. I’m the Chief, Ember. I can invent a code if it means I get to talk to you.”
“That is a severe abuse of power, Brooks,” she whispers. “I should report you to the selectmen. Or Bernice. Bernice still has that ladle in her purse, I’m certain of it.”
“Let her hit me,” I say, my voice dropping an octave. “I’d take the ladle if it means I get to stay in this kitchen.”
She actually smiles then. A real one. Small, but real. It hits me right in the center of my chest.
“You are unbelievable,” she murmurs.
“I know.”
“You abused your position as fire chief to send me fake emotional support reports.”
“I’d do it again.”
She laughs under her breath and finally takes a sip of her tea. I watch her mouth touch the edge of the mug and immediately have to look away before my brain goes somewhere unhelpful.
This woman is going to kill me slowly.
“You’re a very stubborn man, Brooks,” she breathes, her voice shaking just a fraction.
“I am.”
I can feel my pulse everywhere. In my throat. My hands. My ribs. She’s looking at me like she’s waiting to see if I really mean all this or if I’m about to retreat again. And I can’t retreat anymore. I’m exhausted from holding myself back around her.
So I step closer. “I love you.”
Ember’s breath catches a little, and my eyes drop to her mouth before I can stop myself.
“Brooks,” she says.
“I know.”
“No, I don’t think you do.”
I stop moving. She sets the mug down.
“You can’t say things like this unless you mean them tomorrow too.”
“I will.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.”
The words come out instantly. Certain.
“I know exactly how I’m going to feel tomorrow,” I say.
“I’m gonna wake up wanting you in my house.
At my table. Around Sophie. Around me. Same as today.
I’m going to want the noise and the mess and the way you look when you’re annoyed with me.
And the day after that? I’m going to want to wake up and do it all over again. ”
I take a slow, deliberate step backward into the center of her kitchen floor. My heart is thundering against my ribs, each beat heavy and demanding.
“I told you I’m on my knees, Ember,” I say, my voice a low murmur. “I wasn’t just talking about a bench.”
I watch her eyes trace mine, searching for the truth. I’m finished pretending I can handle a world where she isn’t the first thing I see when I wake up.
I take that step, then another, the floorboards groaning slightly under my weight. I sink, my weight shifting forward, the gravity of everything I’ve kept inside finally pulling me down.
My knees hit the linoleum with a heavy, final thud.
Firefighters kneel for very few things.
Victims. Prayer. And apparently Ember.
I sit back on my heels, looking up at her, my hands resting open on my thighs.
“I’m right here,” I whisper, the room completely silent around us except for the sound of the rain against the glass. “Show me how to fix it.”
For a second, she just stares at me. Then she shakes her head a little like she can’t believe what she’s seeing. “You are seriously down on the floor right now.”
“I told you I was done protecting my pride.”
“That is such a dramatic sentence.”
“I’m a dramatic man.”
I finally get the tiniest smile out of her again. It makes me reckless. I shift a little closer on my knees without thinking, my hands brushing lightly against the outside of her calves. Her breath catches.
I tilt my head back to look at her. “Tell me what you need from me.”