2. Derek
DEREK
Iwoke at four with my heart going too hard and my sheets damp.
The dream was already dissolving the way it always did, leaving behind only the pieces I never managed to outrun.
Smoke filled my throat thick enough to taste.
The stairwell groaned wrong underfoot. A voice on the radio told me to fall back.
I lay there for a minute, staring at the ceiling, waiting for my pulse to catch up with the rest of me.
Ember lifted his massive head off the foot of the bed and gave me a look that said he already knew exactly what came next.
"Yeah," I told him. "Let's go."
We ran in the dark for forty minutes, snow coming down steady and fine, the kind that wouldn't stop by morning.
My breath came out in clouds. My boots found the same frozen ruts they found every morning, the same stretch of road, the same turn past the ranger station.
By the time I got back my head had gone quiet again, which was the whole point.
Ember trotted ahead of me the last quarter mile, tongue out, entirely unbothered by any of it, and I envied him that more than I'd ever admit out loud.
I showered, made coffee strong enough to strip paint, and got to the station before the sun did anything more than smear gray light along the ridgeline.
The day went the way most of them did, paperwork and a slow crawl of nothing calls, until the light outside my office window faded to the flat blue that meant the day was giving up for good.
I was three sips into a cup of coffee gone lukewarm on my desk when the radio caught a call two blocks over, a fender bender outside Pinewood Perk, and I was in my truck before dispatch finished the sentence.
It was habit. If something happened that close to the station, I went.
I didn't think about the fact that it was my own truck sitting outside that coffee shop until I was already halfway there, and by then it was too late to send somebody else and pretend I hadn't cared.
The rest of it, I didn't tell Sarge. Not the part where the woman climbing out of the U-Haul had mascara smudged under one eye and still managed to sound entirely unbothered about it.
Not the part where she called the ice a scam and meant it.
I gave him the facts, because the facts were easier to hand over than anything else.
"So somebody hit your truck," Sarge said, dragging a chair backward and sitting on it wrong, arms folded over the top of the backrest. "And you personally responded. To a fender bender. On your own truck."
"That's generally how it works when it's my truck."
"You sent Priya out to the Alvarado place last month, and there was a moose in the living room."
"That's a different kind of call."
"Is it, though?" He tipped his head, studying me the way he studied a fire that wasn't behaving the way the manual said it should. "You wrote the incident report yourself. Usually you'd have Priya do that too."
"I was already there."
"Uh-huh." He let that sit for a second, clearly enjoying himself. "What's her name?"
"Leah Bennett."
"You remembered that fast."
"It was on her license."
"Sure it was." Sarge grinned, the particular grin he saved for moments he intended to bring up again later, probably in front of the whole crew. "You're telling me you didn't get a good look at anything else, but you can quote her business tagline back to me word for word."
I hadn't said anything about a tagline.
"She'll make it magical," Sarge said, delighted with himself. "Priya heard you mutter it in the truck bay. You hate taglines."
"I hate bad ones. That one was competent."
"You hate everything with a font choice."
"That's not accurate."
"It's extremely accurate." He stood, satisfied, and clapped me once on the shoulder on his way past. "Anyway. You've got the budget meeting in an hour. Try not to fall in love with anyone else's vehicle registration before then."
I didn't dignify that with an answer, mostly because I didn't trust what would come out if I tried.
Sarge had been doing this to me for two years, poking at whatever I didn't want poked at until I either laughed or left the room, and most days I could out-wait him.
Today I just wanted the coffee to work faster than it was working.
The town hall meeting room hadn't changed in the two years I'd been coming to it, and I doubted it had changed much in the twenty before that either.
Folding chairs sat in crooked rows. A coffee urn stood in the back corner that Doris swore had been running since before I was born, brewing something closer to tar than coffee, and which nobody had the heart to replace because replacing it felt like admitting the town was getting modern.
The radiator along the far wall clanked and hissed and did nothing useful except make the room feel smaller than it already was.
I took my usual seat near the door, the one that let me leave fast if a call came in, and waited for County Rep Harlan Digby to say something that would ruin my week.
He didn't disappoint.
"The county board has reviewed subsidy allocations for the coming fiscal year," Digby said, reading off a printed sheet like it was scripture, "and continued funding for Pinewood Ridge's second engine is contingent on demonstrated community and economic impact.
Winterfest, as your largest annual event, will serve as this year's benchmark. "
"Meaning what, exactly?" I said.
"The festival needs to perform, Chief Walsh.
" Digby folded his hands on the table like he was bracing for an argument he'd already had a hundred times.
"Attendance. Revenue. Vendor participation.
If the numbers hold up, the funding holds up.
If they don't, the board will have to consider whether a town this size needs two engines or whether one is sufficient. "
As if a mountain road iced over in five different places tonight cared what the spreadsheet said was sufficient, or a chimney fire waited politely for the county to finish debating line items before it spread.
I didn't argue, because arguing with Digby was like arguing with the weather.
You could be right and it still snowed. I sat there running numbers of my own, the kind that mattered more than his, response times and the miles between Pinewood Ridge and the next nearest station, and I was still running them when Mayor Judy Whitfield stood up at the front of the room with the particular brightness of someone about to deliver good news whether the room wanted it or not.
"I have wonderful news," Judy announced, clasping her hands together.
"As you all know, we lost Carol to Arizona a few months back, which left us in something of a crisis regarding festival coordination.
But I am thrilled to tell you that we've found her replacement.
She's new to town, she has real event experience, and I think you're all going to love her. "
I was only half listening, running Digby's numbers, when the door at the back creaked open and half the room turned to look.
I didn't need to turn. I already knew.
"Everyone, this is Leah Bennett," Judy said, beaming like she'd personally arranged the snow outside to fall more festively. "She just moved here from Denver, and she's agreed to take over Winterfest coordination starting immediately."
Leah stood near the doorway in a coat still dusted with snow, her hair pulled back in a way that hadn't quite survived the walk over, and when her eyes found mine across the room, something crossed her face that mirrored whatever was crossing mine.
It was recognition. Then something sharper flickered underneath it.
Of course it was her.
Dread landed first, the same weight I felt every time this town asked me to be more sociable than I wanted to be. Underneath it was something I liked even less: relief.
I hated that feeling more than I hated the meeting.
"And since safety approval touches every part of the festival," Judy continued, entirely too pleased with her own planning, "I'd like Chief Walsh to serve as her direct liaison. You'll be working closely together on permits, burn plans, crowd logistics, all of it, straight through New Year's."
"All of it," I repeated.
"Every bit of it." Judy clapped her hands together once, delighted. "You two will be perfect together."
Across the room, Leah's expression did something complicated, landing somewhere between polite and openly horrified, which was at least honest. I respected that, even when it was aimed at me.
Sarge, three seats down, was not even attempting to hide his grin.
"Chief Walsh," Digby said, already moving on to the next line item like the last five minutes hadn't happened, "given the funding stakes, I'll want regular updates on festival logistics. Weekly, if possible."
"Understood."
It came out flat and final, same as everything else I didn't want to say out loud, because no other answer would have helped.
The county wanted numbers. Judy wanted a coordinator and a chief who played nicely together.
Digby wanted paperwork. None of them wanted to hear that I'd spent the whole day since dawn trying not to think about a woman I'd met for six minutes.
Apparently I was about to spend the next two months failing at that in person, with permits to sign besides.
The meeting rolled on. Digby moved through line items about salt budgets and snowplow routes with the enthusiasm of a man reading a grocery list. Judy interjected twice to suggest the festival needed more twinkle lights, both times ignored.
I kept my eyes on my notepad and did not look at the door again, which took considerably more effort than it should have.
When the meeting finally broke, chairs scraping and Digby gathering his papers with the brisk efficiency of a man who billed by the hour, Sarge fell into step beside me on the way out.
"So," he said.
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to."
"I was going to say," Sarge continued, entirely undeterred, "that this is either going to be the longest two months of your life or the most interesting one you've had in about two years, and I genuinely cannot tell which."
"It's going to be the first one."
"Keep telling yourself that."
Outside, the snow had picked up again, fat flakes catching in the streetlights, and across the parking lot I watched Leah climb into a car that was decidedly not the U-Haul, talking with her hands to someone I recognized as Maddie Reyes, laughing at something already, like the meeting hadn't just handed her exactly the kind of complication she probably hadn't been looking for either.
I got into my truck, the dent in the tailgate still catching the light every time I hit a bump, and sat there a moment before starting the engine.
Two months of permits, burn plans, and crowd logistics stretched out ahead of me, straight through New Year's, with a woman who'd hit my truck a few hours earlier and somehow already knew exactly how to get under my skin without trying.
I thought about the tagline again, gold script curling under her name like a promise, and hated that some part of me had already decided to believe it.
Dread and something else fought it out in my chest the whole drive home, and by the time I pulled into my own dark driveway, I still didn't know which one was winning.
Ember met me at the door with his whole back end wagging, entirely uninterested in my mood, and I scratched behind his ears longer than the greeting really called for, mostly because it gave me something simple to do with my hands.
It was going to be a very long, very complicated two months.