4. Derek
DEREK
The bay lights came up fluorescent white at dusk, on a timer nobody bothered to reset as the days shortened.
By five the whole apparatus floor glowed brighter than the sky outside, already gone the flat navy that meant real cold tonight.
Engine One sat gleaming under it, hood up, Tomás elbow deep in something under the housing while Priya called out numbers off a clipboard three feet away.
Somewhere behind them a radio played low, some country station Doris at the general store would have approved of, and the whole bay smelled like diesel and hand soap and the sharp metallic cold that clung to everything in here once the sun went down.
I liked this hour best, tools and hoses and the particular hush of a building getting ready instead of running toward something.
"Chief." Tomás didn't look up from the engine. "Rumor has it you've got a girlfriend."
"I don't have a girlfriend."
"That's not what I heard." He wiped his hands on a rag, entirely too pleased with himself for a man who'd been elbow deep in an engine ten seconds earlier. "Chief's got a type. Chaotic, opinionated, drives like a stunt double."
A couple of the guys near the hose rack laughed, low, the kind of laugh that spreads through a firehouse faster than any siren does. Priya didn't glance up from her clipboard, but I caught the corner of her mouth twitch.
"Get back to your equipment check."
It came out sharper than I meant it, and faster too, which was its own kind of answer even if I hadn't planned on giving one.
Tomás grinned like he'd won something and went back to the engine without pushing it further, mostly because he knew exactly how far he could take this before I actually got annoyed, and he'd apparently found the edge of it already.
Priya looked up next. "For what it's worth, Sarge already told everyone about the truck."
"Of course he did."
"And the tagline."
"I'm aware."
"He does a whole impression. It's not accurate, but it's very committed."
I didn't dignify that with an answer either, mostly because there was no version of that conversation I could win, and because Ember chose that exact moment to come skidding around the corner from the break room with someone's boot in his mouth, ears flying, nails scrabbling for purchase on concrete that had never once given him any.
"Ember. Drop it."
He did not drop it. He brought it to me instead, tail going hard enough that his whole back half swung with it, and deposited a very damp, very chewed boot directly on my foot, like a gift I hadn't earned but was clearly about to receive anyway.
"That's mine," Tomás said, not moving to reclaim it.
"Then you should have put it somewhere he couldn't reach it."
"He's ninety pounds. There's nowhere in this building he can't reach it."
That was mostly true. I'd adopted him eighteen months ago from a shelter two counties over, on a night I don't examine too closely anymore.
The house had felt too quiet, and I told myself getting a dog was a practical decision, good for structure and routine, nothing sentimental about it.
He'd been the biggest one in the kennel and the loudest, throwing his whole body against the chain link like enthusiasm alone might bend it.
I remember thinking he was exactly the kind of chaos I had no business inviting into a life I'd spent years making quiet.
I took him home anyway. He'd chewed through something he shouldn't have within the hour, and I let him, and that turned out to be more or less the shape of our whole relationship since.
He was the one soft thing I'd let myself keep.
I didn't examine that either. I fed him, walked him, let him take up two thirds of a bed built for one person, and told myself none of it meant anything beyond the practical, the same way I told myself a lot of things that didn't survive close inspection.
Tomás crouched down and scratched behind Ember's ears until his back leg started thumping against the concrete, traitor that he was, wagging for the man whose boot he'd just destroyed.
"You're a menace," Tomás told him, entirely too fondly for someone missing a boot.
"He's selectively loyal," I said. "Ask him nicely enough and he'll forgive anyone."
"Sounds like someone else I know."
"Don't."
Tomás held both hands up in surrender, grin widening, and let the engine pull his attention back before I had to say anything else about it.
I clipped a leash on him mostly for show, since he ignored it entirely once we got moving, and loaded him into the truck for the drive out to the field behind the community center, where Judy's committee wanted to put a temporary ice rink for the festival.
It needed a site inspection before I'd sign off: load capacity, access routes, whether the ground would hold once they trucked in the refrigeration unit.
I told myself that was where I was headed.
I did not go straight there.
The turn came up before I'd decided to take it, the gravel road past the ranger station, narrow and rutted and mostly forgotten once the summer hikers stopped coming through.
I'd driven it enough times that my hands took it without asking my head first, and by the time I noticed what I'd done I was already pulling into the small turnout at the end, tires crunching over old snow gone gray and hard.
The bench sat where it always sat, half buried, stone dark with cold and damp.
There was no name on it, not from where I stood, and no date either, though I knew both were there if I got close enough to brush the snow off, which I never did.
I'd read them once, the year it went in, and once had been enough.
I didn't need to read them again to know exactly what they said.
Ember climbed out with me and, for once, didn't run anywhere. He sat by my leg instead, leaning his whole weight into my knee the way he did sometimes when he'd decided, in whatever way dogs decide these things, that this was not a moment for chasing anything.
I didn't think about it in words, standing there. It was just a weight I'd carried long enough to hide it most days. It hadn't gotten lighter. It had just gotten more familiar.
I didn't stay long. I never did. Staying too long turned it into a performance, even with no one watching, and I'd promised myself a long time ago that this particular grief didn't get to be a performance.
It got five minutes, maybe less, and then it got folded back down small enough to fit into a life that still had an ice rink to inspect and a festival to survive.
"Come on," I told Ember, and he got up without complaint, shook the cold off in one full body ripple, and beat me back to the truck.
The field checked out fine, flat enough, solid enough, close enough to parking that nobody would have to haul folding chairs across half the county.
I paced off the corners anyway, out of habit more than necessity, boots crunching over frozen grass while Ember investigated every fence post like it might be hiding something worth reporting.
A rabbit shot out from under the bleachers at one point and he gave chase for exactly four strides before he seemed to remember he was supposed to be working, and trotted back to my side looking faintly embarrassed about the whole thing.
I made the notes I needed to make and drove back to the station with the heater running too hot and Ember asleep against the passenger door, snoring loud enough to compete with the radio.
My phone buzzed against the console around the time I pulled into the lot, and I almost ignored it, until I saw the subject line.
REVISED WINTERFEST PROPOSAL, fire code compliant, I promise.
The email was timestamped eleven o'clock the night before.
I did the math without meaning to. She'd built this after the meeting broke, after the parking lot, after however long it had taken her to get home and sit down and actually do it, awake long after any reasonable person would have called it a day.
I read it once standing in the bay, coat still on.
The bonfire had shrunk to a contained burn pit, twelve feet, ringed with a steel barrier and set well outside every setback I'd quoted her.
The lanterns were gone from the fire lane entirely, rerouted exactly the way she'd promised, strung along the storefronts instead where they belonged.
The heaters were spaced to code, actual code, not approximate code, with distances written out next to each one like she'd sat there with a tape measure and the fire ordinance both open on her desk at the same time.
The sleigh route missed the heater zone by a comfortable margin and somehow still looped past the prettiest storefronts on Main.
I read it a second time in my office, mostly to confirm I hadn't misjudged it the first time out of surprise.
I hadn't misjudged it. It was good. It was, if I was being exact about it, better than good, thorough in the specific way that told me she'd actually read the code sections instead of nodding through the meeting and hoping I'd soften somewhere on the back end.
Nobody softened me. She hadn't even tried.
She'd just done the work instead, which annoyed me more than if she'd argued, because now I didn't have anything left to object to, and objecting was the only reason I had to keep talking to her.
I scrolled back to the top and read her note above the attachment a third time, four lines explaining her reasoning for the burn pit's placement, direct and unapologetic and entirely too competent for someone I'd known five days.
That thought lingered longer than I wanted it to.
I could have replied to the email itself, something short and procedural, approved pending final walkthrough, and been done with it in four words instead of one. That was the sane version. I opened a text to her cell number instead, which was its own small admission I chose not to look at directly.
Fine.
I typed it and deleted it three times over, staring at the four letters longer than any word had ever earned from me. Then I typed it a fourth time and hit send before I could talk myself out of it.
I set the phone down on the desk like it had done something to me personally, and Ember, sprawled across the entire width of my office floor, lifted his head just long enough to give me a look that said he'd noticed exactly how long that had taken, and judged me accordingly.
Outside my window the bay lights buzzed off in sections as the crew wrapped up for the night, one bank at a time, until the only light left in the building was the one over my own desk and the blue glow of the phone screen going dark.
"Don't start," I told him.
He put his head back down, thoroughly unconvinced, and I sat there in the quiet of my own office, phone dark on the desk, hating that a single word had taken me four tries to send, and hating even more that some part of me was already waiting to see how she'd answer it.
The phone buzzed once, twenty minutes later, right as I was locking up the office for the night.
I looked at it longer than I needed to before I actually read the message.
Then I read it twice more, standing there in my coat with my keys still in my other hand, before I let myself smile about it on the walk out to the truck.