6. Derek
DEREK
The dishes had been sitting in the sink since yesterday, or the day before that, plate stacked on plate in a way that would have driven Rachel out of her mind if she'd still been around to see it.
Ember was passed out in the hallway doorway, one ear twitching every so often at some sound I couldn't hear, and I stood at the counter with a mug of coffee gone cold an hour ago, staring at the calendar stuck to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a fish somebody had given me as a joke I'd forgotten the punchline to.
Outside the kitchen window, wind pushed loose snow across the porch light in thin ribbons, and somewhere down the block a dog I didn't recognize barked twice and gave up.
The house held the kind of quiet that only came after nine at night, once the last truck outside had gone home and the street settled into whatever passed for stillness out here.
I'd bought the place two years ago mostly because it sat close to the station, and because the realtor stopped showing me anything with more than one bedroom after the second week, having apparently decided I didn't need that explained to me twice.
Most nights I didn't mind it. Tonight it had a weight to it I couldn't shake, one that pressed in around ordinary tasks until even washing a mug felt like a way of avoiding something else.
Next month's page waited underneath this one, thin enough that I could see the ghost of a red circle through the paper if I held it up to the light, which I hadn't, not tonight, not for a while.
I knew which square it was without looking.
I always did. I'd bought that calendar at Hutchins' General Store weeks ago, some landscape photography set with a different mountain range for every page, and hung it the same day I bought it because leaving it in the bag on the counter felt like a decision I didn't want to examine.
Doris kept the same brand behind the register every year without me ever asking her to.
The kitchen had gone still enough that my own thoughts got loud in it. They didn't come all at once the way they usually did. They came in pieces instead, small enough to miss if you weren't careful.
Smoke hung thick enough to lean on. A stairwell groaned wrong underfoot, the sound a building makes right before it stops being a building and starts being something else.
A voice on a radio, flat and procedural, told me to fall back, fall back now, and another voice, closer, not on any radio at all, started a name that never made it past the first syllable before the floor took the rest of the sound with it.
Heat came first, before any of the rest of it.
Heat thick enough to feel through turnout gear worked its way into places gear wasn't built to keep it out of.
The weight of an air tank rode low on my back, heavier than it should have been that far into a shift.
A hand closed around my shoulder and pulled, hard, the kind of grip that didn't ask permission, and then there was nothing where that hand should have been a few seconds later, just cold air and the sound of something enormous giving way behind me.
I didn't let it go further than that. I never did. I put the mug in the sink, ran water over dishes that didn't need rinsing, and let my hands do something ordinary until my chest stopped feeling like it belonged to somebody running a race he hadn't agreed to enter.
It was a method I'd developed the same way I built everything else that mattered, piece by piece, through trial and a lot of very bad nights nobody else had witnessed.
Running worked. Dishes worked. Ember, when he was in the mood to be useful instead of destructive, worked better than either.
What didn't work was sitting still with my hands empty, which was why I rarely let myself do it, and why a sink full of dishes had less to do with laziness than most people probably assumed.
I didn't know, most nights, if it was getting easier or if I was just getting better at cutting it off sooner. I'd stopped trying to tell the difference a long time ago. I had one policy about that stairwell: I didn't go back down it, not even in my own head, if I could help it.
I dried the last dish and set it in the rack, telling myself I was thinking about the festival budget or the ice rink inspection or any of the dozen practical things actually on my plate this week, and mostly succeeding, except for the one stubborn corner of my mind that kept drifting back to a text I'd sent two days ago and the four words it had taken me four tries to send.
She'd answered within a minute. It was something short, something that shouldn't have mattered as much as it did, and I'd read it twice before setting the phone down and telling myself that was the end of it.
My phone rang while I still had my hands in the sink, buzzing hard enough against the counter that Ember lifted his head to glare at it before deciding it wasn't worth getting up for.
I dried one hand on my jeans and answered without checking who it was, because at that hour it was always the same three people, and two of them only called about actual emergencies.
"You're not on shift," Sarge said, by way of hello. "Which means you have no excuse for sounding like that."
"Sounding like what?"
"Like a man doing dishes alone in the dark, thinking about things he shouldn't be thinking about.
" He paused, deliberately unbothered, the kind of pause he used when he wanted me to know he'd noticed something and wasn't going to make a production out of it.
"Anyway. Thanksgiving potluck, firehouse, the week after next. You're coming."
"I'll think about it."
"You'll think about it the way you thought about the budget meeting, which is to say you're already coming and you just don't want to admit it out loud yet."
"It's a potluck, Derek, not a deposition." I could hear him grinning through the phone, a skill he'd clearly perfected over the years. "You're allowed to just show up and eat pie."
"I'm coming for professional reasons."
"Sure you are, Chief."
"The whole crew's bringing something," he went on, entirely too casually for a man who'd clearly rehearsed this part.
"Priya's doing a green bean thing nobody's brave enough to ask about twice.
Tomás is bringing three pies because he doesn't trust anyone else's crust. Even Doris signed up for something, despite swearing up and down last year she didn't cook.
And Leah's on the cooking committee, apparently, organizing half the potluck logistics for the department on top of the whole festival, because God forbid that woman have one single unclaimed hour in her week. "
"Is that supposed to be relevant information?"
"I'm just painting the full picture. Wouldn't want you showing up unprepared."
"I'm not going because of the cooking committee."
"Never said you were." The smile came through anyway, wide enough I didn't need to see it to know exactly what it looked like. "I said you're coming, and I said Leah's on the cooking committee. Two separate facts. You're the one connecting them."
"I'm not connecting anything."
"Sure you're not." I could hear him settle into whatever chair he'd claimed, the old office chair that squeaked on one side, still creaking faintly through the line. "You've gone quiet for four whole seconds. That's a record for you when somebody says her name."
"I'm doing dishes. Quiet happens."
"Convenient timing."
"Sarge."
"I'm not saying anything. I'm just noting the pattern for the record."
I opened my mouth to tell him I had inspections that week, or paperwork, or any of the six other excuses that usually worked on him, and what came out instead was, "What time?"
Sarge didn't say anything for a second, which for him was its own kind of victory lap. Ember, sensing nothing further worth investigating, had gone back to sleep in the doorway, one paw twitching through whatever dream currently held him.
"Two o'clock," he said finally, far too pleased with himself. "Bring nothing. You'll burn it."
"I can cook."
"You can boil things. That's not the same skill."
"That's a professional opinion I never asked for."
"It's a professional observation. I've eaten your chili."
"Once. Years ago."
"I still think about it sometimes. Not fondly."
"You called me, technically."
"And you picked up. That's on you."
"Details." He was already moving on, already satisfied with whatever he'd gotten out of this conversation, which was apparently everything he'd wanted. "See you there, Chief. Wear the sweater. The one Marisol got you."
"I'm not wearing the sweater."
"You're wearing the sweater."
He hung up before I could argue the point further, a tactical retreat I recognized because I used it myself often enough.
I stood there holding a dead phone for a second longer than the moment required, Ember's tail thumping twice against the floor like he'd read something in my expression even from clear across the room.
The sweater comment would follow me for days, I already knew, the same way every joke at my expense in this department had a way of outliving its own punchline, repeated at roll call until it stopped being funny and started being tradition instead.
I set the phone down on the counter and stood there a second in the quiet the call had left behind, and caught my own reflection in the dark window over the sink, half lit by the one light still on over the stove.
I was smiling. Not the careful, measured version I gave people when a smile was socially required and nothing more, but something looser than that, something that had gotten past whatever checkpoint I usually ran expressions through before I let them onto my face.
I didn't recognize the man looking back at me. I hadn't, actually, in about two years, not with that particular look on him, easy and a little foolish.
Two years was a specific number, not a rounded one, and I knew exactly what sat on the other side of it without needing to do the math.
I'd gotten good in that time at keeping hope from getting anywhere near me.
Somehow it had gotten in anyway, quiet as anything, wearing her name whether I wanted to think about her tonight or not.
I turned off the kitchen light still smiling, Ember's nails clicking against the floor behind me as he followed me down the hall, and that, more than the fragments in the sink water, more than the stairwell or the voice on the radio or the name that never finished, was the thing that actually scared me.
Grief I knew how to carry. I'd had plenty of practice, enough to fold it down small enough that nobody noticed.
This was new, and new meant I had no idea how badly it might knock me over once it actually arrived.
I climbed into bed still turning the thought over, and it followed me into whatever sleep I managed to find.
Ember jumped up beside me sometime after midnight, the way he always did once he decided I'd been alone long enough, and settled his whole weight against my legs without asking permission.
I let him stay. Some nights that was the only company I could stand, ninety pounds of dog breathing steady in the dark, asking nothing of me except a little room on the mattress.
I fell asleep before I meant to, one hand resting on his back, and for once the dream didn't come.