7. Leah
LEAH
The firehouse bay had been turned into something between a wedding reception and a crime scene.
Paper turkeys were taped to every flat surface, construction paper feathers curling in the heat off two space heaters nobody had bothered to have code checked.
Folding tables ran in a crooked line down the center of the room under a rotation of tablecloths that clearly didn't match and clearly weren't meant to, and the whole building smelled like turkey gravy fighting a losing battle against the permanent undertone of diesel and rubber.
I'd been in town the better part of a month, and this was already the strangest holiday gathering I'd ever attended, and I'd grown up going to my grandmother's church potlucks, which had once featured a Jell-O mold shaped like a dove.
"There you are." Maddie found me by the punch bowl with two paper cups already in hand, one of which she pushed into mine without asking whether I wanted it. "You look like you need this."
"Do I?"
"You've got the face you get right before you start color coding something nobody asked you to color code." She took a long sip of her own cup. "Which, for the record, I respect. But not today. Today you're allowed to just stand here and drink bad punch like a normal person."
"This is genuinely terrible punch."
"Doris made it. Don't say that where she can hear you.
" Maddie's eyes drifted past me, tracking something across the room, and her whole expression shifted into the particular delight of someone who'd just spotted exactly what she was looking for.
"Speaking of people you're not allowed to insult where they can hear you, your favorite Fire Chief just walked in looking like someone forced him to attend his own execution. "
I did not turn around fast. I want that on the record.
"He's not my favorite anything."
"A month of permits, burn plans, and supervised bonding, and you're going to stand there and tell me he's not your favorite anything?" Maddie's eyebrows did something complicated. "Judy's practically running a betting pool at this point."
"There's no pool."
"There is absolutely a pool. I'm just not allowed to tell you the numbers, because I have a professional relationship with half the people running it." She grinned into her cup. "The smart money has been watching you two circle each other for a month. The smart money has eyes."
"The smart money should mind its own business."
I opened my mouth to argue further and closed it again, because there was no version of that argument I could win honestly, and honesty was currently not something I had the energy to fake.
A crash sounded from the dessert table, followed by a shriek of delight that was very clearly a child's, and both of us turned to see two small figures, one maybe seven and one maybe five, locked in some kind of standoff over a pumpkin pie that had not yet been sliced.
"Those would be Sarge's," Maddie said, far too calm about it. "Mateo and Bea. He brought reinforcements this year."
"Reinforcements for what?"
"Making sure nobody else's kids feel bad about behaving worse than his."
"Bobby álvarez!" a voice called from across the room, sharp enough to cut through the noise, and Sarge appeared out of the crowd at a jog, scooping the smaller of the two off the table before disaster could finish what it started. "That is not how we ask for pie."
"She started it," said Mateo, with the wounded dignity of a boy about to be believed by no one.
"I started it," Bea said, delighted and clearly proud of it, wriggling in her father's arms.
"You're both benched from dessert for five minutes." Sarge set her down and pointed a finger between the two of them like he was drawing a boundary line neither should cross. "Marisol is going to hear about this."
"Marisol already knows," called a woman I hadn't met yet, carrying a casserole dish toward the tables with the weary competence of someone who had done this exact thing every year for a decade. "Marisol saw it coming from the parking lot."
Across the room, Mayor Judy Whitfield stood over what could only be described as an architectural achievement, a gratitude turkey built from real feathers, craft foam, and what looked like an entire glue gun's worth of ambition, its tail fanned out wide enough to require its own personal folding table.
She was adjusting it with the focused intensity of a surgeon, and as I watched, one particularly enthusiastic tail feather tipped the whole structure sideways, sending it listing dangerously toward a bowl of mashed potatoes.
"Somebody help her," Maddie said, not moving an inch to help her.
I got there half a second too late to actually prevent it, my hand catching the turkey's wooden base just as its center of gravity gave out for good, and between the two of us we wrestled the whole ridiculous thing back to standing before it could baptize the potatoes.
"Thank you," Judy said, breathless and thoroughly unbothered, like near disasters were simply part of her decorating process. "It really ties the whole table together, don't you think?"
"It's certainly a turkey."
"Isn't it though?" She patted one foam feather back into place. "Gratitude, Leah. That's the whole spirit of the thing. Speaking of which, I hear you're on green bean casserole duty."
"I am."
"Wonderful. Try not to set anything on fire."
I laughed at that, because it seemed like the kind of thing you were supposed to laugh at, and did not yet know how close it was about to come to being a genuine warning rather than a joke.
The kitchen at the back of the bay had clearly been designed for feeding a dozen firefighters at a time, not an entire town's Thanksgiving, and every burner on the industrial stove was already occupied by the time I got back there with my casserole dish in hand.
I found a sliver of space at the end, wedged my dish onto the burner, and turned the dial with the kind of confidence that should have been my first warning sign.
Somewhere behind me, Priya was explaining her own green bean situation to anyone who would listen. "It's not the same as Leah's," she said, sounding vaguely defensive about it. "Mine's got almonds."
"Nobody accused you of anything," Tomás said, not looking up from whatever he was basting.
"I'm just saying. Having two green bean dishes at one potluck is a lot of pressure, and I want it on record that mine got here first."
I filed that away as exactly the kind of small town detail I was never going to stop finding delightful, and went back to my own dish, which had started making a sound I didn't love.
The topping, a very ambitious mix of fried onions and breadcrumbs I'd added because a recipe online promised it would elevate the whole dish, caught somewhere around the four-minute mark, a thin curl of smoke rising off the top before I'd even registered the smell.
"That's not supposed to do that." I said it out loud, to no one, the way people say things they already know are too late to be useful.
The smoke thickened fast, curling toward the ceiling in a way that felt significant in a building specifically staffed by professionals whose entire job was noticing exactly that kind of thing.
I grabbed for the oven mitt hanging on the handle, missed, grabbed again, and by the time I actually had it on my hand there was a small, undeniable flame licking up one corner of the breadcrumb topping like it had personal ambitions.
"Leah."
Derek's voice arrived before he did, low and even, unnervingly calm for a man addressing an actual open flame in an actual kitchen, and then his hand was over mine on the oven mitt, correcting my grip before I had even fully processed that he'd crossed the room.
"You're gripping it like it insulted you." His fingers adjusted mine around the handle, firm and quick, no wasted motion. "Loosen up. It's an oven mitt, not a hostage negotiation."
"There's a fire, Derek!"
"There's a very small, very manageable fire." He reached past me with his free hand, flipped the burner off, and in one smooth motion lifted the dish and set it on the cool back burner, where the flame gasped once and died on its own, without either of us doing anything else. "See. Handled."
I stood there for a second with my heart still going too fast, very aware that his hand was still resting over mine on the mitt, warm and steady in a way that had nothing to do with the fire I had just started.
"This from the man who alphabetizes fire code violations," I said, mostly to have something to say that wasn't about his hand.
"They're not alphabetized." The corner of his mouth did the thing it did, the almost smile that never fully committed. "They're organized by severity. There's a difference."
"That's not better."
"It's marginally better."
"You just described your own filing system as marginally better than the worst possible option."
"I'm aware of how that sounded."
I laughed, a real one, and for a second neither of us moved, elbow to elbow at the stove with a rescued casserole between us and his hand still warm over mine on the mitt.
The kitchen noise, Priya's almonds and Tomás's basting and the general chaos of the bay beyond it, seemed to recede to somewhere very far away, leaving just the two of us and the small ridiculous fact that I still hadn't pulled my hand back, and neither had he.
"You've got flour on your face," he said, quieter than the joke required.
"I don't use flour in casserole."
"Breadcrumb, then. Same problem." He didn't reach to brush it off, and I found myself wishing, in a way that startled me, that he would.
Neither of us said anything for a second that stretched longer than it should have, long enough that I became aware of my own heartbeat in a way that had nothing to do with almost burning down a firehouse kitchen.
His hand was still on mine. Mine was still on the mitt handle.
Between us, the rescued casserole steamed quietly, forgotten by both of us in favor of something considerably less flammable and considerably more dangerous.
Then his radio crackled against his hip, sharp and businesslike, cutting through whatever had been building in the space between us like it had been sent specifically to end it.
Derek's whole posture changed before the dispatcher finished the first sentence, his hand leaving mine so fast I felt the absence of it before I understood why.
"Copy," he said into the radio, already stepping back, already turning into the version of him that belonged to the whole town and not just to this kitchen. He looked back at me once, like he meant to finish whatever this was properly. "I have to."
"Go," I said, because there wasn't another word for it that would have made either of us feel better.
He was already moving, already gone in every way that mattered, and the last thing I caught was half a sentence trailing behind him through the kitchen doorway, something that might have been an apology or might have been my name, I honestly couldn't tell which, before the door swung shut and the noise of the bay swallowed whatever he had been about to say.
I stood there holding a casserole dish that smelled faintly of scorched breadcrumbs, my hand still curled around the oven mitt like it might still be warm from his, and waited for the disappointment to arrive.
It arrived fast, and it was not about dinner.
I had a rescued casserole and a room full of people who loved each other in loud, visible ways.
But the ache in my chest had nothing to do with green beans.
It was about a man who'd left mid-sentence without finishing whatever he'd been about to say.
That was a far more inconvenient problem than a slightly overcooked topping, and I stood there long enough to admit it to myself before Maddie found me again, eyebrows already raised, grin already loading.
"So," she said, grinning like she already had the whole story guessed. "How was the almost fire?"
"Don't."
"I'm just asking about the casserole."
"The casserole didn't make you smile like that."
Maddie's grin widened into something shameless, and I carried my rescued dish back out to the folding tables, past Judy's teetering turkey and Sarge's benched children and Priya's defensive almonds, and told myself the whole way there that whatever I was feeling would pass by the time I sat down to eat.
It did not pass by the time I sat down to eat.