8. Derek
DEREK
Inever got to finish the sentence I'd been building toward, and looking back, that turned out to be the whole shape of my night in miniature.
It was a chimney fire, elderly resident, flames reported visible from the road out past the county line, where the plows wouldn't run again until the state route got cleared first. I was in my truck before Sarge finished relaying the address, the sweater Marisol had picked out still on under my coat, ridiculous and itchy and entirely beside the point now.
I called it in as we rolled, Priya and Tomás already loading into the engine behind me, and let the last twenty minutes fall away the way they had to. There would be time later to think about a kitchen, a casserole, a hand that hadn't pulled back as fast as it should have. There wasn't time now.
Ida Kowalski's cabin sat a quarter mile off the county road down a driveway that hadn't seen a plow blade in a week, snow packed hard enough under my tires that the truck fishtailed twice before I found the ruts somebody else had already cut.
Smoke rolled steady and thick from the chimney stack, more than any chimney should put out.
I could see the orange glow of it before I'd even cleared the last stand of pines, flickering high enough inside the flue to worry me.
Ida herself stood on the porch in a bathrobe patterned with cardinals, arms wrapped tight around her own shoulders, more furious than frightened from what I could tell at fifty yards, which told me everything I needed to know about how this call was going to go.
"About time," she said, the second I was close enough to hear her. "I called that in ten minutes ago."
"Six, ma'am." I was already moving past her toward the side of the house, eyes on the roofline, gauging how far the smoke had spread and whether it had made it past the flue into the actual structure. "You're not hurt?"
"I'm eighty-one years old and standing in the snow in my bathrobe. Of course I'm hurt. My pride is in shreds."
"I meant burned."
"I know what you meant, young man." She said young man the way other people said idiot, with the exact same amount of affection. "No. I got myself out the second I saw sparks coming down into the woodbox. I'm old, not stupid."
Tomás and Priya had the engine positioned by the time I circled back, hose already charged, and I ran the scene the way I ran every scene, fast and flat and entirely without room for anything else to get in.
A chimney fire meant creosote built up thick enough in the flue to catch, and the real danger wasn't the fire in the chimney itself so much as what it could do if it jumped into the attic or the walls before anyone caught it.
"Roof's clear," Priya called down from where she'd gone up with the ladder, flashlight sweeping the shingles around the chimney stack. "No visible extension. Flue's glowing, though, Chief. This thing's been building for a while."
"Copy. Tomás, get the chimney kit. We're going in from the cleanout."
We knocked it down inside twenty minutes, working the chemical extinguisher up through the cleanout at the base while Priya monitored the roof for any sign the fire had jumped into the surrounding wood, and by the time the last curl of smoke thinned out into something ordinary, Ida had made her way down off the porch despite my telling her twice to stay put, a blanket someone had draped over her shoulders dragging in the snow behind her.
"Well?" she said, arms crossed, daring any of us to have bad news for her.
"Contained. No structural extension." I straightened up from where I'd been checking the cleanout access one last time. "You're going to want a certified sweep out here before you use that fireplace again. Whoever serviced it last didn't do you any favors."
"That would be my nephew. He thinks because he watched a video once he's qualified to do anything."
"He is not qualified to do this."
"I'll tell him you said so. He won't listen, but I'll tell him.
" She studied me for a second, the same unimpressed once-over I'd been getting from half this town since the day I took the job, and something in her expression shifted into something almost fond.
"You're the one they've got running around with that event girl. The wedding planner."
"I'm not running around with anyone."
"Mm." She said it the way people say things they've already decided not to believe. "Well. Whatever you're doing, keep doing it. This town could use a little more of whatever put that particular look on your face just now."
I did not ask what look she meant. I already had a fairly good guess, and I did not need Ida Kowalski, eighty-one years old and freshly rescued from her own chimney, to confirm it for me at eleven o'clock at night in a snowbank.
We wrapped the scene inside the hour, Ida installed in her nephew's care after a phone call that cost me more patience than the fire had. The drive back to the station gave me exactly as much time as I needed to start thinking again about everything I'd been trying not to.
The station at that hour belonged to nobody, the bay quiet and dim except for the security lighting over the trucks, the whole building settling into the particular hush that came after a call, adrenaline draining out of my system the same slow way it always did, leaving behind a kind of tiredness that had nothing to do with sleep.
Tomás and Priya had already peeled off toward the bunk room, and I stood alone by Engine One doing the paperwork my hands still remembered how to fill out even when the rest of me wasn't fully back yet.
That was when I heard the door.
I looked up expecting Sarge, or maybe Priya coming back for something she'd forgotten, and found Leah standing just inside the bay instead, still in her coat from the potluck, holding a covered dish in one hand and a thermos in the other, like she'd walked straight from that kitchen to here without stopping to reconsider it once.
"You're allowed to say no," she said, before I'd gotten a single word out. "But I had a rescued casserole, my own thermos, and an evening that ended a lot earlier than I expected, and I decided the responsible thing to do was make sure you hadn't died fighting an eighty-year-old's chimney."
"Eighty-one."
"Even worse. That's basically a war crime, letting an eighty-one-year-old's chimney nearly kill you." She held out the thermos like an offering, or possibly a peace treaty. "Coffee. I didn't make it, I stole it off the church ladies' table, but it's hot and it's yours if you want it."
I took it before I'd fully decided whether I should, and the warmth of it against my cold hands felt like the first honest thing that had happened to me all night.
"You didn't have to save an eighty-one-year-old's chimney with that much intensity, you know." She leaned against the door of Engine One, arms crossed, watching me with the same look she'd been giving me since the coffee shop parking lot the first night we met. "She wasn't judging your technique."
"How would you even know how intense I was?"
"Priya texted the group chat. Apparently you ran that chimney kit like it owed you money.
" Her mouth curved, not quite a full smile, the kind that meant she was enjoying this more than she wanted to admit.
"I'm just saying. The fire was contained in twenty minutes.
You didn't have to treat it like the whole county was going up. "
"It's not really something I know how to do halfway."
"Nothing about you seems to be something you know how to do halfway."
I didn't have an answer for that, mostly because it was true, and I had never once heard anyone say it out loud before, not as an accusation and not as a compliment either, just a fact laid down plain the way she seemed to lay most things down.
We ended up sitting on the tailgate of my own truck, backed into its spot at the end of the row, the bay doors shut against the cold and the security lights buzzing low overhead.
She'd brought two forks for the casserole without my asking, which meant she'd planned this more than she probably wanted to admit, and we ate cold green bean casserole out of the same dish at midnight like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
"So," she said, after a while, not looking at me, focused very deliberately on her fork. "Does it always feel like that? The calls?"
"Meaning?"
"Like you know exactly what you're doing. Like there's no version of tonight where you don't have an answer."
I thought about lying, or deflecting, which was the version of this conversation I'd had with everyone else who'd ever asked me some variation of that question, Sarge included, over the years. I didn't do either.
"This is the only place I've ever been any good at fixing what's broken.
" I said it to the casserole dish, mostly, because looking at her while I said it felt like more than I had room for right then.
"Everywhere else, I'm guessing I'm the same as anybody.
Here, I know exactly what to do. Every time. No exceptions."
She didn't say anything for a second, and I braced for the question I could feel coming, the one people eventually asked once you handed them an opening that honest, the why and the since when and the what happened.
She didn't ask any of it.
"That's not nothing, Derek." Quiet, no performance to it, like she'd weighed the sentence before she let it out. "Most people never find even one place where that's true."
She went quiet after that, not the waiting kind of quiet where somebody's just loading up the next question, but the actual kind, comfortable and undemanding, like she'd decided the conversation was allowed to just end there if that was what I needed.
We sat on the tailgate in the cold with an empty casserole dish between us and the bay doors shut against the wind, and she didn't fill the silence with anything, and I found myself doing the math without meaning to.
For two years I had braced every silence for the next question, the next careful approach toward the subject I kept buried. Not one of those silences had ever felt like this, one that asked nothing of me at all.
That should have worried me more than it did.
She checked the time eventually, some easy stretch of her shoulders that told me the night had reached its natural end, and I walked her out to her car because it was cold and because some habits didn't ask my permission before kicking in, opening doors and checking mirrors and generally behaving like a man who'd spent two decades being told it was his job to make sure people got where they were going safely.
She unlocked her car, then stood there a second with her hand on the door, not quite leaving yet, and I found myself doing the same thing I'd been doing all night, standing in a spot I could have left thirty seconds ago and hadn't.
"Thank you," I said. "For the casserole. And the coffee. And the not asking."
"I know when not to ask." She smiled, small and real. "Try to sleep, Chief. You earned it tonight."
"I'll think about it."
"No you won't. You'll go inside, finish your paperwork, and pretend tonight didn't happen until I bring it up again."
I watched her open her car door, and something about the whole night, the cabin and the chimney and the casserole and the quiet, made the next sentence come out of me before I'd fully approved it.
"Maybe the festival isn't the worst idea Judy's ever had."
Leah went very still, one hand on the top of her car door, and turned to look at me with an expression I didn't have a name for, something that started as surprise and moved fast into something warmer.
"That's basically a love sonnet, coming from you."
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"You just complimented the festival, Derek. Unprompted. That's the most romantic thing anyone's said to me in this town, and it was about zoning permits."
"It wasn't about zoning permits."
"No," she said, and her whole face did something I felt in my chest more than I understood it, something bright and unguarded that made the cold night feel a lot less cold. "I don't think it was."
I didn't have anything to say to that, so I didn't say anything, and I stood in the parking lot watching her taillights until they turned out of sight, the ridiculous sweater still on under my coat and something considerably more dangerous than cold settling into my chest in its place.