12. Derek
DEREK
The station past closing kept a different kind of silence than it kept during the day.
No radio traffic, no boots on concrete, just the hum of the one desk lamp I'd left burning over a monitor old enough that the fan inside it rattled every time it woke up.
I'd sent Priya and Tomás home two hours ago.
I'd told Sarge I was catching up on paperwork.
That was technically true, if you counted spending two nights on somebody else's festival revenue projections I had no obligation to build as paperwork.
Nobody had asked me to build a spreadsheet.
Digby wanted weekly figures from whoever compiled them, and Leah compiled them, competently and thoroughly, same as she did everything.
I could have waited for her numbers and cross-checked them the way I'd promised the room I would.
Instead I'd spent two nights running my own version from scratch, ticket sales against vendor receipts against parking counts, because some part of me needed to see the math land on eight hundred attendees and forty thousand dollars with my own hands on the keys before I'd let myself believe it could.
Ember lay under the desk with his chin on my boot, the same spot he claimed every night I brought him along instead of leaving him home alone with a chewed-up dog bed and a guilty conscience. Every so often he sighed, long and dramatic, like the late hour personally offended him.
"Almost done," I told him. He didn't believe me. Neither did I, honestly, but the numbers kept resolving into something close enough to hope that I couldn't make myself stop.
I heard the side door before I heard her, the specific creak it made that the front door didn't, and I had my hand halfway to the radio on instinct before I registered the sound of boots that weren't wearing steel toes.
"It's me," Leah called, from somewhere in the dark bay. "Don't shoot."
"We don't carry guns."
"I know. It felt dramatic."
She came around the corner of Engine One with her coat still buttoned to the throat, cheeks pink from the cold, a canvas bag over one shoulder that looked like it held fabric swatches rather than food, and for the first time since I'd known her she wasn't holding anything out to me the second she walked in the door.
"No casserole tonight," I said.
"No casserole. No excuse, actually, which I realize makes this weirder.
" She set the bag down on the nearest chair and perched on the edge of my desk instead of sitting in it, close enough that I had to angle the monitor slightly to keep working.
"I was walking home from a client fitting, saw your truck still in the lot, and I didn't want to walk past a lit window and pretend I didn't notice it.
That's the whole reason. I don't have a better one tonight. "
"That's a strange thing to apologize for."
"I'm not apologizing. I'm explaining. There's a difference.
" She said it lightly, but something in her eyes when she looked at the spreadsheet glowing behind me told me she meant it more than the tone let on.
"You don't have to stop what you're doing.
I'll just sit here and judge your font choices. "
"My font choices are excellent."
"Your font choices are Times New Roman, which tells me everything I need to know about you as a person."
Ember lifted his head at the sound of her voice, gave one thump of his tail against the concrete, and went back to sleep on my boot, apparently deciding she'd already passed whatever test he ran on people who came through that door after dark.
I finished the column I'd been working, vendor receipts against the numbers Leah had already sent me two days ago, the totals close enough to matching that the gap was almost certainly a rounding error and not the kind of thing worth losing sleep over, though I'd apparently decided to lose sleep over it anyway.
I saved the file and sat back, and the quiet that followed wasn't the working kind anymore.
It was the other kind, the kind that asked something of both of us if either one let it sit long enough.
"You don't have to tell me anything," Leah said, before I'd said a word, like she'd read exactly what was building in the space between us and wanted to give me a way out of it before I needed one. "I just didn't want to walk past a lit window and pretend I didn't notice."
"You already said that part."
"I know. It felt like it needed saying twice.
" She wasn't looking at me directly, her eyes on Ember instead, giving me the same kind of room she'd given me on that tailgate the night of the Kowalski chimney fire, room to talk or not talk without either choice costing me anything with her.
"For what it's worth, I'm not asking. I'm just here. "
I looked at the spreadsheet instead of her while I said it, the same way I always did when a sentence mattered more than I wanted it to.
"I used to do this somewhere else." My voice came out steadier than I expected, which surprised me almost as much as the fact that I was saying it at all. "Boston. I was a firefighter there before I came here."
She didn't say anything. She didn't move either, not toward me and not away, just stayed exactly where she was on the edge of my desk, giving the sentence room to keep going if it wanted to.
"Something happened on a call." The words came slower now, each one costing more than the last, like I was pulling them up out of somewhere that didn't want to let them go easily. "I came here to get quiet."
"Thank you for telling me that much."
She said it gently, no push behind it, no follow-up question waiting to ambush whatever I might say next, and something in my chest loosened just slightly, the way a knot gives an inch before it decides whether it's actually going to come undone.
"There was somebody with me that night." I hadn't planned on saying more. I said it anyway, watching my own hands on the desk like they belonged to somebody else. "A partner. He had a name."
I stopped there. I felt the name sitting right behind my teeth, close enough to taste, and I could not make myself push it the rest of the way out, not tonight, not in an empty firehouse bay with the lights off and a woman I was not ready to lose watching me with an expression that had gone very still and very careful.
"You don't have to say it," Leah said. "Not tonight. Not ever, if tonight's as far as it goes."
"I want to. I'm just not there yet."
"Then we're not there yet." She said it like it was the simplest fact in the world, no disappointment in it, no impatience either. "That's allowed."
I hadn't realized how much weight that particular permission would carry until she gave it to me, easy as handing over a cup of coffee.
Two years of people had either pushed too hard or backed away too fast, and here she was doing neither, just sitting on the edge of a desk in a cold firehouse letting me keep exactly as much of myself as I could stand to hand over that night.
I sat there trying to find something to say that wouldn't ruin whatever she'd just done for me, when Ember solved the problem for both of us by standing up, stretching his entire back half into a long, satisfied arc, and stealing my pen directly off the desk.
"Ember."
He did not stop. He trotted it around the bay like a hard-won trophy, tail going, ears flying, prancing past Engine One with the marker clamped sideways in his jaw and the specific swagger of an animal who had just accomplished something he intended to be very proud of for the rest of the evening.
"Is that your pen?"
"Was."
"He's going to eat it."
"He's not going to eat it. He's going to hide it somewhere I won't find it until spring, and then act personally offended when I ask him about it."
Leah laughed, a real one, loud enough to bounce off the bay's concrete and startle Ember into a faster lap around the trucks. I found myself laughing too, low and surprised. It caught me off guard the way it always did lately.
"He has excellent timing," Leah said, wiping one eye. "Truly excellent. A professional interruption."
"He's selectively brilliant. Mostly he just eats boots."
"A well-rounded skill set."
We chased him for one lap before he gave the pen up, dropping it at Leah's feet like an offering, looking deeply pleased with himself.
By the time she handed the pen back to me, chewed and damp and unusable, the heaviness that had been sitting in the room a few minutes earlier was gone.
Something lighter, and just as dangerous, had taken its place.
"I should let you finish your spreadsheet," she said, gathering her bag, checking the time on her phone with the particular reluctance of someone who didn't actually want to leave. "And I should go home and actually sleep, which I've been telling myself for three nights running."
"Thank you for stopping."
"Thank you for telling me that much." She repeated it on purpose this time, softer, like she wanted me to hear it land twice. "I mean it, Derek. Whatever else you never tell me, I'm glad you told me that."
I walked her to her car the way I always did, cold biting through my jacket, Ember trotting ahead of us with the ruined pen still clamped triumphantly in his jaw, and I stood in the lot until her taillights disappeared around the corner by the church, the way I'd started doing without ever deciding to make it a habit.
I went back inside long enough to shut down the monitor and lock the side door, and it was only once the building had gone properly dark and quiet around me, no more spreadsheet glow, no more Ember chasing anything, that I let myself think the thought I'd been keeping at arm's length for most of the evening.
I had started arranging my whole week around the chance I might see her.
It wasn't the festival meetings. It wasn't the permits.
It wasn't any of the reasons I could say out loud to Sarge or Judy or anyone else who asked.
The actual shape of my days had begun bending toward her without my permission.
I drove past the empty storefront on Main more than a fire chief with festival duties had any real reason to.
I found myself checking my phone in the gap between calls for a text that wasn't going to arrive faster for the checking.
I'd started keeping a second mug in the bay cupboard, the plain blue one she liked, without ever once admitting to myself why.
They were small decisions, stacking into a pattern I hadn't noticed forming until it was already built.
I couldn't remember the last time anything had scared me that much. Not a fire. Not a bad call.
I locked the door and walked out to my truck, the cold sharp enough to sting, the sodium lights turning the snow the color of old honey.
I climbed in and sat there without starting the engine, breathing slow and deliberate the way I used to on the worst calls, in for four counts, out for four more, until my chest stopped aching.
It took a full minute before I trusted myself to drive.
I sat there anyway, breathing, watching my own breath fog against the cold windshield, and let myself feel exactly how much trouble I was in before I finally turned the key and pointed the truck toward home.