14. Derek
DEREK
Sarge found me in the equipment room checking inventory on rope bags I'd already checked twice that morning, which should have told him everything he needed to know about the state I was in, and instead told him exactly the opposite.
"So," he said, leaning against the doorframe with the easy patience of a man who had all afternoon and intended to use every minute of it.
"Don't."
"I haven't said anything yet."
"You're about to."
"The whole square saw you go in for it, man." He crossed his arms, grinning the grin he'd clearly been perfecting for two years just for moments like this one. "Doris texted the group chat a play by play. There's apparently a timestamp."
"There's no timestamp."
"There's absolutely a timestamp. Doris timestamps everything. She timestamped the moose."
"I was checking her for hypothermia risk." I set the rope bag down harder than it needed to be set down, which undercut the sentence in a way I heard the second it left my mouth. "It was cold. She'd been standing outside for hours."
"Checking her for hypothermia risk." Sarge repeated it slowly, like he was turning the words over to see if they'd hold weight from any angle. "With your hand."
"I didn't put my hand anywhere."
"You were about to."
"I wasn't about to do anything." That one came out sharper than the others, and I regretted it the second Sarge's eyebrows went up, because sharp was its own kind of confession and we both knew it.
"Okay." He held both hands up, entirely too pleased with himself for a man conceding a point he clearly didn't believe. "You weren't about to do anything. Understood. Noted. I'll tell Doris to strike it from the record."
"Don't tell Doris anything."
"Too late for that particular ship, Chief."
"I have work to do."
"You have a rope bag you've already inspected twice, according to the log you filled out an hour ago, which I only know because I read it while you weren't looking, because I am a professional and also nosy.
" Sarge pushed off the doorframe, still grinning, completely unbothered by the look I gave him.
"For what it's worth, nobody in that square thought less of you for it.
Most of them have been waiting on it since the U-Haul. "
"There was no it."
"Sure, Chief."
I grabbed the rope bags and left him standing there with that same insufferable grin, because there was no version of that conversation I was going to win, and because the crew was waiting on me out at the training grounds for the afternoon drill, and because standing in an equipment room getting needled about a piece of mistletoe was not how I intended to spend the rest of my week even if some stubborn part of my chest disagreed.
The training grounds sat behind the ranger station, a stretch of open field backed by pine woods that went dense and blue this time of afternoon, snow fresh enough that our boots left the first tracks of the day across it.
Priya and Tomás had the rope rigging half set up by the time I got there, running a rescue drill off the old fire tower, and Ember trotted at my heel on his lead, thrilled with the cold and the open space and the general injustice of being made to walk instead of run.
We were twenty minutes into the drill, Priya rappelling down the tower face while Tomás called out belay checks, when Ember spotted the rabbit.
I felt the lead go tight and then go nothing at all, the clip snapping loose from his collar the way it had threatened to for weeks, and by the time I turned my head he was already thirty yards gone, a streak of black and brown cutting straight into the treeline after something that had a considerable head start and no intention of losing it.
"Ember!"
He did not come back. He never did, not for a rabbit, not for anything with that single-minded kind of forward momentum, and I handed my end of the belay line to Tomás and started after him with the irritation of a man who had one soft spot in his whole life and it had just run directly into a pine forest at dusk.
"I'll help." The voice came from behind me, and I turned to find Leah picking her way across the field, boots crunching through the fresh snow, a canvas bag over one shoulder that suggested she'd been walking back from somewhere with no plans to end up here.
"You don't have to."
"I know I don't have to. I'm doing it anyway." She was already moving past me toward the treeline, calling Ember's name in a bright, coaxing tone that had exactly zero effect on a dog who could not currently hear anything over the sound of his own triumph. "Which way did he go?"
"Straight into the thickest part of it, obviously. He has excellent taste in terrible decisions."
We split up along the edge of the trees, calling his name into woods gone quiet and blue with the fading light, our voices carrying strange and flat between the trunks.
I found myself listening for the sound of him more than following my own search pattern.
Some old instinct was cutting in, whether I wanted it to or not.
I heard Leah's laugh before I heard the dog.
"Derek. Derek, I found him. Oh, you absolute disaster."
I followed her voice to a thicket of low brush maybe forty yards in, and found Ember right where the laugh had promised, tangled three separate ways in a snarl of dead blackberry cane, one ear flopped inside out, tail going hard enough to shake the whole bush, and an expression on his face that suggested he considered this the single greatest achievement of his entire career.
"He looks thrilled," I said.
"He looks like a crime scene that's proud of itself."
I crouched down and worked the cane loose one strand at a time while Ember tried to lick my face for his trouble, Leah kneeling on the other side of him doing the same, both of us laughing at the sheer scale of his self-inflicted disaster, and something in the cold, hushed woods made the laughing feel bigger than it should have, bigger than one dog tangled in a bush had any right to earn.
"There." I got the last cane free, and Ember shook himself out in one full body ripple that sent snow and broken twigs flying in every direction, thoroughly unbothered by the entire ordeal. "You're an idiot. A beloved idiot, but an idiot."
"He's got range." Leah stood, brushing snow off her knees, breathless from laughing, her cheeks bright with cold and something else, and Ember planted himself between us, tongue out, tail sweeping, utterly satisfied with how the whole afternoon had turned out.
We stood there a second too long, close enough in the narrow gap the thicket left us that I could see the snow catching in her hair, the particular flush the cold put in her cheeks, the way her laugh was fading out of her expression slowly instead of all at once.
Ember leaned into both our legs at the same time, tail thumping, and neither of us moved to put more distance between us than the dog was currently taking up.
I reached out and brushed a piece of blackberry cane out of her hair before I'd fully decided to do it, my hand lingering a half second longer than the task required, sliding to the edge of her jaw the way I'd been wanting to for longer than I was willing to admit even to myself.
She went very still. It wasn't the startled kind of still. It was the other kind.
I leaned in.
It was slow, deliberate, nothing external forcing the pace this time. No radio, no crowd, no county rep with a clipboard, just the two of us, a dog, and pine trees gone dark blue in the fading light. For one full second I let myself want it.
Then I heard Tomás's voice carry faintly from the field, calling something about the belay line, and some old, practiced part of my brain snapped back online before I'd even registered it as a threat.
The open field. The crew forty yards out.
The fact that half the county now considered my conduct with this woman a matter of public record.
I pulled back.
"Unprofessional," I said, and hated the word the second it left my mouth, hated it more for how flat and procedural it sounded, like I was quoting a manual instead of explaining myself. "The crew's right there. Digby's got eyes on this whole festival now. I can't."
Leah's face did something complicated, fast, gone before I could read all of it, and what settled in its place was worse than hurt would have been, because hurt at least would have been honest.
"Right." Her voice came out too bright, pitched a half step higher than it needed to be, the specific brightness of someone building a wall out of cheerfulness in real time. "Professional."
"Leah."
"No, you're right." She bent down and clipped the lead back onto Ember's collar with hands that were not quite steady, though she covered it well, better than I deserved given what I'd just done. "Wouldn't want anyone getting the wrong idea. Wouldn't want a timestamp."
That landed harder than anything Sarge had said all day.
Unlike yesterday, unlike the radio call that had saved us both from a decision neither of us had made, this time there was nothing external to blame.
No emergency, no deadline, no dispatcher's voice cutting in to let me pretend the choice had been made for me.
This was entirely me. I had leaned in, and I had pulled back, and there was no version of the story where that belonged to anyone but me.
"I should get him back to the truck," she said, already turning, already gathering the lead in one hand. "Sarge is probably wondering where you went."
"Leah, that's not..."
"It's fine, Derek." She said my name like it cost her something too, though a different kind of something than it had cost me two nights ago in an empty firehouse. "You're right. Bad timing. Bad optics. All of it. I get it."
She didn't get it, not the real shape of it, because I hadn't given her anything true enough to get.
I stood there and watched her walk back across the field, Ember trotting docile at her side for once, her spine straight the whole way, her pace so even it told me exactly how much effort it was taking to look effortless.
She did not look back once. Not at the treeline, not at the thicket, not at me standing there in the wreckage of my own hesitation with a piece of blackberry cane still caught in my glove.
I stood in that field longer than I needed to, furious at myself in a way I hadn't been in two years, not since a stairwell and a name I still couldn't say out loud. This was nothing like that failure. Except that once again I'd stood still while something that mattered walked away, and let it.
I had run into burning buildings. I had made calls in four seconds that other men needed four minutes to talk themselves into.
And I had just stood in a snowy field and let the one thing I actually wanted disappear across it because I was more afraid of a county rep's opinion than I had ever been of an actual fire.
I thought about walking after her. I stood there long enough to actually consider it, boots planted in snow gone gray with the last of the light, and then I thought about Digby's face if word got back to him that the fire chief he'd praised for his direct involvement had chased a woman across a field in front of his own crew, and I stayed right where I was, which told me everything I needed to know about which fear was currently winning.
That was its own kind of failure to act, and it did not feel any smaller than the other one.