17. Leah
LEAH
Pinewood Perk after hours looked nothing like the version I saw every morning.
Chairs were stacked upside down on every table but two, the espresso machine gone quiet and dark.
The string lights along the exposed beams were still glowing, warm, because Maddie had left them on for us, and she announced it the second we walked in like she'd been planning this since the day I hit Derek's truck.
"I made cocoa." Maddie set two mugs down on the one table wearing its chairs right side up, whipped cream piled high enough to qualify as its own weather system.
"Real cocoa, not the packet kind. I'm closing up, so you two have the place to yourselves.
Lock the front door when you leave and slide the key through the mail slot. "
"You don't have to leave," Derek said, hands smelling faintly of engine grease no amount of soap had fully gotten out.
"I absolutely have to leave. I have a husband who thinks I still live at this coffee shop, and I'd like to prove him wrong at least one night a week.
" Maddie was already untying her apron, grinning at me over Derek's shoulder in a way that promised a full interrogation later.
"Enjoy your cocoa. Enjoy your non-date. I'll see myself out. "
"It's not a date," Derek said, to the table, to the cocoa, to no one in particular.
"Never said it was, Chief." Maddie grabbed her coat off the hook by the door, and the bell above it chimed once on her way out, leaving the two of us alone with two mugs of cocoa, a wall of string lights, and a silence that didn't feel like it needed filling nearly as badly as I expected it to.
"She's going to interrogate me tomorrow," I said, pulling a chair out across from him.
"She's going to interrogate me tonight. She just texted Sarge, I'd bet money on it."
"Sarge already thinks we're getting married."
"Sarge thought that the week I got here. By now he's probably picked out china patterns."
I laughed, surprised by how easy it came, and wrapped both hands around the mug for the warmth more than anything, watching him across the small table with his sleeves still pushed up and a smear of grease along one forearm he hadn't quite managed to scrub off.
For six weeks we'd talked in permits and setbacks and fire code, giving almost nothing away on purpose.
Something about an empty coffee shop after dark, with nobody left to interrupt us, made all of that feel suddenly optional.
"Can I ask you something?" I said, before I'd fully decided to.
"You're going to ask it either way."
"Fair." I turned the mug slowly between my hands. "What made you become a firefighter? Not the version you give the town hall. The real one."
He was quiet for a second, considering it the way he considered everything, like a question deserved actual weight before he handed an answer back.
"My father wasn't one. Wasn't anything close to it, actually.
He fixed transmissions for thirty years and complained about his knees the whole time.
" He turned his own mug a quarter turn, an unconscious mirror of what I was doing with mine.
"I liked the idea of a job where showing up mattered in a way you could actually measure.
You go, or you don't. Somebody's better off because of it, or they're not.
No spreadsheets arguing about outcomes for six months afterward. "
"That's a very controlled reason to run into a burning building."
"Most good reasons are controlled ones. It's the bad ones that show up loud."
I let that sit for a moment, filing it away with the rest of what he'd told me, and decided that since he'd asked for the real version, he owed me the truth in return.
"You want the real version of my story too? Fair's fair."
"I've been curious since the U-Haul."
I took a breath, and then I just started talking, because it turned out two years of carrying something carefully was a lot easier to set down than I expected once somebody actually asked to hold it.
"I was engaged. His name was Trevor. Charming, handsome, could talk his way into or out of anything, and I mean anything, which should have been my first warning sign and somehow wasn't." I wrapped both hands tighter around the mug.
"I worked for a woman named Diane Petrov.
Best event planner in Denver, brilliant, ruthless, the kind of boss who taught you everything valuable she knew and never once let you forget she was the one who'd taught it to you. "
"That's a great combination. Fiancé and boss."
"It was a spectacular combination, actually, right up until the part where they fell in love with each other over one of my client's seating charts."
Derek went very still, mug halfway to his mouth. "They what?"
"I was planning a wedding for a couple who'd hired me specifically because Diane recommended me personally, which in hindsight is its own kind of joke I didn't appreciate at the time.
Trevor used to help me with logistics sometimes, moving boxes, running errands, being generally useless in a charming way.
Diane used to review my seating charts before every big event, because apparently my instincts on where to put difficult relatives needed her personal sign-off.
" I shook my head, and the laugh that came out wasn't a happy one, but it wasn't broken either, more like something I'd sanded the sharp edges off through sheer repetition.
"Nothing says 'I love you' like your fiancé and your boss color-coding a seating chart together at two in the morning while I was asleep in the next room, thinking my fiancé was working late and my boss was being generous with her time. "
"How long did you know?"
"I didn't know at all. Not one single second of suspicion, which is either a testament to how good they were at hiding it or how bad I am at noticing when people are lying to my face.
I found out at the actual wedding, at the rehearsal dinner, in front of the client I'd been serving for eight months.
" I made myself keep my voice light, because the alternative was not something I wanted to hand him in a coffee shop with the lights this soft.
"Trevor got drunk on champagne and made a toast that was supposed to be about the happy couple.
Somehow it became entirely about himself and Diane, timeline included, dates included.
Apparently he'd been wanting to say it out loud for a while, and champagne finally gave him the nerve.
In front of eighty guests. In front of the bride, who I'd promised the most perfect night of her life. In front of me."
Derek set his mug down without drinking from it.
"I threw a centerpiece," I added, mostly because the joke was easier than the silence that followed.
"Not at anyone. Just down. Forcefully. There's a difference, legally speaking, though the venue manager filed an incident report anyway.
Two incident reports in one lifetime. I'm building quite a collection, apparently, and you were there for the second one. "
"Leah."
"It's fine. It was two years ago. I'm basically a different person now, a person who lives in a mountain town and argues with a fire chief about bonfire radius for fun." I tried to make it land light, and mostly succeeded, except for the last word, which came out smaller than I meant it to.
"It's not fine." He said it quietly, no performance to it, just flat and certain the way he said most things that mattered. "You don't throw a centerpiece over something that's fine."
I looked up at that, caught off guard by how precisely he'd found the one thread I usually managed to keep hidden under all the jokes.
"No," I admitted. "I don't."
"What did it cost you? Actually cost you. Not the version with the good lines in it."
Nobody had ever asked me that directly, not even Maddie, who'd lived through the whole thing three states away over the phone and still somehow managed to only ever ask if I was doing okay, a question easy enough to lie your way around. Derek's question didn't leave me anywhere to hide.
"It cost me believing my own judgment." My voice came out steadier than I expected, though something underneath it wasn't steady at all.
"I'd built my whole career on reading people, on knowing what a room needed before it asked for it, and I completely missed the two people closest to me falling in love right under my nose for months.
So now I second guess everything. Every read on a person, every instinct, I run it through this exhausting extra filter now, because the one time it mattered most, I got it catastrophically wrong. "
He didn't say anything for a moment, and I braced for whatever came next, the reassurance or the deflection or the careful subject change people usually reached for once you handed them something that heavy.
He reached for his own mug instead, wrapped both hands around it, and looked at me the way he looked at a fire he was about to walk into, calm and unflinching and entirely without performance.
"I know what that costs," he said. "The second guessing everything afterward."
"Derek."
"His name was Mike." The words came out low, careful, like he was setting each one down somewhere fragile.
"We were partners for fifteen years. Boston.
He had a laugh you could hear three trucks away and he made fun of my coffee order every single shift the whole time and never once got tired of the bit.
" He turned the mug in his hands, not looking at me now, looking somewhere past my shoulder instead.
"A call went wrong. I don't have all of it in me tonight, the whole shape of it, but a call went wrong, and I've never really put it down since. "
I didn't say anything right away, mostly because I didn't trust myself not to reach for him too fast and startle whatever this was into stopping.
"You don't have to put it down tonight," I said finally, quiet, careful with it the way he'd been careful with his own words. "I just want to hold some of it, if you'll let me."
Something moved across his face, fast and unguarded, gone before I could name it, and his hand slid across the table to meet mine halfway. Our fingers found each other over two mugs of cooling cocoa like neither of us had actually chosen it.
His hand was warm despite the grease and the cold night outside. Neither of us said anything for a long moment, the string lights humming faint overhead, both of us finally done performing being fine at each other.
"Thank you," he said eventually, "for asking the real question instead of the easy one."
"Thank you for answering it."
"I haven't said his name out loud in two years."
"I know," I said, though I hadn't, not really, not the specifics, only the shape of how much it must have cost him to say it. "I'm glad you did."
He looked down at our hands like he was only now registering they'd found each other, and something almost like a smile started at the corner of his mouth, the first easy one I'd seen from him all night.
Then his eyes caught the clock above the espresso machine, and every line of him changed at once.
"It's eight fifty-eight."
"So?"
"The countdown's at nine." He was already up, already pulling me with him, chair scraping loud against the floor. "We are two blocks from the square and I promised Judy I'd be standing next to the switch."
"You're going to be late to your own tree lighting?"
"We're about to be. And if we don't move in the next thirty seconds, I am never going to hear the end of it from Sarge, who will absolutely make it a toast at somebody's wedding someday."
We ran, hands still locked together, out the door and down the frozen sidewalk, breath fogging behind us, laughing too hard to explain ourselves to the people we startled on the corner.
The square glowed gold and waiting up ahead, the crowd already thick around the stage by the time we reached its edge, and neither of us let go.