27. Derek
DEREK
The office smelled like burnt coffee and toner, same as it did most weeks by now.
Paperwork stood in leaning towers across every flat surface I owned, the tallest one threatening to slide off the filing cabinet whenever somebody walked past too fast. I'd given up trying to file any of it in order weeks ago.
There was a system. The system was that everything eventually got done, usually at the worst possible hour, usually by me.
Priya knocked on the doorframe at half past seven, still in her turnout pants, hair scraped back tight enough to look like it hurt.
"Chief, you got a minute?"
"Depends what you did."
"Nothing yet. That's the problem." She stepped in, holding a clipboard of her own, a nervous habit she'd picked up from watching Sarge do the same thing for six years straight.
"I ran the equipment check on Engine Two twice because the first time I couldn't remember if I'd actually checked the hose couplings or just thought about checking them. "
"And?"
"They were fine. Both times." She exhaled, some of the tension leaving her shoulders. "I just wanted somebody to know I double checked. In case it mattered."
"It mattered that you noticed you weren't sure. That's half the job." I set my pen down, giving her the actual attention instead of the distracted kind I'd been rationing out all week. "Rookies who never doubt themselves are the ones who miss things. The doubt means you're paying attention."
"Sarge doesn't doubt himself."
"Sarge has six years on you and a memory for hose couplings that borders on unnatural.
Give it time." I watched her take that in, filing it away the careful, deliberate way she filed everything, like she was afraid of losing a single piece of instruction if she didn't. I recognized the look.
I'd worn it myself once, a long time ago, in a station that didn't exist anymore except in the version of it I still carried around.
"You're six months in. Nobody expects you to move like Sarge yet. I didn't, at your age."
"You moved like Sarge at my age?"
"I moved like a man trying too hard to prove he belonged somewhere, which looked a lot like competence from the outside and felt a lot like panic on the inside.
" I hadn't meant to say that much of it out loud, but Priya had gone still in the specific way people go still when they're actually listening instead of just waiting for their turn to talk, and something about that made it easier to keep going.
"It took me years to stop white knuckling every call like it was a test I could fail permanently.
You don't have to get there that fast. Ask the dumb question.
Double check the couplings twice if you need to. "
"What if I ask the dumb question in front of everybody and it turns out not to be dumb, just embarrassing?"
"Then it turns out to be embarrassing, and you survive it, and next time it's a little less embarrassing.
" I almost smiled at the look on her face, somewhere between relief and disbelief that I was actually saying any of this out loud.
"I'm not going to pretend I'm good at this part.
Sarge is better at the encouraging speeches. But I meant what I said. Keep asking."
She left a few minutes later looking steadier than she had walking in.
I sat there a moment longer than the empty office required, thinking how much easier it would have been if somebody had told me the same thing six years into my own career, instead of letting me figure it out alone, in a city that eventually cost me more than I ever admitted out loud until two nights ago.
The knock that came next was sharper, more official, and I knew who it was before I looked up.
Harlan Digby stood in the doorway with his clipboard held against his chest like a shield, county polo tucked in with military precision, surveying my office with the particular disapproval of a man who alphabetized his own spice rack.
"Chief. I'm conducting the facilities inspection the board mandated for continued funding review."
"Nobody told me you were coming today."
"That's rather the point of a surprise inspection.
" He stepped inside without waiting for an invitation, running one finger along the top of a filing cabinet and studying the dust it collected like evidence in a trial only he understood the stakes of.
"Your equipment logs are current, which I'll note favorably. Your office, less so."
"I fight fires, Digby. I don't decorate."
"Noted." He made an actual mark on his clipboard, unbothered by the edge in my voice, same as he seemed to be by most things I said to him. "There's something else. New directive from the board, effective immediately."
"New meaning what, exactly?"
"It means the attendance and revenue figures I requested aren't sufficient on their own anymore.
The board wants a formal economic impact report filed alongside them.
Vendor receipts, itemized. Verified ticket sales where applicable.
A signed attendance count from an authorized town official, not an estimate.
" He said each requirement like he was reading off a menu he'd personally curated to be as unappetizing as possible.
"All of it due the same date as the original figures. The second day of the new year."
"That's a massive lift to add this late in the game."
"It's the board's requirement, not mine.
I don't set policy, Chief. I apply it." He capped his pen, the small ritual gesture he made whenever he considered a point closed.
"Whoever's been compiling those figures should be aware.
This isn't a formality anymore. It's an actual audit trail.
If the documentation doesn't hold up, the funding conversation doesn't happen at all, regardless of what the raw numbers say. "
I stood there for a second doing the math I didn't want to be doing, the same math I'd been quietly running since the meeting where this whole thing started, except now the equation had gotten heavier without anyone asking if I could carry it.
"Verbal assurance isn't a line item, Chief.
" Digby said it like he'd read the exact shape of what I was thinking and wanted to close the door on it before I tried.
"I need documentation. All of it. Signed, dated, itemized.
I don't care how good the festival looks from the sidewalk.
I care what survives when somebody with a red pen goes through it in a windowless room in the spring. "
"Understood."
"Good." He tucked the clipboard back under his arm, already halfway to the door, business concluded in his own head the second the words left his mouth. "I'll be back for the final walkthrough closer to the date. Try to file something before then. It reflects poorly on the department otherwise."
He left the way he always did, without waiting to see what his words landed on, and I stood there in the wreckage of my own paperwork towers turning the new requirement over until it stopped sounding like an inconvenience and started sounding like exactly what it was.
This wasn't a repeat of the same warning.
This was new weight, and it wasn't going to land on Digby's desk or mine.
It was going to land on Leah, stacked on top of the vendor coordination, the sponsorship chasing, and everything else she'd already been carrying since the day Judy handed her this festival.
Vendor receipts didn't organize themselves.
A signed attendance count didn't materialize out of goodwill.
Somebody had to build that whole audit trail from nothing, in a month that already had a wedding, a grand opening, and Christmas somewhere inside it, and that somebody was going to be her, whether the county board understood what they were asking or not.
I thought about calling her right then, and decided against it.
Not because it could wait. Because I wanted to see her face when I told her, wanted to be standing close enough to actually help carry it instead of dropping it on her through a phone screen and driving home to pretend I'd done my part.
The rest of the shift passed in its usual scramble, one call for a smoke detector with a dying battery, one argument between Tomás and Sarge about whose turn it was to restock the med bags, Priya running her equipment checks a third time out of what I now recognized as genuine diligence instead of nerves.
I signed off on the day around six, told Priya she'd done good work, and drove home through streets already strung with lights I hadn't put up myself in two years.
My own porch sat dark when I pulled in, same as every winter since Boston, string lights still coiled in a box in the garage where I'd shoved them the first year and never once looked at again.
I stood in the driveway a long moment, engine ticking as it cooled, staring at the black outline of my own house against a sky gone the deep, flat blue of full dark.
I got the ladder out before I could talk myself out of it.
The lights fought me from the first coil, tangled in on themselves in the specific, malicious way that only Christmas lights managed, knots appearing in places that shouldn't have physically allowed for knots.
I climbed the stepladder anyway, breath fogging out in front of me, fingers going numb inside gloves that weren't doing nearly enough against the cold, and worked one stubborn strand free inch by inch while Ember supervised from the porch steps with the mild, unhelpful interest of a dog who had no intention of assisting.
"I have fought actual structure fires," I told the lights, out loud, to no one, wrestling a knot that seemed to be actively resisting on principle. "You will not defeat me."
The knot did not care. I kept working it anyway, patient in a way I rarely let myself be about anything that didn't involve a fire, hooking the strand along the gutter edge one small stretch at a time, uneven, crooked in places, nothing close to the tidy lines other houses on the street already wore.
I didn't care. I hung the whole first strand and stood back on the ladder to look at it, lopsided and a little sad and entirely mine.
Something in my chest loosened, after two full winters of driving past every other lit up house in this town without once turning down my own driveway to try.
I was smiling, standing on a ladder in the cold at nothing in particular, grinning like an idiot at a tangled string of lights I'd fought and mostly beaten. It took me a second to realize I hadn't done that in this exact spot, on this exact porch, in exactly two years.
I kept going anyway, strand after strand, the porch slowly filling in gold and warm against the dark, and I was so deep into untangling the third strand that I almost missed the headlights turning into the mouth of my street, slowing as they came, easing to a stop at the curb instead of pulling into the driveway.
Leah's car sat there a long moment, engine still running, exhaust curling pale in the cold behind it.
I looked over from the ladder, one string of lights half strung between my hand and the gutter, and found her sitting behind the wheel with one hand pressed over her mouth, not moving, not honking, not calling out to announce herself the way she usually did.
She just watched me. A whole minute, maybe longer, her car idling at the curb while I stood there on a stepladder covered in half-strung Christmas lights.
Something in her stillness told me exactly what she was looking at: a man losing a fight with a string of lights for her sake.
Watching it, she'd been too wrecked to interrupt.