29. Derek
DEREK
Leah had been somewhere else for two days straight, and I'd been telling myself it was the festival.
It was an easy story to believe. The economic impact report Digby wanted was enough to keep anyone distracted, vendor receipts and ticket counts and a signed attendance form that still didn't exist in any usable format, and she'd been carrying that weight since the meeting where I'd handed it to her like a man passing off a live wire.
I watched her go quiet mid-sentence twice at the diner two nights ago, watched her stare at her phone a beat too long before setting it face down on the table between us, and told myself every time that it was spreadsheets.
Numbers. The exhaustion of building an audit trail out of nothing in the middle of a festival that already had a wedding and a grand opening stacked into the same month.
I believed it because it was easier than the alternative, and because I didn't have any actual evidence pointing anywhere else.
The call came in a little after two, smoke reported rolling low across the frozen fields out past the county line, an abandoned barn on land nobody had worked in years.
I was in the truck before dispatch finished the address, adrenaline doing what it always did, clean and simple and blessedly free of anything else crowding my head.
Smoke hung thick and gray over the tree line by the time we rolled up, visible from half a mile out, curling low across the fields instead of rising like fire normally would. Wind was doing that. Wind and a roofline that had probably been failing for a decade before flame ever touched it.
"Structure's compromised on the north side already," I said, out of the truck before it had fully stopped, eyes on the sagging roofline. "Priya, Tomás, exterior attack only. Nobody goes inside that barn."
"Copy." Priya was already moving, faster than she used to be, gear sitting easy on her now, the calm that came from somebody who'd stopped thinking about the gear and started thinking about the fire instead.
"Sarge, water supply. We're running off the tanker out here, no hydrant for two miles.
" I pulled my own gear tight, watching the smoke shift with the wind, reading it same as I read every fire, half instinct and half two decades of learning what smoke color and density actually meant.
"This burns hot and fast in old dry wood. I want a perimeter and I want it now."
The next twenty minutes passed fast and loud, entirely too close to something going wrong at any given second.
The roof went about twelve minutes in, a groan and then a crash that sent a fresh column of sparks up into the gray sky, and I felt my whole body go cold and precise the way it always did right at the edge of a call turning bad.
"Ventilation's backing up on the leeward side," Priya called out, voice steady despite the chaos, watching smoke pool and thicken instead of clearing like it should have. "Requesting to adjust the attack angle, Chief. Current position's feeding it instead of starving it."
I looked at what she was looking at, ran the same math she'd apparently already run, and found her right before I'd even finished thinking it through myself.
"Do it. Sarge, back her up."
She adjusted the angle clean and fast, reading airflow off a burning building better than most people twice her experience, and the smoke thinned within ninety seconds, the fire finally starving out once its air ran out instead of getting fed more.
We had it fully out forty minutes later, the barn a smoking, blackened skeleton against a field gone silver white with old snow, structurally a total loss but nothing that had ever threatened another building or another life.
Nobody hurt. Nobody even close to hurt, which on a call like this counted as a genuinely good outcome.
I found Priya afterward, gear steaming faintly in the cold, soot streaked across one cheek, still riding the high that came after fighting a fire clean and winning.
"Good call on the ventilation." I said it plainly, meaning every word of it, and watched it land on her slow and a little disbelieving, like she wasn't used to hearing it. "That's not luck, Priya. That's training. Remember that."
"I almost didn't say anything. Figured you'd already seen it."
"I had. Didn't matter one bit. You called it out loud, on your own read, under real pressure, and you were right.
" I clapped a hand once on her shoulder, quick, the same gesture Sarge used a hundred times a week that I almost never bothered with myself.
"That's the whole job, right there. You just did it. "
"Sarge is going to be insufferable about this," Priya said, climbing into the truck. "He's going to tell everyone he taught me that."
"He probably will."
"Did he teach me that?"
"He taught you plenty. He didn't teach you tonight.
That call was yours, under pressure, with a burning building depending on you getting it right.
" I shut the truck door behind her, watching her sit up a little straighter at that.
"Don't let him take the whole thing. Let him have a piece of it. He's earned that much."
"That's surprisingly generous of you, Chief, for a man who barely speaks in complete sentences."
"Don't get used to it. I've got a reputation to maintain."
She was still smiling about it when we loaded the trucks, and I felt something settle in my chest watching her. Plain, simple satisfaction, watching her become the firefighter I'd already known she could be.
We rolled back into the station a little after four, gear steaming in the cold bay air, boots leaving wet tracks across concrete that would need mopping before the night crew came on.
I peeled off my turnout coat and hung it to dry, running the postfire checklist automatically, half my mind still on the call and half of it circling back, unwillingly, to a woman staring too long at her phone in a diner booth two nights running.
I saw her car pull into the lot while I was hosing down my own boots outside the bay, and something in my chest lifted the specific, uncomplicated way it always did lately whenever I spotted her car.
She came in with two coffees and a smile that looked mostly real, and for a few minutes it was easy, normal, the two of us leaning against the side of the truck while I told her about the barn and Priya's ventilation call, watching her laugh at the right places, watching the tension in her shoulders ease down half a notch the way it usually did once we were alone.
Her phone buzzed in her coat pocket. She glanced at the screen, and something crossed her face too fast for me to read clearly, gone before I could ask about it.
"I need to take this. Sorry. Two minutes." She was already moving toward the door, phone pressed to her ear, stepping out into the cold beyond the bay where the wind would carry her voice away from anyone still inside.
I told myself it was festival business. Vendor confirmation, sponsor logistics, something that needed her voice and not her inbox.
I told myself that right up until the door didn't fully latch behind her, caught on a gust of wind, and her voice carried back through the gap clear enough that I heard it before I could decide not to.
"...I know. I just need a few more days to think about the offer..."
The door swung shut on the rest of it, wind or her own hand pulling it closed, and I stood there in the bay with a rag still in one hand, boots half clean, the words repeating themselves in a space in my chest that had gone very quiet very fast.
Offer.
I ran through every harmless version of that word I could think of: some vendor pitching her a discount, some venue offering a better rate, Judy proposing an expanded role for next year's festival.
None of them explained the way her face had shifted before she left the room, or the particular careful quiet in her voice when she said it, like she was choosing each word with more weight than the sentence should have required.
She came back in a few minutes later, tucking her phone into her pocket, smile sliding back into place a beat too smooth to be entirely real.
"Everything okay?" I asked it plain, watching her face for whatever she'd let me see, giving her every opportunity to just say it, whatever it was.
"Fine. Vendor stuff."
"Vendor stuff usually doesn't send you outside into the cold like that."
"This one did." She said it easy, practiced, a smile fitted back into place a half second too late to be entirely convincing, and I let it sit there between us without pushing, mostly because I didn't know what I was pushing toward yet, and partly because some old, familiar instinct told me not to corner a person into a confession they weren't ready to give.
We finished our coffee. We talked about the festival, the walkthrough Digby still owed us, Priya's ventilation call one more time because Leah wanted every detail of it.
On the surface it was easy, the same as it always was between us.
But underneath it something had shifted, small and quiet, sitting between us now whether either of us named it or not.
She left a little after six, kissing me quick on her way out, and I stood in the empty bay a long moment after her taillights disappeared down the road, turning one fragment of a sentence over and over until it stopped sounding like words and started sounding like a warning I didn't have enough information to actually understand.
I drove home with the radio off, the cab silent except for tires on cold road and my own breathing, going too fast through a version of the conversation I hadn't actually had.
What offer.
I turned it over again and again, running through every plausible explanation and discarding each one a little faster than the last. None of them fit the gravity in her voice when she'd said the word think, like whatever was on the other end of that call mattered enough to make her step outside into the cold rather than say it in front of me.
I didn't call her. I told myself there'd be time for that, a right moment, not a phone call rushed through a bay door at the worst possible time.
I told myself a lot of things on that drive, most of them reasonable, none of them enough to loosen the particular knot sitting low in my chest since the moment her voice had carried back through a door that hadn't quite latched.
Two years I'd spent keeping people close enough to be safe and far enough to stay guarded.
Somewhere in the last two months I'd let that distance collapse entirely for exactly one person, trusting her with things I'd never handed anyone else.
I'd been as certain as I let myself be about anything that whatever came next, we'd face it standing in the same direction.
I hated how much four words could undo that. I hated it the whole drive home, quiet and cold and turning half a sentence over and over in a truck that had felt, an hour ago, like the easiest place in the world to be.
By the time I pulled into my own driveway I still hadn't landed on an explanation I trusted.
Ember met me at the door same as always, tail going, entirely unaware that anything had changed, and I sat down on the kitchen floor with him for a while, letting him lean his whole weight against me, because it was easier than sitting alone with the quiet.