31. Derek
DEREK
The storm had blown itself out sometime before dawn.
What it left behind was worse than the storm itself.
Snow was banked waist-high against the north side of the house, and the driveway had vanished under a drift that reshaped the whole yard.
I stood on the porch with a mug of coffee going cold in my hand, staring at four feet of white where a driveway used to be, and felt something loosen in my chest that had nothing to do with the cold at all.
Ember hit the drift before I'd finished the coffee.
He went in at a dead run, the way he did everything, and vanished up to his shoulders in a single leap. Only his tail stuck out, wagging so hard it looked like it belonged to some separate, happier dog.
"Ember."
He did not come out. He burrowed instead, deeper, snow flying in both directions, some private canine ecstasy playing out three feet beneath the surface of my own yard.
Leah came out behind me, wrapped in one of my flannel shirts over her own clothes, hair still loose from sleep, and stood beside me on the porch steps studying the wreckage of my dog with the particular calm of a woman who had, over the last month, developed an unusually high tolerance for exactly this kind of chaos.
"Is he stuck," she said, "or is this a lifestyle choice?"
"With that dog, it's never entirely clear."
"He's been in there ninety seconds."
"Give him time. He's building something."
She laughed, and the sound of it did the thing it always did lately, loosened something further in my chest that I'd spent two years keeping bolted down tight.
I set the coffee on the porch rail and went down the steps to dig him out, boots sinking to the knee with every stride, and by the time I reached the drift Ember had resurfaced on his own, snow crusted white across his whole face, looking so thoroughly delighted with himself that I didn't have the heart to scold him for it.
"You look ridiculous."
He did not look ashamed of that in the slightest. He shook once, hard, sending a fine spray of snow across both my legs, and dove straight back in.
"He's going back in."
"He's always going back in. That's the whole personality."
We got the shovels from the garage, one real, one a plastic child's shovel Sarge had left behind after some barbecue two summers ago that I'd never gotten around to throwing out, and Leah took the plastic one without complaint, attacking the drift around her car with more enthusiasm than the tool deserved.
"This is doing nothing," she said, after a solid minute of nothing visibly changing.
"It's doing something. It's just doing it at the speed of erosion."
"You have an actual shovel."
"I have the good shovel because I dug this driveway out for two winters before you ever got here. Seniority has privileges."
"That's not how shoveling works."
"It's how I've done it for two winters, and nothing's caved in yet.
" I traded her the real shovel anyway, because watching her lose a fight against three inches of packed snow with a toy meant for a five-year-old was doing something to my morning I didn't want to examine too closely, and took the plastic one myself, which promptly cracked down the length of the handle on my second pass. "This is Sarge's fault."
"Everything's Sarge's fault, in your world."
"Statistically, most things are."
We worked the driveway in uneven silence after that, breath fogging in the cold.
Ember kept weaving between our legs, dumping fresh snow off his fur onto whichever one of us was closest. By the time we'd cleared a path wide enough for her car, my hands had gone numb enough that I couldn't tell where the shovel ended and my fingers began.
"I should get going," Leah said, brushing snow off her sleeve, glancing toward the road where a county truck had finally passed twice, blade scraping low and loud.
"I've got vendor calls all morning, and Doris texted me four times about something she's calling a crisis that's probably not actually a crisis. "
"Probably."
"With Doris it's fifty-fifty."
"Give me two minutes. I want to grab something from inside before you go."
She didn't ask what, which was one of the things I liked best about her, that she let a sentence sit unexplained without needing to chase down every corner of it, and I went back inside alone while she scraped ice off her windshield with the edge of an old gift card she kept in her glove box for that reason alone.
I didn't need to grab anything. That was the part I hadn't told her.
I went to the bathroom first, the narrow cabinet above the sink where I kept only the number of things one man needed and nothing more.
I cleared the bottom shelf in about four seconds flat, my own razor and shaving cream shoved sideways to make room for nothing in particular, bare space where nothing currently sat.
I stood there a second looking at it, an empty shelf in my own bathroom, and felt something bigger than a shelf settle into my chest.
The dresser took longer. I emptied the bottom drawer of winter gloves I never wore and a box of photographs I hadn't opened in longer than I wanted to admit, and stacked both somewhere else, somewhere that didn't matter, until the drawer sat clean and waiting and completely empty in a house that had belonged to exactly one person for two years running.
I didn't examine it too hard. I'd learned, with her, that examining a good instinct too closely was usually how I talked myself out of it.
Two years ago clearing space for anyone in this house would have felt like risk, the specific kind that cost you something eventually, the kind I'd spent two years actively engineering my whole life to avoid.
It didn't feel like that this morning. It felt like the next obvious thing, plain and unremarkable, the way breathing was plain and unremarkable right up until you noticed you were doing it.
I didn't tell her. I wasn't ready to hand her the whole shape of it yet, not with a shovel still cooling in my hand and vendor calls waiting on her end of the morning. I just closed the drawer, quiet, and went back outside like I'd forgotten whatever I'd claimed to need.
"Get what you needed?" she asked, not looking up from the windshield.
"Yeah."
"You don't seem to be holding anything."
"I decided I didn't need it after all."
She glanced at me sideways, something curious crossing her face, and let it go without pushing, same as she let most things go these days, trusting I'd hand it over eventually on my own schedule instead of hers.
I walked her to the car, boots crunching over the path we'd cleared, and kissed her once at the door, unhurried, before she climbed in and pulled carefully out of the driveway, tires finding the ruts the plow had left further down the road.
I stood there in the cold a minute after her taillights disappeared, Ember leaning his whole snow-crusted weight into my leg, and thought about an empty drawer in my own dresser, and didn't feel a single thing I'd expected to feel about it.
The station, when I finally made it in an hour later, smelled like burnt coffee and wet boots, half the crew still shaking snow off their jackets by the door, and I'd barely gotten my own coat off before my phone rang with a number I recognized immediately and liked considerably less than most numbers that called me.
"Chief Walsh."
"Chief. Harlan Digby." He said his own name the way he said everything, flat and procedural, like he suspected I might have forgotten it overnight. "I'll keep this brief. The board convened an emergency session this morning."
"On what?"
"On the Winterfest funding timeline." A pause, the particular pause he used right before handing over something he knew I wasn't going to like.
"The filing deadline has moved. The second day of the new year, eight a.m. sharp.
Full revenue figures, the economic impact report, all of it, complete and verified by the time that office opens. "
"That's the same date it's always been."
"The date's the same. The time isn't. Previously it was end of business.
Now it's eight a.m." He said it like the distinction should have been obvious to me from the start, mildly irritated that it wasn't. "The board wants to review the figures before their own session at nine, not scramble through them same day.
It's a scheduling matter on their end, not mine. "
"You're moving up a deadline eight hours because it's convenient for a meeting."
"I'm relaying what the board decided. I don't set the formula, Chief.
I apply it." He let that sit exactly as long as he always let his favorite lines sit, long enough to make sure I'd heard it properly.
"Ms. Bennett will need every figure locked and submitted the night before, realistically, if she wants any margin at all for a printer jam or a bad night's sleep. "
"She's already carrying vendor coordination, sponsorship, and the entire final week of the festival on top of this."
"That's not new information to me, Chief. Nor is it grounds for an extension. I asked the board directly. They declined."
"You asked."
"I asked. On the department's behalf, given the department's direct involvement.
" He said it almost gently, which from Digby counted as an apology, though not one I particularly wanted from him.
"The second day of the new year, eight a.m. sharp.
The board moved it up. I'm sorry, Chief. Actually, I'm not. It's a formula."
"That's not an apology, Digby."
"It wasn't meant to be one. I was being precise." A pause, papers shuffling somewhere on his end. "I'll send the updated requirements in writing within the hour. I'd suggest telling Ms. Bennett sooner than that, given the compressed window."
He hung up without waiting for anything else, the way he always did, business concluded the second the last relevant fact had been delivered, and I stood there in the middle of the bay with my coat half off and a tightened deadline sitting in my chest like a stone I hadn't asked for.
Sarge caught the tail end of my expression from across the bay and didn't bother pretending he hadn't. "There's the Digby face."
"He's earned it lately."
"What'd he move this time?"
"The deadline. Eight hours earlier, no extensions. Board's decision, not his. Allegedly." I finished pulling my coat off and hung it with more force than it required. "She's going to have to have everything locked the night before now instead of same day."
"She'll handle it. She's been handling worse than Digby since the day she hit your truck."
"I know she will. That's not the part bothering me."
"Then what is?"
I didn't have a clean answer for that, not one I wanted to hand Sarge before I'd handed it to myself first, so I pulled out my phone instead and called her, watching the numbers on the display climb toward a full connection while the crew moved around me toward the trucks for the morning check.
She picked up on the second ring, already laughing at something on her end before she even said hello.
"If this is Doris again, I've already told her the crisis can wait until after lunch."
"It's not Doris."
"Worse or better?"
"Digby moved the filing deadline up. The second day of the new year, eight a.m., not end of day. He's sending it in writing within the hour, but I wanted you to hear it from me first."
She went quiet for one full second, the kind of pause I'd learned to read as her running the numbers fast behind her eyes rather than panicking.
When she spoke again, her voice had already settled into something steady and certain that undid me a little more than I was prepared for on an ordinary cold morning in the bay.
"Okay. We move everything up a day. I'll have the vendor totals locked by the thirty-first instead of the first, print everything the night before, and hand-deliver it myself before eight." A small laugh, easy, unbothered. "We've got this."
"Just like that."
"Just like that. Panicking about it later won't make the paperwork move any faster now." Something warmer crept into her voice, the kind she usually saved for the end of a call rather than the middle of one. "Thank you for telling me yourself instead of letting me find out from an email."
"I wasn't going to let you find out from an email."
"I know. That's why I said thank you."
We talked another minute about nothing that mattered, logistics and timing and whether Doris's actual crisis needed handling before or after the vendor totals, and by the time I hung up I stood there in the bay with the phone still warm against my ear, watching Priya and Tomás run through the morning truck check across the floor, and felt exactly the thing I'd felt clearing an empty drawer an hour earlier, except louder now, harder to ignore.
She hadn't panicked. She hadn't asked me to fix it, hadn't needed reassurance. She'd just recalculated on the spot and handed the whole crisis back to me lighter than she'd received it. That was how she handled everything that landed on her desk lately, calm and sure and entirely her own.
I had no idea, standing there in that cold bay with an empty drawer waiting for her back at the house, that she was carrying a decision of her own, already made and kept quiet, the same way I'd kept that empty shelf to myself that morning.
I just knew I was falling for a woman who said we've got this like it wasn't even a question, and that some stubborn, hopeful part of me had already stopped being afraid of exactly how hard I was falling.