33. Derek
DEREK
Snow fell soft and windless over the square that night, the kind that seemed to hang in the air before it settled.
It caught gold in every candle flame lined along Main Street.
I stood near the gazebo with a candle of my own, wax already dripping warm over my knuckles, and watched four hundred people hold tiny flames steady in the dark.
The whole town had turned out despite the cold, more of them than I expected on a night like this.
Doris stood near the church steps with a box of spare candles, pressing them into the hands of anyone who'd forgotten to bring one.
Maddie hovered by the cocoa stand with a cup she wasn't drinking from, more interested in scanning the crowd than staying warm.
A pack of kids looped the gazebo at a dead run despite three different parents calling for them to slow down, sneakers kicking up powder that caught gold in the candlelight on its way back down.
Leah found me there with two candles of her own, one already lit, passing the flame to a stranger's wick beside her before she ever made it to me.
"You look like a man guarding something," she said, tipping her candle toward mine so I could light it properly instead of holding it like a threat.
"I'm guarding the wax. It's aggressive tonight."
"Wax isn't aggressive."
"This wax has opinions. It's already ruined one glove."
She laughed, quiet, and settled in beside me at the edge of the crowd, her shoulder finding mine the way it did most nights now without either of us deciding it on purpose.
Up front, Judy stood at a small podium wired into a sound system Sarge had spent an hour testing that afternoon, her good coat buttoned to the throat, clearly primed for a speech longer than the occasion strictly required.
"Friends," Judy began, voice booming out over the square, amplified enough to rattle the storefront windows. "Tonight isn't just about candles. Tonight is about light finding its way through the darkest, coldest part of the year, and if you'll indulge me a moment on the subject of light itself."
"Here we go," Leah murmured.
"She's got at least six minutes of metaphor left in her."
Judy did not get six minutes. She got roughly forty seconds before the sound system let out a sharp electrical pop and died completely, her amplified voice cutting to nothing mid-sentence, the whole square going quiet enough that I heard the pop echo faintly off the church roof.
"Well," Judy said, considerably smaller without the microphone, visibly recalculating her entire evening in real time.
Nobody moved for a second. Then somewhere near the front, one voice started singing anyway, thin and a little unsteady, and a second voice joined it within two words, and by the third line half the square had picked it up without any signal to start, four hundred candles swaying soft in time to a hymn nobody needed a microphone to carry.
O holy night, the stars are brightly shining.
Leah's hand found mine somewhere in the second verse, and I let it, our candles tilting close together as the crowd swelled into the chorus.
Voices rough and off key carried the song clean across the square in a way Judy's dead microphone never could have.
I wasn't much of a singer. I mouthed along anyway, low, mostly for her benefit, and felt something in my chest ease the way it only ever did here, in this square, with this woman standing close enough that I could feel her shoulder shake slightly with the effort of not crying during a hymn about stars.
The song ended in scattered, imperfect harmony, and the whole crowd broke into applause for themselves, Judy included, laughing now instead of visibly panicking, waving off Sarge's attempts to fix the system with the easy confidence of a woman who'd just seen her festival succeed in spite of her own equipment.
"That was better than anything that speaker could have done," Leah said, wiping one eye with her free hand.
"It usually is. People just need a reason to stop waiting for permission."
"That's unreasonably profound for a man holding a dripping candle."
"I contain multitudes."
Behind us, Sarge had the access panel on the sound system open, muttering something to Priya about a blown fuse while Judy hovered at his shoulder offering suggestions he clearly wasn't using.
Nobody seemed to mind the delay. The square had drifted into its own quiet rhythm without the microphone, voices low, laughter carrying easy across the cold air the way it never quite managed indoors.
She laughed again, and I used the noise of the crowd still settling around us as cover to step us both back toward the gazebo steps, away from the thickest part of the crowd, close enough to the string lights that they threw warm color across her face instead of the flat white of the streetlamps further out.
"I have something for you," I said, "before the night gets away from us."
"You already got me a gift. The label maker incident alone should have used up your whole budget for the season."
"This isn't from the label maker."
I reached into my coat pocket, where I'd been carrying it since that morning, and closed my hand around it one last time. Then I held it out to her, a small brass coin worn smooth at the edges, a fire department insignia stamped into one face and a set of initials into the other.
"This was Mike's."
Leah went very still, her eyes moving from the coin to my face and back again, like she understood, somehow, that this wasn't a casual thing, even before I said another word.
"His challenge coin. Every crew carries them, and every firefighter's supposed to keep their own.
I kept his, after." I turned it once between my fingers before I pressed it into her open palm, closing her fingers around it gently with my own.
"I've never given it to anyone. Not once, in two years.
It's stayed in a drawer, or in my pocket, and nobody else has held it since the day his mother handed it back to me at the funeral and told me it belonged with somebody who'd carry him forward. "
"Derek."
"I want you to have every part of me. Not just the parts that are easy to hand over.
" My voice came out steadier than I expected, certainty carrying it the whole way through instead of running out halfway like it usually did on anything this heavy.
"Not just the funny stories about Ember or the parts where I fix your generator.
I mean the whole thing. Mike included. Boston included.
All of it, not filed away where it's safe for both of us. "
She didn't say anything right away, and I let the silence sit there, unafraid of it in a way I wouldn't have managed a few months ago, watching her turn the coin over once in her palm the same way I'd just turned it over in mine.
"I'm not going to lose this," she said finally, her voice thick, closing her hand around it like she meant to weld her fingers shut around the metal itself. "Any of it. Not the coin. Not what it means that you gave it to me."
"I know you won't."
"Do you have any idea what this cost you to hand over?"
"I do. It's why I did it anyway." I reached up and brushed a strand of hair back from her face, my hand lingering at her jaw the way it did most nights now, and saw something in her expression go soft and unguarded in the candlelight.
"Two years I kept that coin somewhere I didn't have to look at it too often.
I want it somewhere I get to see it in your hand instead. "
She closed the distance between us and kissed me, slow and certain, the crowd noise and Judy's ruined speech and the whole glowing square fading out around the edges of it, and for one full minute nothing existed except her mouth against mine and a small brass coin pressed warm between our joined hands.
My radio crackled against my hip.
I felt her freeze against me, some old, familiar tension coiling instantly through both of us, braced for the particular urgency that usually came through that speaker, and I pulled back far enough to answer it, watching her face for whatever came next.
"Chief, you there?" Sarge's voice came through easy and unhurried, nothing in it that matched the way my whole body had just gone rigid out of pure habit.
"Go ahead."
"Nothing urgent. Need your signature on a transport, is all. Mrs. Alvarez got a little dizzy by the cocoa stand. No relation, before anybody asks, everyone always asks. Vitals are fine, but she wants to get checked out proper, and paramedics need the chief's sign off before they load her."
I felt the whole tight coil of adrenaline drain back out of me almost as fast as it had arrived, replaced by something considerably more ordinary, and looked at Leah, who had gone from braced to laughing in the space of about two seconds.
"Copy. On my way."
"Sorry to interrupt whatever that was," Sarge added, entirely too smug for a man reporting a minor medical call. "Priya says you two looked very serious over there."
"Priya should mind her own equipment check."
"Priya's equipment check is done. That's how she has time to watch you two."
I clipped the radio back onto my belt and looked at Leah, who wore the particular smile she always got whenever my job interrupted a moment she'd clearly rather have kept going a while longer.
"Go," she said, before I could apologize for it. "Some things don't wait for permission either."
"I'll be twenty minutes."
"I'm not going anywhere."
I kissed her once more, quick, and jogged off toward the cocoa stand where a small cluster had gathered around a folding chair, Mrs. Alvarez sitting upright and mildly annoyed at all the fuss being made over what she insisted, loudly, was nothing more than standing up too fast. I signed the transport form, checked her pulse myself out of old habit more than necessity, and told the paramedics she was stable enough for a routine ride in, the whole exchange taking closer to ten minutes than the twenty I'd promised.
Mrs. Alvarez gripped my wrist once before they loaded her in, sharp enough that I nearly laughed despite myself, and told me in no uncertain terms that she expected a full report on how the rest of the evening went once she was back on her feet.
I told her I'd hold her to it. The paramedic pulled the doors shut, lights cycling slow and unhurried through the snow.
No siren, no reason for one, just a routine transport for a woman who'd stood up too fast. I stood there a second in the cold, letting that fact settle all the way through me.
Calls like this used to be the only kind I trusted myself to want.
Now they were just the kind that let me get back to the person waiting for me by the gazebo.
I looked back once before I turned toward the ambulance and found Leah exactly where I'd left her by the gazebo steps, candle burned down low in one hand, the coin still closed tight in the other.
She watched me with an expression I couldn't fully read from that distance, something that looked, even from thirty yards away, like a woman working something important out in her own head.
I didn't know what it was. I only knew, walking back toward her, string lights glowing warm overhead and snow still falling across the square, that I wanted to be close enough to hear it when she finally said it out loud.
For the first time in two years, I wasn't afraid of what that might be.