43. Leah
LEAH
The waiting room at Ridgeview General had four chairs bolted along one wall, arranged in a row that didn't match the four across from it.
A coffee table held last season's magazines fanned out like nobody had touched them since summer, and one vending machine hummed under fluorescent light so flat and white it left everyone standing beneath it looking half dead already.
I'd been sitting across from that machine for what felt like a year.
My phone told me it had been forty minutes.
Maddie sat two seats down, a blanket still draped over her shoulders from the square, her hands wrapped around a paper cup of coffee she hadn't so much as sipped.
Sarge stood by the window with his arms crossed, watching the parking lot like it owed him something, and every few minutes a nurse walked past the double doors at the end of the hall without once turning her head our way.
"They said he was stable." I repeated it out loud mostly to hear it again, to see if it sounded more true the second time. "That's what the paramedic said. Stable."
"Stable's good." Sarge didn't turn from the window. "Stable means his body's not fighting him for the wrong reasons anymore."
"Stable isn't a diagnosis. Stable is a word they hand out so people stop asking questions in the parking lot."
He looked at me then, something almost like a smile tugging at one corner of his mouth even now. "You're not wrong. You want me to go find someone and make them regret handing it out?"
"Would that actually work?"
"No. But it would feel good for about ninety seconds."
I laughed, a short, ragged sound that surprised me coming out of my own chest, and Maddie reached over without a word and squeezed my hand once before letting it go, the kind of gesture that didn't need anything attached to it.
An hour passed with nothing in it but the vending machine's hum and the squeak of somebody's shoes down a hallway I couldn't see.
I got up twice to buy coffee I didn't want, just to have something to do with my hands that wasn't twisting the hem of my jacket into knots.
The second cup sat cooling on the table in front of me, untouched, a thin skin already forming across the top.
"You should eat something." Maddie's voice was quiet, careful, that of someone who'd clearly done this kind of waiting before and knew exactly how useless the advice was going to be.
"I can't."
"I know. I'm saying it anyway."
A doctor finally came through around one in the morning, tired eyes over a surgical mask pulled down around her neck, and my whole body went rigid the second I saw her scanning the room for a face to land on.
"Family of Derek Walsh?"
"I'm..." The word caught somewhere behind my teeth, because what was I, exactly, on the form nobody had thought to hand me yet. "I'm his partner. Sarge is his second in command. We're what he's got here tonight."
She looked between the two of us for exactly one second, decided it was close enough, and nodded.
"He's got smoke inhalation, moderate. We're keeping him on oxygen and watching his lungs closely for the next several hours.
There's also a burn along his right forearm, second degree, painful but not deep enough to need grafting. "
I knew that forearm. I knew every inch of it, the old scar tissue near his wrist he'd never once explained and I'd never once asked about, silver and puckered under my fingers more nights than I could count by now.
Whatever had marked him in Boston sat almost exactly where this new burn had landed.
It felt too cruel to be coincidence, even though I knew it had to be.
"Is he going to be okay?"
"He's out of danger and he's going to recover.
I won't lie to you and tell you tonight's going to feel like nothing, because smoke inhalation this significant means we watch him carefully until we're sure his lungs are clearing the way we want them to.
But the burn will heal. His vitals are strong. He's a lucky man."
"When can I see him?"
"Once he's settled in a room, which should be soon. He's sedated right now and likely will be for a few hours yet. I'd encourage you to rest if you can. There's nothing productive happening between now and when he wakes up except waiting."
She left before I could ask anything else, and the word sedated settled in my chest like a weight I hadn't asked to carry, heavier than anything vague the paramedics had said in the parking lot. Stable had been a placeholder. This was a shape, and the shape had teeth in it I hadn't braced for.
"Hey." Sarge crossed the room and sat down in the chair beside me, close enough that his shoulder nearly touched mine. "You heard her. He's going to be fine."
"Fine's not the same as fine right now."
"No. It's not." He didn't try to argue me out of the fear, which somehow helped more than if he had. "But I've seen worse walk out of buildings and be back on shift inside a month complaining about the coffee. He's tougher than tonight is trying to convince you he is."
Maddie excused herself not long after to check on Judy, who'd apparently taken the whole thing hard enough that somebody needed to sit with her too, and then it was just me and Sarge in a waiting room that felt bigger with fewer people in it instead of smaller.
He didn't leave. He settled deeper into the chair like he had nowhere else in the world he needed to be, and for a long while neither of us said anything at all.
"You want to hear something that'll make you laugh?" he said eventually, somewhere past two in the morning, when the hallway had gone quiet enough that I could hear the building's own pulse humming through the walls.
"Desperately."
"You should've seen him at my kid's christening. Cried like a baby and denied it for a year."
I turned to look at him fully for the first time in an hour. "Derek. Cried."
"Sobbed. Full ugly cry, the kind where you're trying to be quiet about it and failing completely.
Stood in the back of the church with his jaw locked so tight I thought he might crack a tooth, and it didn't matter, tears just kept coming anyway.
" Sarge's mouth curved, soft with the memory.
"Afterward I asked him about it at the reception, and he looked me dead in the eye and told me he had allergies.
In a stone church. In the middle of winter. "
"What did you say?"
"I told him my daughter appreciated being compared to seasonal pollen. He didn't think that was funny at the time."
"Is it funny now?"
"It's the funniest thing I own. I bring it up at least twice a year specifically to watch him get uncomfortable.
" He shook his head slowly, and something in his voice shifted, quieter now, more careful with what he said next.
"That man doesn't let much through the walls he's built himself.
But when it does get through, it gets through all the way. No half measures. Never has."
"I know." I did, better than almost anyone. "That's part of why I'm sitting here instead of anywhere else."
"Figured as much." He glanced sideways at me, something assessing in it that felt less like judgment and more like a man double-checking a fact he already believed. "You scared?"
"Terrified."
"You thinking about running?"
The question landed harder than he probably meant it to, and I understood, somewhere underneath the sting of it, exactly why he was asking.
That exact fear had cost this town people before, and he'd probably watched Derek pay that same price himself.
"No. Not for one second tonight. Not for one second since I decided to stay in this town in the first place. "
"Good." He said it simply, like it settled something he'd been carrying since the parking lot. "Wasn't sure. Figured I'd ask instead of wondering."
"I'm not her, Sarge."
"I know that. I think you've known it longer than I have." He leaned back, closing his eyes for a second like the conversation had cost him something too. "Doesn't mean tonight isn't hard. Just means hard isn't the same thing as wrong."
I sat with that for a long time after he stopped talking, turning it over the way I'd turned over so many things about this man and this town since the night I first drove in with a U-Haul and a plan that hadn't survived contact with any of it.
Rachel would have spent tonight measuring the cost, adding up every hour like this one against the life she'd wanted, deciding somewhere around dawn that the math didn't work anymore.
I wasn't doing that math. I'd already done it, weeks ago, in a kitchen with Diane on the phone and a decision that had felt like falling and landing in the same instant.
I wasn't sitting here wondering if I could survive loving a man who ran toward fire.
I already knew I could. I was only sitting here praying I wouldn't have to prove it tonight, in this hallway, under this light.
Somewhere around three thirty I got up and found the window at the end of the hall, dark outside except for the parking lot lights and one streetlamp flickering on a delay like it hadn't decided yet whether it was worth the effort.
I pressed my forehead against the cold glass and let myself say the thing I hadn't said out loud all night, quiet, not quite a prayer because I'd never been the kind of person who prayed, but close enough to one that it didn't matter what I called it.
"Please. Not like this. Not after everything."
Nobody answered me. Nobody was supposed to.
I stood there anyway, forehead against glass, until the shaking in my hands settled into something closer to stillness, and then I went back to my chair because that was where I could still be useful, sitting close enough that someone would find me the second there was anything to find.
A nurse came through around four with an update that Doris was awake, talking, already complaining about hospital food loudly enough that half the ward had heard her do it.
She added, almost as an afterthought, that Mr. Hendricks had turned up fine an hour earlier, treated and released, having made it out through the far side of the tent on his own steam before the worst of the smoke ever reached him.
I laughed at that too, real relief cutting through the exhaustion for the first time in hours, and I filed the news away carefully, because I already knew, without anyone telling me, exactly whose first question was going to need that answer the moment he had breath enough to ask it.
Dawn came the way it always does in a hospital, without any real announcement, just a slow graying of the hallway window and the shift change bringing fresh faces down the corridor with clipboards and quieter voices.
I'd moved my chair as close to his door as they'd let me, watching a monitor through the gap where the curtain didn't quite meet the wall, counting the numbers on it like they were something I actually understood.
His eyes moved first, a small flutter under closed lids that stopped my whole body cold, and then they opened, slow and unfocused, blinking hard against the light like it was an assault he hadn't been warned about.
"Derek." I was up and beside the bed before I'd decided to move, one hand finding his uninjured one without thinking twice about it.
His mouth worked for a second before anything came out, his voice wrecked down to something barely above a whisper, rough as gravel dragged over concrete. "Is she okay... is Doris..."
I laughed, and somewhere in the middle of laughing I started crying too.
Of course that was what he'd ask first. Of course the first thing out of a throat that had spent all night in smoke was somebody else's name and not his own.
I'd already known that answer for hours, and this, stubborn and selfless, was exactly the man I loved.