47. Derek
DEREK
The dishes had been sitting in the sink since the morning of the hearing, plate stacked on plate the way they used to sit before Leah ever walked into this kitchen with a rescued casserole and two forks, and I stood at the counter in my dress uniform with the tie already pulled loose, staring at a sink I had no intention of doing anything about tonight either.
Ember lay by the front door instead of the hearth, chin flat on the floorboards, watching the door like he expected somebody to walk through it any minute now.
He'd been doing it for five days straight, ever since the night Leah's car pulled out of this driveway for what I'd told myself, at the time, was the last time.
He wasn't eating his dinner until I sat with him anymore.
He wasn't chewing anything he shouldn't.
He was just lying there, waiting. Some stubborn part of me kept telling him she wasn't coming.
Some other part of me refused to believe it.
The board had reversed the funding. I'd stood in a packed room that morning and watched two years of quiet dread lift clean off my chest, watched Sarge whoop loud enough to embarrass every one of us, watched Priya's hands finally stop shaking on a podium she'd earned the right to stand behind.
I should have felt like a man who'd just won back his whole life.
Instead I'd driven straight home, changed out of a uniform that still smelled like nerves, and sat in a quiet house with a dog who wouldn't stop staring at the door, because the one person I actually wanted to tell about any of it was the one person I'd spent five days making sure couldn't reach me.
I knew exactly what she'd done. Sarge had told me twice already, in pieces, breaking from his usual habit of dumping bad news on me all at once, like even he couldn't stomach handing it over in one blow.
Her storefront had turned into a campaign office overnight, poster boards stacked three deep against the walls and a phone bank Doris ran like a small, furious army.
I hadn't let myself ask for details past what he volunteered, because asking felt like admitting I had a right to know, and I'd spent that whole stretch convincing myself I'd given up that right on a porch with a sentence I still couldn't take back.
I ran the dishwater hot enough to sting and didn't put a single plate in it. I just stood there with my hands under the tap, watching steam curl up toward the window, and let myself think about the thing I'd been refusing to think about since the porch.
It wasn't about protecting her.
The thought arrived plain and unwelcome, the kind I usually managed to push down before it caught up with me.
This time it didn't let go. It just sat there in my chest, solid and undeniable.
I hadn't walked away from Leah to spare her a future built around a man who might lose everything.
I'd walked away because some old, cowardly corner of me had done the math the second Sarge said the word consolidation, and decided losing her on my own schedule would hurt less than losing her on somebody else's.
That wasn't protection. That was a man setting his own house on fire before the wind could do it for him.
I turned the water off and stood there dripping onto a floor I hadn't mopped in a week, and thought about Rachel for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit, not the easy, resolved version of her I'd made peace with in a diner booth, but the actual truth underneath it.
I hadn't stopped loving Rachel either. I'd just gotten so good at bracing for the day I'd lose her that I'd started losing her on purpose, a little at a time, long before Boston ever finished the job.
She'd told me herself, sitting across that table with somebody else's ring on her hand, that she'd left because she couldn't compete with a ghost I wouldn't talk to her about.
I'd nodded along at the time like it was history, safely behind glass, something that had happened to a younger, less healed version of myself.
It wasn't behind glass anymore. It was standing in my kitchen right now, and it had my name on it.
Headlights swept across the front window, cutting bright through the dark, and Ember's head came up off the floorboards so fast his whole body followed it, a low, hopeful whine building in his throat before the truck door slammed and he recognized the walk. It wasn't her walk. It was Sarge's.
I opened the door before he could knock.
"You look like hell," Sarge said, by way of greeting, stepping past me into the house without waiting for an invitation, the way he'd been doing since the week I moved to this town.
"Thanks."
"I mean it as a diagnosis, not an insult.
" He looked at the sink, at the dry dishes stacked exactly where they'd probably been sitting since this morning, and something in his face went from teasing to serious fast enough that I felt it land before he said another word.
"Ember's been sleeping by your front door ever since the night she left.
Marisol drove past on her way to pick up the kids and saw him through the window.
She made me come over here tonight instead of letting it wait till tomorrow. "
"He's fine."
"He is not fine. He's a dog who thinks somebody's supposed to be walking through that door, and he's not wrong, and you know he's not wrong, which is exactly why you can't look at me right now."
I looked at him. It cost me more than it should have.
"I fixed the department, Sarge. That was supposed to be the hard part."
"You fixed the department. Good. Congratulations.
Now fix the other thing." He crossed his arms, planting himself in the middle of my kitchen like he had nowhere else in the world to be tonight, which, knowing him, he probably didn't. "You gonna tell me what happened on that porch, or am I gonna have to guess? "
"I told her she deserved better than a man about to lose everything."
"That's not what happened. That's the story you told yourself so you could sleep at night, and judging by the state of this kitchen, it didn't even work.
" He shook his head slowly, disappointed in a way that landed harder than anger would have.
"You didn't lose Mike because you loved him too much, and you're not gonna lose Leah for the same stupid reason twice. Get off my porch and go fix this."
"We're in my kitchen."
"I'm speaking metaphorically. Don't be difficult."
I almost laughed, the sound catching somewhere before it could turn into anything real, and Sarge didn't let the moment soften, didn't let me hide behind a joke the way I usually managed to.
"You want to know what she's been doing the last five days while you've been standing right here not washing dishes?
" He didn't wait for me to answer. "She turned her own storefront into a war room.
Phone banks running twelve hours a day. Doris manning a table like a general.
She dug through department files herself looking for every photo that proved what we've been to this town for years, because she wanted the board to see it in pictures, not just numbers.
She stood in front of three hundred people this morning and never once said your name, not once, on purpose, because she didn't want anybody thinking this was about winning you back.
It was about the fifteen of us. She built the whole thing for people who never once asked her for a single thing. "
"I know."
"You know the facts. You don't know what it cost her to do it while you weren't speaking to her.
" His voice dropped, rough now, none of the usual teasing left in it.
"I watched her hand deliver a printed schedule to every single speaker herself, timed to the minute, and I watched her face every time somebody mentioned your name at that podium, and I am telling you, man, that woman built you a rescue and didn't ask for a single thing in return, not even a thank you. "
I sat down hard in the nearest chair, because standing had stopped feeling like something I could keep doing.
"I don't know how to do this without being scared the whole time."
Sarge didn't answer right away. He pulled out the chair across from me instead, sitting down slow, and for a second he looked less like the man who'd just spent five minutes tearing me apart and more like the man who'd sat with me on my worst night two years ago and never once asked me to explain myself.
"Nobody does, man. You do it scared. That's the whole trick."
"That's not much of a trick."
"It's the only one that's ever worked for anybody.
" He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, watching me with the same steady attention he brought to a bad scene, the kind that made rookies trust him even when the whole building was coming down around them.
"You think I wasn't scared marrying Marisol?
You think I'm not scared every single day watching Mateo and Bea grow up in a world that doesn't come with guarantees?
Scared's not the problem, Derek. Scared's just the toll you pay for wanting something enough to lose it.
You've been trying to dodge the toll for two years, and all it's ever gotten you is standing alone in a kitchen with dirty dishes and a dog who's given up sleeping anywhere but by the door. "
I looked past him at Ember, who'd resettled himself in the doorway to the kitchen instead of the front door, close enough to keep both exits in view, and something in my chest cracked open the rest of the way.
"I told her she deserved someone who wasn't about to lose everything."
"And now you've got everything back. The department, the funding, the whole town standing behind you." Sarge spread his hands, the gesture simple and unanswerable. "Kind of makes that excuse expire, doesn't it?"
He was right, and I hated exactly how right he was, and underneath the hating there was something else starting to move, fast and certain, the specific feeling I only ever got right before I made a call on a fire ground that couldn't wait for a second opinion.
"I need to go."
"I know."
"Right now."
"I know that too. That's why I'm still sitting here instead of already walking you out." He stood, and for the first time all night something like a smile broke through the seriousness. "Go. Before you talk yourself into one more good reason to stay here feeling sorry for yourself."
I was moving before he finished the sentence, keys off the hook by the door, boots half laced. Ember scrambled up from the doorway so fast he nearly took my legs out from under me, already at the front door, his whole body vibrating like he'd never once doubted this was coming.
"Lock up when you leave," I called back, already halfway across the porch.
"Go fix your actual life, Derek. I'll handle the door."
I didn't hear whatever he said after that, if he said anything at all, because I was already in the truck with the engine turning over, Ember scrambling into the passenger seat and planting both front paws on the dash like he intended to will the whole drive faster through sheer force of posture.
The porch light threw one last gold stripe across the driveway as I backed out, Sarge's silhouette still standing in the doorway, arms crossed, watching me go the way a man watches something he's been waiting two years to see happen.
I pointed the truck toward town and drove like the last two years of careful, deliberate caution had simply stopped existing. Ember rode with his ears pinned back and the window cracked, both of us racing toward the one thing I'd spent two years convinced I wasn't allowed to want that badly.
I was done being scared quietly. If I was going to do this terrified, I was at least going to do it out loud, standing in front of her, before one more night went by where the only thing waiting by my door was a dog who understood exactly what I'd been too much of a coward to say myself.