5. Weston
WESTON
Igive her the morning.
I don’t text. I don’t walk past the Trading Post. I go to the station, change into my uniform, check the apparatus with Dean, and eat whatever Mack put on the kitchen table and insists is a balanced breakfast. The crew moves around me in the rhythm I’ve memorized over five years—Mack talking, Dean correcting him, Graham checking something twice, Levi quiet on the bench. Normal. Steady. Mine, for now.
Holt is in the kitchen doorway, coffee in hand. His gaze lands on me and stays there. He doesn’t ask. He just waits—shoulder against the frame, unhurried, giving me room to get to it.
“I need to talk to you,” I say.
He nods once and walks toward the office. I follow. He shuts the door and moves to the desk, leaning against it. He’s giving me the space to stand, to pace, to take up room.
“The wildland offer,” I say. “I haven’t signed it.”
“I know.”
“You recommended me.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
Holt sets the coffee down. “Because you’re the best fit we’ve got for backcountry work. Because you’ve been ready for two years and you’ve been too loyal to say it out loud. And because staying in a place you’ve outgrown isn’t loyalty, Weston. It’s fear.”
The words land in the center of my chest. I don’t argue, because he’s right, and he’s Holt, and Holt doesn’t waste words on things that aren’t true.
“I don’t want to be the guy who leaves,” I say.
Holt looks at me for a long time. The gray at his temples. The lines around his eyes that come from years of making calls in the dark and living with every one of them.
“You’ve been on this crew since before I made captain,” he says.
“You were here when Drew transferred in. You were here when Mack blew out his shoulder and came back six weeks early because he couldn’t stand his own cooking.
You were here for every call, every shift, every morning in this kitchen.
” He picks the coffee back up. “You think transferring to a team in the same district is going to erase that?”
“It’s a different crew.”
“It’s the same family. Brotherhood doesn’t have a radius. You’re not leaving us, Weston. You’re in the next bay.”
The next bay. Twenty feet of concrete and a shared kitchen. I’ve been carrying this offer for two weeks, building it into something enormous in my head—a departure, a betrayal, a kitchen-counter note—and Holt just reduced it to twenty feet.
“Sign the offer,” he says. “Come to dinner on Sunday. Lea’s making that thing with the potatoes you like.” He opens the office door. “And fix whatever’s going on with the candy shop girl. You look like hell.”
I walk across the courtyard at 4:15.
The candy shop light is on. Through the window, I can see her building the autumn display—the one we started together two nights ago.
Candied apples on the rack I assembled, caramel corn in harvest bags arranged on the shelf I leveled, the window coming together in golds and reds and deep amber.
She’s arranged everything with the same attention she gives her brackets, her batches, her bench scraper lines. Every piece placed with intention.
I push the door open. The bell chimes. She looks up from the display, and the smile arrives—bright, warm, automatic.
“Hey,” she says. “The display is looking great. I think the rack might need one more—”
“Don’t,” I say.
The smile holds for a second. Then it folds.
“Don’t do that,” I say. “Don’t put on the bright version because it’s easier. I’ve seen you without it. I’m not going to unsee it.”
She stands in her shop with an apple in one hand and a twist tie in the other, and the brightness drains from her face.
What’s underneath is the same thing I saw through the smoke the first night.
The version of Millie Davis that nobody stays long enough to meet because the sweet version is so convincing, they never think to look for anything else.
“You’re leaving,” she says. Her voice is steady, but her hands aren’t.
“I’m transferring to a team in the same station. I’m not moving. I’m not going anywhere.”
“You’re walking into fire. That’s going somewhere.”
“Yeah.” I cross the shop and stop at the counter, the marble slab between us. “And I’m coming back from it. Every time. To this shop, to this town, to you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know that I’ve been invisible my entire life.
I know that I stood in this courtyard for years and nobody looked at me.
I know that two nights ago I walked through a door because of smoke and found a woman swearing at a copper pot, and I haven’t had a single thought since then that wasn’t about her.
” I set my hands on the marble. “You’re not the last one standing, Millie.
You’re the first person I’ve ever wanted badly enough to be terrified of losing. ”
Her eyes are bright. She sets the apple down on the counter. The twist tie drops. Her hands are shaking, and she doesn’t hide them, doesn’t tuck them behind her back or grip her apron to steady them. She lets me see.
“I’ve been the easy one my whole life,” she says.
“The sweet girl, the one who smiles, the one who never needs anything hard. And loving a man who walks into wildfire is the hardest thing I can think of.” She looks at me across the marble, across the space where caramel and sugar and everything else happened last night. “I want it anyway.”
I come around the counter. She meets me halfway—no slab between us, no armor. I kiss her with my hands in her hair, and she tastes like caramel again.
We finish the display together. She hands me apples, and I hang them on the rack. She arranges the harvest bags, and I adjust the shelf. The window fills with amber and gold and the deep reds of a season that’s arriving whether Copper Peak is ready or not.
The candy shop is ready for fall. So am I.
I pull the offer from my back pocket, unfold it on the marble slab, and sign my name.