Page 39 of Christmas with Three Firemen

Across the bay, Wes has found the teenager, the one with the dead phone, sixteen maybe, alone on a cot with his knees pulled up. Wes sits down on the next cot over and says nothing. Two full minutes pass before the kid speaks first, and then they’re talking, low and unhurried, and I watch the kid’s shoulders come down an inch, and then another.

By eleven the bay has gone quiet.

The kids are asleep between the rigs, small shapes under borrowed blankets with the Christmas lights blinking red and green above them. Someone has set a radio on the gear bench, tuned low to a Christmas station, more weather than noise.

The kitchen crew has shrunk to Danny with his coffee at the end of the table, and Wes at the sink, and me, because the counters need wiping and being useful is the only mode I reliably operate in.

I pick up a towel and take the dripping pot out of Wes’s hands.

“What did you say to him?” I ask. “The kid on the cot.”

“Nothing.”

“You talked for twenty minutes.”

“He talked. I nodded.” Wes passes me a stack of bowls. “His building flooded last Christmas. Now this. He thinks December has it out for him personally.”

“December might.”

“That’s what I said.” A pause while he scrubs. “He laughed. It’s a start.”

We work through the rest of the dishes like that, him washing, me drying, trading sentences when there’s something worth saying and comfortable when there isn’t. At some point he glances at me sideways.

“You held that baby a long time.”

“Forty minutes.”

“You counted.”

“I count everything.”

The corner of his mouth moves, that suggestion of a smile he rations out like it costs him something, and he hands me the last pot, and I dry it and rack it, and neither of us says anything else, and it isn’t uncomfortable in the slightest.

Grant is in the doorway to the bay when I look up.

One shoulder against the frame, watching the sleeping residents, and his face is open in a way I haven’t seen on him before. Not soft. Unguarded. He looks over and finds me at the counter with the towel still in my hand, and neither of us says anything, because there’s nothing that needs saying right now, and we both seem to know it. He looks back at the bay. I look back at the counter.

The radio plays something old and slow. Outside, the blizzard keeps taking the city apart and rebuilding it in white, and in here, a bay full of people who didn’t know this morning where they’d sleep tonight are sleeping in a fire station.

I go upstairs at midnight.

I sit on the edge of the bed and look at my hands. They still feel like they’re holding something. Not the baby, not the towel, not any one thing I carried tonight. Just the sense of having been used well.

I’ve been here two weeks. I have an unsolved case, a name I can’t prove anything about yet, and a captain keeping something from me. None of that changed tonight.

But somewhere between the serving line and the last dried pot, without my permission and without any moment I can point to, the station stopped feeling like a temporary assignment.

And that is a far more dangerous thing than anything else I’ve walked into since I got here.

Chapter eleven

Chapter Eleven: Noelle

The alarm goes off at six forty-seven in the morning.

I’m already awake. I’ve been awake since five, lying in the dark listening to the blizzard work its way through the old building’s joints, and when the alarm sounds, I’m sitting at my desk with cold coffee and the Delaney files open on my laptop.

The station moves beneath me. Boots on the stairs. The bay doors grinding open. Engines turning over.