Page 56 of Christmas with Three Firemen

My brain, the machine that never stops running, has finally gone quiet. Not peaceful. It’s just stopped. A stopped clock in a still room.

I don’t know how long I’ve been here when the door opens.

“Hey, have you seen my…”

Mateo’s voice stops.

I don’t look up. I can see his sneakers at the edge of my vision, stopped halfway through the doorway, and I can hear the sentence he was carrying die in the air, and I know what I must look like. On the floor at four in the morning in yesterday’s clothes. I know exactly what it looks like because I’ve spent my whole career being the one who walks in and finds someone else falling apart. I’ve just never been the one on the floor.

“Noelle.”

He says my name carefully, like it might be attached to a tripwire.

I should say something. I’m fine. Couldn’t sleep. Just needed somewhere quiet. I have an entire catalog of sentences designed for exactly this situation, polished over years of use, and I reach for them, only to find that none of them will come.

He crosses the room slowly. Crouches down in front of me, at a small distance, his forearms on his knees.

“Okay,” he says, quiet. “Okay.”

He doesn’t ask what happened. He just starts talking, low and easy.

Nothing that needs an answer.

It’s snowing like the end of the world out there. Kowalski tried to make his coffee again tonight; it was a war crime. There’s leftover pasta if I want it. Words as company rather than words as questions, and some distant part of me understands that he’s doing this on purpose, that this is a skill, that Mateo Ruiz has sat with people on the worst nights of their lives before and knows the shape of it.

The door again.

Wes doesn’t say anything at all.

I hear his footsteps, unhurried, and then he’s beside me, lowering himself to the floor against the wall, close enough that his shoulder is an inch from mine. He doesn’t look at the photograph.

He doesn’t look at me. He looks at the middle distance, present and silent, a wall between me and the rest of the room.

Neither of them asks about the photograph.

Mateo is just crouched there, and Wes is a warm line of quiet at my shoulder, and for one moment, one strange suspended moment inside the worst night I’ve had in twenty-one years, I am not alone in it.

Then the door.

I know before I look up.

I don’t know how I know. The change in the air, maybe, or the sound of footsteps that stop too abruptly, or just the fact that some part of me has been waiting for this door to open since the moment I turned the photograph over upstairs.

Grant stands in the doorway.

He’s in a t-shirt and sweats, hair flattened on one side like he’d been lying down but not sleeping. He stops with one hand still on the door frame.

His eyes go to the photograph in my hands.

The color leaves his face. I’ve never seen that happen to him before, not at scenes, not in his office, not once. His jaw goes slack for a second, and then his whole body pulls tight, and his hand grips the door frame hard enough that the knuckles show white.

He looks from the photograph up to my face.

Nobody moves.

I glance at Mateo. He’s frozen in his crouch, eyes moving between me and the doorway, his mouth half open like a question got stuck there. Beside me, Wes has straightened up off the wall. His hands have come off his knees.

Grant stays in the doorway.