Page 84 of Christmas with Three Firemen

My body just knew. Some part of me has apparently known how to do this since I was eight years old, watching it happen from the other direction, and I never understood until this exact second that I’d been carrying its shape in my body the whole time.

I don’t cry. I don’t have the room for it yet.

I sit in the snow and breathe.

Across the scene, through the strobing lights and the falling snow and the crew working the hoses, Grant finds me.

He’s fifty feet away, soot-streaked, radio in hand, mid-command to someone I can’t see.

He looks over anyway, the way he always finds me in a room without seeming to look for me at all, and he sees the broken window above the girl and me in the thermal blanket. Me sitting in the snow catching my breath, and something moves across his face that isn’t relief exactly.

It’s recognition.

He knows exactly what just happened.

He knows it better than anyone alive, because it happened to him first, and he’s looking at me across a burning firehouse on Christmas Eve like he’s seeing both of us at once, the boy in the snow and the woman in it now, twenty-one years folding down into one single, impossible moment.

Then his radio crackles and he’s back in it, shouting a position, and I sit in the snow and hold my knees and watch my station, my firehouse, still standing, still fighting for itself in the storm, and somewhere close by a child who isn’t mine is safe because I knew exactly how a fire moves.

It’s Christmas Eve.

The building is still standing.

So is everyone inside it.

Chapter twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-Six: Noelle

Christmas morning, we don’t do much, which turns out to be exactly what everyone needs.

The tree’s still up in the common room, scorched at the edges from smoke that never quite touched the ornaments, and somebody, Tara, probably, has restrung the lights that got knocked loose in the fire so it’s blinking again like nothing happened to it.

Mateo makes pancakes for whoever’s on shift, more batter than any reasonable number of people could eat, because that’s how Mateo cooks on a day that matters. Callum wears the Santa hat that’s been rotating through this station for longer than he’s been alive.

Danny hangs a stocking for Rico even though Rico’s still in the hospital, insists on it, says a man doesn’t stop being part of the house just because the house is short one bed for a while.

Wes drives up to see Rico himself in the afternoon, brings the stocking with him, and comes back saying only that Rico ate two of the hospital’s terrible cookies and complained the whole time about missing pancakes.

Grant and I don’t exchange gifts. There wasn’t time to think about it, not with everything the last few weeks have been, but he sits with me at the kitchen table for an hour with two mugs of the good coffee and doesn’t say much, and it’s enough. Outside, the snow keeps falling on a street that’s finally starting to look like itself again.

Two Days Later

Morrison calls at seven in the morning, and this time he doesn’t start with my first name.

“Meadows,” he says, and I hear something in his voice I haven’t heard in two months. Not weariness. Something closer to relief. “Marsh talked.”

I sit up in bed. Beside me the station is starting its morning noise, boots on the stairs, Kowalski’s radio somewhere below, and I hold the phone against my ear and wait.

“Full confession, once the DA showed him the accelerant match from Christmas Eve alongside the pattern from the first three fires. Same signature, same hand, and he knew we had him cold.” A pause, papers shuffling on his end. “He’s talking about who paid him. Names. Dates. A numbered account that traces back through two shells to Meridian.”

“To Delaney.”

“To Delaney,” Morrison confirms. “That’s the piece we needed. Everything you built on the financial side, the acquisitions, the permits, the negligence pattern, none of it alone gets us a criminal charge on Delaney himself. It gets us a very expensive settlement and a strongly worded press release. But now we’ve got Marsh’s confession connecting the money directly to the arson, and your paper trail showing exactly why Delaney wanted these buildings burned in the first place.” Another pause. “It’s a case, Meadows. It’s a real case.”

I sit on the edge of the bed with the phone against my ear and feel something loosen in my chest that has been tight for two months, maybe for twenty-one years.

“When,” I say.