Page 85 of Christmas with Three Firemen

“Warrant’s being drafted this morning. We move by this afternoon.”

***

I watch it happen on the kitchen television with the rest of the crew, all of us crowded around Kowalski’s ancient set with its rabbit ears propped against the window, the volume too loud because nobody can find the remote.

Local news, breaking coverage. Matthew Delaney, led out of a Midtown office tower in handcuffs, still in his suit, flanked by two detectives who don’t look nearly as pleased with themselves as I expected.

He doesn’t cover his face. He looks straight into the cameras with the same easy warmth he had at the fundraiser, like this is a minor inconvenience he’ll have resolved by lunch.

It won’t be. I know what’s in that file. I know what two months of quiet, careful, infuriating paperwork can do to a man who thought his name was too big to touch.

The kitchen erupts. Rico, back from the hospital with one eyebrow still shorter than the other, pumps a fist so hard he winces and has to sit back down.

Mateo whoops and nearly upends a tray of cinnamon rolls. Danny just watches the screen with his arms crossed and something satisfied settling into his face, a man who has waited a long time to see a particular kind of justice arrive.

Grant doesn’t cheer.

He stands in the doorway with his coffee and watches the screen, and when Delaney’s face fills the frame one more time before the anchor cuts away, something crosses his expression that I recognize now, because I’ve seen it up close. Twenty-one years of a story finally getting its ending.

He looks over at me.

I don’t need him to say anything. I just nod, and he nods back, and that’s the whole conversation.

The days that follow move fast in the way legal processes never do, except when they finally do.

Marsh’s plea deal comes together within the week, cooperation in exchange for a reduced sentence, every detail of the operation laid out in exchange for not dying in prison.

The financial case against Delaney Urban Partners is referred to three separate agencies, all apparently wanting a piece of the same very satisfying pie.

Reporters call my office more times in four days than they have in four years, and Morrison handles most of it, because I am, by his explicit instruction, unavailable for comment.

I don’t mind. I’ve said everything I needed to say in four hundred pages of documentation. The rest isn’t mine to perform.

The one thing I do, the thing I insist on despite Morrison’s raised eyebrows, is walk the archive box back to the station myself instead of shipping it.

I carry the original incident report, the one with my parents’ names in it, up the stairs, set it on my desk, and read it front to back for the first time without my hands shaking.

The crew did everything right that night.

I always knew that, somewhere underneath everything else. I just needed twenty-one years and a burning building of my own to actually believe it.

***

By the Friday before New Year’s, the neighborhood has organized an impromptu benefit for Firehouse 23, and nobody even raises the question of postponing it because of the fire.

The station is still healing. The equipment room and the supply closet took the worst of the Christmas Eve fire, scorched brick visible along the north wall, plywood over two windows that haven’t been replaced yet, the smell of smoke still faint under the pine if you know to look for it. Insurance adjusters have been through twice.

A contractor, not Delaney’s, has already started the rebuild.

It isn’t whole. It’s standing, and it’s theirs, and apparently that’s enough.

The neighborhood shows up in numbers I didn’t expect. More than I’d have guessed, if Mateo’s running commentary is accurate, and he seems to think it is. Families who spent a night on cots in this bay during the blizzard.

The little girl in the red coat and her mother, both of them finding me specifically to say thank you, though I try to explain that the crew did the actual work of keeping the building standing around us.

James brings his guitar and plays something slow near the damaged wall like he’s serenading the scars instead of hiding them.

The plywood-covered windows get strung with lights anyway. Someone hangs a wreath directly over the scorch mark on the north wall, and it should look like an absurd, cheerful decoration over visible damage, but instead it looks exactly like what it is. Defiance dressed as festivity.