Page 87 of Christmas with Three Firemen

I get up. I don’t decide to walk toward the damaged wing. My feet just go.

The equipment room and the supply closet took the worst of it, and the contractors have made progress, new framing up along the north wall, wiring pulled and waiting to be run, but the space is still more skeleton than room.

I sit down on an overturned crate in the middle of it with a mug of coffee that’s already gone cold, because I forgot I was holding it somewhere between the kitchen and here, and I look at the scorch marks still visible above the new framing, black fingers reaching up toward where the ceiling used to be whole.

This is where I found her. The girl in the red coat, wedged between the boxes and the wall, hands over her mouth.

This is where the case actually ended, if I’m honest about it. The arrests were paperwork after this. The confession was paperwork after this.

This room, this exact spot, is where twenty-one years of a story I’d been telling myself finally ran headlong into a different story, and I don’t know how to describe what it’s like to sit in the wreckage of the moment that changed everything, except that it feels like sitting inside a punctuation mark. The period at the end of a very long sentence.

I don’t hear him come in. I never do.

Grant lowers himself onto a second crate a few feet away, not asking, not announcing himself. We sit there together looking at the same broken wall.

“Contractors walked the site yesterday,” Grant says. “Three weeks, they’re saying, if the permits clear on schedule.”

“That’s fast for a full wall rebuild.”

“City’s suddenly very motivated to approve the paperwork.” We sit. The wall stares back at us, half-finished, patient.

“Morrison called this morning,” I say.

Grant doesn’t look over. He just waits, the way he’s learned to wait, the way this whole building apparently trains its people to wait for the rest of a sentence instead of chasing it.

“The assignment’s closed,” I say. “Officially, as of the arrests. He wants me back at the office after the New Year. Full caseload. There’s apparently a backlog that’s been waiting for me for two months.” I turn the cold mug in my hands. “He was, I don’t know. Kind about it. Told me I did good work. Told me the department’s grateful. Told me I earned some time off before I dive back in.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“I said I’d think about it.”

Grant is quiet for a moment. Down the hall, faintly, I can hear Mateo’s voice and then Rico’s, some argument about the eggnog jug that still hasn’t been thrown out, ongoing since before Christmas Eve like it’s achieved the status of station folklore.

“You don’t sound like someone who’s thinking about going back to a caseload,” Grant says.

“I don’t know what I sound like.”

That’s the honest answer, and I give it to him because I’ve stopped being able to give him anything else.

A few weeks ago I would have deflected, made it about logistics, framed the decision in terms of investigative efficiency or professional obligation. I don’t have that armor anymore. I used it all up somewhere between the archive box and the burning building and the parking lot in the snow.

“I don’t know if I want to stay,” I say, “or if I’ve just forgotten how to leave.”

Grant turns his head at that. I feel it more than see it, the weight of his attention shifting toward me instead of the wall.

“Those aren’t the same thing,” he says.

“I know they’re not the same thing. That’s the problem. I can’t tell which one I’m doing.” I set the cold mug down on the floor beside the crate. “I still have an apartment. Rent-controlled, across town, the first place I’ve ever actually liked living in. If I go back to Morrison’s office, that’s where I go home to. Alone, the way I’ve gone home alone for seven years.”

I look at the scorched wall instead of at him. “Staying here isn’t just about paperwork ending. It means giving up the part of my life I actually built for myself, on purpose, and betting all of it on things that have only ever existed inside a crisis. I don’t know how to do that. I’ve never once done that.”

“You stayed in the parking lot.”

“That was one night.”

“You’ve stayed every night since then.”

I don’t have an answer for that, so I don’t give one. The framing timber creaks somewhere above us, settling, the building doing its slow patient work of healing itself whether or not anyone’s watching.