Page 88 of Christmas with Three Firemen

“I keep thinking about the file,” I say. “The original incident report. My parents’ fire. I read the whole thing for the first time last week, and it said what I always thought it would eventually say if I ever let myself read it: that the crew that night did everything right. There was nothing anyone could have done differently.” I look at the scorched wall. “So now I don’t know who I am without it.”

“You don’t need to have it figured out today.”

“That’s a very generous thing for the man running a fire station on a deadline to say.”

The corner of his mouth moves.

“I’ve got three weeks of contractors and a rebuilt wall to worry about,” he says. “I’m not in a hurry about anything else.”

Through the gap where the window used to be, before the plywood went up, there’s a smaller gap along the top, and cold air comes through it, and with it, faintly, the sound of the street.

A snowplow scraping past somewhere on the avenue. The particular hush a city gets after a storm finally breaks, the noise coming back slowly instead of all at once, like the whole borough is testing whether it’s safe to be loud again.

I get up, go to the gap, and look through it.

Across the street, the bodega’s got its awning lights running the same tired rhythm it’s probably run every December for a decade, patient and ordinary and completely unaware of anything that’s happened on this side of the street. The plow finally made it down this block yesterday. The snow’s still piled waist-high at the corners, but the road underneath is visible again for the first time in days.

First things first, apparently, in this neighborhood. The lights come back on before anything else does.

I stand there a while, watching them blink.

“I don’t know what I want yet,” I say, without turning around. “I know that’s not the answer you’re looking for.”

“I’m not looking for an answer.” His voice comes from right behind me now; he’s crossed the room without my noticing, which happens more and more these days, all three of them moving through my awareness like they belong there. “I told you once you don’t get to protect anyone by disappearing. I’m not going to turn around and tell you that you owe anyone a decision either. Not me. Not this station.”

“Then what do you want?”

He’s quiet for a moment.

“I want you to figure out what you want,” he says. “Not what’s easiest. Not what feels safest because it has the shape of something you already know how to do.”

I turn around. He’s closer than I expected, and in the cold half-finished room with plywood over the window and scorch marks on the wall and weeks of staying stacked up behind both of us, he looks steady in a way I’ve come to rely on without ever admitting it.

“That’s a hard question to answer in a burned equipment room,” I say.

“Take your time,” he says. “We’re not going anywhere.”

We.

I don’t ask him to clarify who he means. I already know, the same way I know the sound of his footsteps, the same way I’ve learned this station’s whole silent language over these past few weeks without ever meaning to enroll in the class.

I look back out through the gap in the plywood. The bodega lights blink on, off, on. Somewhere down the block, a kid shrieks with laughter, chasing something through a snowbank, and the city keeps putting itself back together one small ordinary thing at a time, and I stand in the middle of my own unfinished repair and let that be enough, for now.

Chapter twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Mateo

Her phone rings at eight in the morning, and I know exactly whose name is on the screen before she even looks at it, because I watch her shoulders find that particular brace they haven’t needed in weeks.

She steps into the hallway to take it. I keep flipping pancakes and don’t listen, which takes real effort, because I am constitutionally incapable of minding my own business, but I’ve learned a few things living beside Wes for six years, and one of them is that some silences you protect on purpose.

She comes back four minutes later. Doesn’t say anything. Sits down at the table and looks at her coffee like it owes her an explanation.

I don’t ask.

I know what the call was anyway. Morrison’s name has been sitting over this station all week like a weather system nobody wants to name out loud, the assignment’s closed, the caseload’s waiting, come home after New Year’s.

I’ve watched her carry that possibility around for days now, the same way she used to carry her files, close to her chest, giving nothing away.