Page 48 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

"I tried to make entry. My own crew pulled me off the stairs. Took three of them. I broke Ruiz's nose doing it." He opens his hand and looks at the ring in his palm. "I woke up in an ambulance and there was a chaplain sitting where the paramedic's supposed to sit, and I knew before he said one word, because they don't send chaplains for smoke inhalation."

I take his other hand. That's all. I don't say I'm sorry. I don't say she's in a better place. I don't say any of the things people said to him in a receiving line while he stood there dying in a suit.

I hold his hand and I stay quiet and let him have the silence.

He looks down at our hands. Then at me. And something in his face comes loose, like he'd braced for the platitude and I never fired it.

"Two years I've been a live grenade," he says. "Write-ups. Fights. The department didn't send me home to rest, Nellie. They sent me home so they didn't have to fire me."

"And instead, you fell off my roof."

The laugh gets out of him before he can stop it. Rough, surprised, real.

"Instead, I fell off your roof."

We sit with the TV dark and his hand in both of mine, and I do not say the thing climbing my throat, which is that a man who ran into a burning building for her is sitting on my couch, and I have never in my life been the kind of woman anybody ran toward.

The nightmare comes at 2 a.m.

I'm awake before I know why. Then I hear it through the wall. Not screaming. Worse. His voice low and wrecked, saying numbers, an address, saying move, move, let me through, that's my—

I'm out of the chair-bed and across the hall before I decide to be.

He's tangled in the sheet, sweat-soaked, one fist twisted in the fabric like a strap he's hauling on. I take his hand the way I did the first night, both of mine around it, and I say his name once, low.

"Owen. You're in Willowbend. You're in my house. Everybody's out."

He surfaces hard, a man breaking water. Eyes wild, then finding me, then knowing me. His grip on my hand could crack walnuts.

"You're okay," I say. "I've got you."

His breathing comes down slow. The room settles. My hand is going numb and I don't take it back.

I shift my weight to stand, to go back to the chair, and his fingers tighten.

"Stay."

Barely a word. Eyes already closing. Asleep, or close enough that he'll never know he said it. Or awake enough that he'll pretend.

I look at the chair across the room. Ugly, floral, my back already aching from three nights in it.

I look at the bed. At the space beside him. At his hand around mine like I'm the thing keeping him above water.

Every rule I own is standing in that doorway with its arms crossed. Thirteen weeks. Never renew. Leave first, it's tidier. My mama's voice and eleven schools and one box I never unpack, all of it lined up, waiting for me to do the smart thing.

I stay.

Chapter fourteen

Case Notes, Tuesday, 8:40 A.M.

RUE

My life has gotten annoyingly good, and I keep the receipts to prove it.

Receipt one sits on my kitchen table in a jelly jar. Wildflowers, cut this morning, left on my porch before I woke. The note underneath is in James's terrible careful handwriting, every letter drawn like he's being graded on it.

Saw these and thought of you. That's not true. I saw these after I thought of you. — J