Page 61 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

"You did the same thing after Claire." His voice doesn't change. That's what gets me. He's not needling, not this time. "Went cold on everybody so nobody could take anything else off you. Wouldn't return calls. Told your mama you were fine right up till the write-ups started stacking. How'd that work out?"

I put the wrench down.

"That's not the same."

"It's the exact same, brother. You're just wearing a different shirt."

I want to swing back. I've got two years of practice swinging at anybody who gets close to the truth. But something in me, something that's been cracking slow since a nurse with a stethoscope called me a Labrador, doesn't reach for it.

I stand there instead. Let it land.

"I know how to go cold." It sounds smaller than I want it to. "Shut the door before anybody else gets carried out of my life on a gurney. That part I could teach a class on." I make myself say the rest. "It's the staying I never learned. Letting somebody matter and standing there anyway, knowing what it costs when it goes wrong. I don't know how to do that, Tater. I don't know if I ever did."

Tater's quiet a minute. Then he pushes off the rig and comes around where I have to look at him.

"Maple Street," he says. "The kitchen fire. You stood in that doorway six seconds, Owen."

My stomach drops. "We covered that already."

"Well we didn’t go over all of it, I got more to say." No heat in it. That's the worst part. "Smoke alarm went off and you weren't in Willowbend anymore. I took the nozzle and didn't say nothing, because it was a nothing fire and a green probie was watching."

"It was one bad morning."

"When's the last time you made entry on a working structure fire? A real one."

I open my mouth. Close it. He already knows the answer, same as he knew it behind the engine on Maple Street. Two years. Not once since Chicago. Everything since has been grass fires and kitchens.

"That leg's gonna heal," he says. "And the day it does, the chief puts you back on a truck. One of these days it won't be a nothing fire. What happens to the man next to you when that doorway's got somebody behind it?"

"That's not gonna—"

"You don't know that. I don't know that. That's the whole problem." He picks at a callus on his thumb, looking at his hands instead of me, which is what Tater does when something costs him. "I recruited you. I told the chief you were solid. If something goes wrong in a fire because your head's still in Chicago, that's on me too, brother. I can't keep covering and calling it loyalty."

That one lands harder than the doorway did. Because he's right, and because I've been letting him carry it.

Neither of us says anything for a minute. Somewhere in the station a phone rings and quits.

"Department keeps a counselor on retainer," he finally says. "Free. Nobody's business but yours. Not the chief's, not mine. Guy's ex-Army, works with guys who've seen the worst day of somebody's life and can't put it down."

"Tater—"

"I watched you carry Claire for two years like a pack you won't take off, and I kept my mouth shut about it because it wasn't costing anybody but you." He's already texting. My phone buzzes in my pocket. "Now it's costing Nellie, and someday it's gonna cost whoever's on the other side of a door with you. So. Phone number. What you do with it's on you."

He picks up the wrench I set down, checks the bolt, snorts.

"You stripped this."

"I know."

"Good talk," he says, and walks off, and that's Tater. Never stays long enough for you to argue.

***

I don't call.

Day after, I don't call either.

Third day, light duty, I'm in my truck on lunch with the number pulled up and my thumb hanging over the green button like it weighs forty pounds.