Page 70 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

"What did that feel like?"

"Like a door."

"And what did you do with it?"

"Nothing. I drove home." I flex my fingers. Whole. Unsplit. "That's new."

Doc writes something. He doesn't write much, so when the pen moves, I notice.

"Tell me why she said no."

"She didn't give a reason."

"Then tell me the reason you gave yourself. On the drive home. Because you gave yourself one."

And there it is. The thing sitting behind my ribs since the porch, since the festival, since Chicago if I'm honest, and I have been trying to be honest, that's what the plastic chair is for.

"My job is running into fires," I say. "And the one that mattered, I was on the wrong side of the city."

The clock doesn't tick. Doc doesn't blink.

"So I figure she can feel it on me. What I am. A man who shows up after."

He sets the pen down. Leans forward, elbows on knees, close enough that I can't look past him.

"You've decided your love is a thing that arrives too late," he says. "I want you to sit with that sentence. Is that true of you, Owen? Or is it true of one terrible night?"

I open my mouth.

Nothing comes.

"One night," he says. "One address. One radio call out of two thousand. And you took it and made it your name." He taps the desk once, soft. "You got a woman out of a wrecked minivan on Juniper Lane. You caught a nurse off a ladder with your own leg. You've been early your whole life, son. You were late once."

The room goes watery. I stare at the window until it stops.

"Homework," he says, standing, session over the way he ends them, no ceremony. "Go tell somebody the truth. Somebody who can't answer back, first. Then somebody who can."

***

The overlook on the river road faces west, and I've been coming up here all summer to talk to my wife.

Claire's buried in Chicago, next to a stone with two names on it, and I used to think that meant the talking had to happen there. Turns out grief doesn't check addresses. You can stand on a limestone bluff eleven hundred miles from a grave and she'll hear you fine.

The sun's low. The river's running slow and copper underneath. I park the truck, walk to the rail, and take the chain out from under my collar.

The ring spins at the end of it. Catches the light.

"Hey, trouble," I say.

Wind off the water. A hawk working the far bank.

"I gotta tell you some things, and you're gonna let me get through it, because if you interrupt me the way you interrupt everything, I'll lose my nerve."

I can hear her laugh. Two years and I can still hear it, and for the first time that doesn't feel like a wound. Feels like a window.

"There's a nurse." My thumb runs the band. "You'd like her, which is the worst part. She argues like you. First time I met her she stitched my arm and took my head off in the same ten minutes and I walked out of that ER half in love and too stupid to know it."

The hawk drops. Misses. Climbs again.