Page 86 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

Tater appears behind her with a dish towel over his shoulder, reads the porch in one look, and herds the twins out the back door with a promise about the hose. Good man. Best man I know.

Debbie folds in stages, like a chair.

"A few weeks." Her voice is already wet. "She made me swear. On the twins, Owen. She made me swear on my babies."

"She's pregnant." Saying it out loud does something to my knees. "She's pregnant and she got in a car and left."

"Yes."

"Why."

The flinch. Right there on her face, the thing she's been holding since the tape line, and now I get to watch it break loose.

"You should sit down."

"Debbie."

"It's my fault." Cracked straight down the middle. "She was scared, Owen. Scared of what the news would do to you. The nightmares. That morning on the porch with the ring. She saw that, did you know that? She saw you out there at dawn holding Claire's ring and shaking, and she decided right then she'd never make you choose between a ghost and a crib."

"That's not what that was." I have to stop. Breathe. "That was me thanking her. That was me saying goodbye."

"She didn't know that." Debbie wipes her face with the heel of her hand. "And then I made it worse. God help me, I was trying to talk her into telling you and I made it worse."

"What did you do?"

"I told her about Rosie."

The name hits like a beam coming down.

"She knows Claire was six months along. A little girl you never got to meet. That you buried them. I thought if she understood how much you'd lost, she'd see why you deserved the truth. Instead, she went white as that door and said, if I tell him, I put him back inside that fire."

Debbie's crying for real now, ugly and honest.

"She wasn't protecting herself, Owen. She never does. She was willing to be the villain of your whole story if it kept you standing."

I look down at the photo in my hand. That little ring of light in all that dark.

And here's the thing that guts me. I understand it. Every inch of it. Two years ago I'd have done the same. I'd have carried anything alone, lied to anybody, burned my own life down to the slab before I let one more ounce of hurt land on somebody I loved.

She learned that from watching me sleep.

"Where is she." My voice comes out sanded flat.

"I don't know. Check-in at Millbrook isn't till Monday." Debbie's already moving, digging through the junk drawer by the door, shoving a torn envelope at me with an agency name and a number scrawled across it. "She's stopped somewhere. She has to be. She was dead on her feet when she pulled out, and Nellie doesn't drive tired. She'd write herself up for it."

Tater comes back around the side of the house. He doesn't ask one question. He looks at the photo in my hand, then at me, and he's already pulling his keys off the hook inside the door.

"Two trucks cover more road than one. You run the interstate south, toward Millbrook. I'll take 87 north in case she doubled back. I see her car; I don't do a thing. I park, I sit, I call you." He grips the back of my neck, one hard shake, the way he's done since we were seventeen. "She's yours to talk to, brother. Not mine. Now go."

Debbie follows me down the steps, barefoot on the gravel, tears running past her chin.

"She loves you! Owen! She loves you so much she left, do you hear me? FIND HER!"

***

The truck eats Route 9 while the sun comes up over the smoke still hanging on River Road.

I call. Voicemail. Call again. Voicemail. Third time it doesn't even ring, and I can see it like I'm standing in the room. Her phone face-down on some nightstand, buzzing itself in circles, and her staring at the ceiling pretending she can't hear it.