Page 5

My sister kept telling me I was disappearing. I kept telling her I was fine. We were both right.

The crew was in the kitchen arguing about the Bruins when I poured my coffee and looked for a reason to leave. Amos thought the new defenseman was going to be the difference this season. Julio thought it was the goaltending. Bert said they were both wrong and started pulling up preseason stats on his phone to prove it, which meant this was going to take a while.

Hockey talk filled a firehouse kitchen faster than anything else in Boston. The guys would start with a single play and end up relitigating the entire 2011 collapse before someone's timer went off. I'd heard every version of this argument since I got to this station. I never joined.

I took my coffee down the hall to my office and closed the door.

On my desk, my phone buzzed. Erin.

ERIN

Come to dinner Sunday. I'm making Mom's lasagna. Don't say you're working.

Erin invited me to something every week. Dinners, barbecues, game days at her house. She'd been doing it since the divorce came through, which was her particular form of triage. If she could get me out of this apartment, out of this station, out of my own head, then maybe the brother she remembered was still in there somewhere. I appreciated it. But I also couldn't sit at her dinner table and make conversation without feeling like I was performing a version of myself that no longer existed. So I said no. She asked again the next week. Neither of us acknowledged the pattern.

The door opened without a knock.

"What do you want, Kane?"

Sawyer dropped into the chair across from my desk with a plate of Julio's eggs and a fork, like my office was the break room and he'd been eating here for years.

"Making sure you're not alone."

"What is this, the girls' bathroom?"

Sawyer grinned and took a bite.

I'd been a firefighter when Sawyer came on. He was five years younger and twice as loud as anyone on our shift. He'd attached himself to me before the end of his first week like I was something he'd decided about. When I made lieutenant, then captain, he was the only one who didn't adjust. Everyone else added "sir" or "Captain" or a half-second pause before they spoke. Sawyer just kept walking into my office without knocking. I respected every member of my crew. Sawyer was the one I actually liked.

"You've been different since the divorce, Cap. More closed off. The guys have noticed." He leaned back in the chair. "I've noticed."

Sawyer picked up the fork again and pointed it at me. "On shift, you're here. Off shift, gym, then back here for overtime. Somewhere in there you hit the grocery store at exactly six fifteen because you are a serial killer. Your days off, you sit in your apartment and do nothing, which I know because I've texted you on four consecutive weekends and you've responded to zero of them."

"I responded to one."

"'Noted' is not a response. 'Noted' is what an email auto-reply says." He scraped the last of the eggs off the plate. "Come watch the game with us this weekend at the bar. The whole crew is going. Bert is bringing his girlfriend, Julio is bringing his weird cousin, it'll be great."

"I'll think about it."

Sawyer studied my face for a second.

"You know the guys in there would fight an anaconda for you," he said. "Every one of them. But none of them know you. You've never grabbed a beer with them, never sat through a dinner, never done a single thing with this crew outside this building." He tapped the desk. "At some point you have to ask yourself what you're protecting."

I didn't have an answer for that. Or I had one and it was sitting in a box in my apartment.

“Sawyer—”

The tones dropped.

Sawyer was on his feet before the sound finished. I was half a step behind him. Gear on. Boots, bunkers, helmets. The crew fell into their spots on the engine without a word.

My whole life worked like this. The parts that worked at all.

The call was a two-vehicle accident on Atlantic Ave, one car T-boned at an intersection, the driver pinned behind a compressed dashboard. We pulled up with lights still cycling and I sized the scene before my boots hit the pavement.

"Engine 19 on scene, Atlantic and Congress. Two-vehicle MVC, one confirmed entrapment. We're setting up for extrication."

Her voice came back within seconds.