Page 35 of Christmas with Three Firemen

Rico picks an argument with Callum about something that doesn’t matter and sustains it with the dedication of a man who needs the noise.

Someone strings an additional set of Christmas lights along the apparatus bay, which already has more lights than a department store, but nobody questions it.

I sit at the kitchen table with my laptop and my files, trying to work.

I manage it, mostly. The Delaney paperwork gives me enough to focus on that the background noise of the station becomes almost comfortable, a low-frequency hum that I’ve stopped fighting somewhere in the last week without noticing when.

Mateo slides a bowl in front of me around seven without being asked. I look down at it. Something with tomato and white beans and what smells like enough garlic to ward off every supernatural threat in a five-block radius. I pull it toward me and keep reading.

“You’re welcome,” he says.

“Thank you,” I say, approximately thirty seconds too late.

I can hear the grin in his silence.

By nine o’clock I’ve cross-referenced every contractor approval on record for Firehouse 23 against the Delaney files and come up empty. Not because the connection isn’t there. Because whoever structured these transactions was careful.

The Delaney name sits one company removed from every direct permit, always filtered through a subsidiary, always with a clean paper buffer between the parent company and anything that could be called culpable.

You don’t build that kind of distance between yourself and a paper trail unless you know exactly what the paper trail could prove.

I sit back and look at the ceiling.

Outside the windows, the storm presses white against the glass. Inside, the Christmas lights are the only warm thing in the room.

It looks like a home.

The thought arrives uninvited, and I push it back out immediately.

***

I go to bed at eleven and lie awake for a long time.

The storm is audible from up here, the wind working its way through the old building’s joints and edges, a low persistent sound that sits just below the threshold of alarming.

The radiator ticks. Snow taps at the window. Through the floor I can hear the station below, quieter now but never quite silent, the way it never is.

Boots on the stairs. A door somewhere down the hall. A low exchange of voices, too muffled to make out words.

I stare at the ceiling.

The string lights over the headboard blink their cheerful, indifferent rhythm. They’ve become part of the texture of this room by now, this ceiling, this temporary life I’m living inside someone else’s home.

Three specific people on the other side of these walls.

That’s the thought that won’t leave.

Not the case, not the storm, not the blizzard that just added an indeterminate number of days to my sentence here. Just the undeniable awareness of three people in this building whose exact locations I could probably identify right now without moving from this bed.

Grant in his office, still working at this hour. Mateo a few rooms down, probably finally asleep, sprawled across an entire twin mattress the way comfortable people sleep. Wes somewhere quiet but still awake.

A week ago the tension in this building had a single address. Grant’s office, Grant’s voice, Grant’s eyes finding mine across a room with an expression I couldn’t name but felt in my sternum.

Now it doesn’t work like that anymore.

Now it’s Mateo’s hand on my jaw in a half-dark kitchen three nights ago and the way the kiss changed before I’d decided what to do about it.

It’s Wes in the doorway saying nothing, doing nothing, just being there. It’s all three of them at once in a way that doesn’t resolve itself into any clean conclusion no matter how many times I turn it over.