Page 49 of Christmas with Three Firemen

She opens her mouth.

“I’m not finished,” I say.

She closes it.

“You could have compromised the scene. You could have compromised the investigation. You could have gone down inside that building and pulled one of my crew off active firefighting to get you out instead of the other way around.” I keep my voice even. “That’s not acceptable. None of it.”

A beat.

“Are you finished?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“The origin point was in the rear ground floor room,” she says. “Same accelerant pattern as the apartment building two weeks ago. Same directionality. Same concentrated application at the base of the load-bearing wall. If I’d waited for full clearance, the ventilation process would have disturbed it before I could document it.”

I look at her.

“I got what I needed,” she says. “I got confirmation that these fires are connected and that whoever is setting them knows exactly what they’re doing. That matters more than the two minutes of smoke I breathed.”

“It doesn’t,” I say. “Not to me.”

Her expression shifts. She wasn’t expecting that specific answer.

“Your evidence matters,” I tell her. “Your safety matters more. Those two things are not in competition with each other no matter how you try to frame them.”

“I’m not one of your crew, Grant.”

“You’re in my station.”

“That doesn’t give you jurisdiction over how I do my job.”

“It gives me responsibility for what happens to you while you’re doing it.”

She stands up and moves to the window. I watch her look out at the snow.

“You could have been seriously hurt,” I say, and my voice comes out differently than I intended.

She turns from the window.

We look at each other.

“I know that,” she says.

“But you went in anyway.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She’s quiet for a moment.

“Because waiting felt worse,” she says.

I understand that in a way I don’t want to understand it, in the way you understand something that lives in the same part of you as your own worst decisions. I’ve made the same call. Wrong reasons, right instinct, with consequences either way.

I cross the room to where she’s standing at the window.

She hears me coming and turns, and then I’m right there, close enough that she’d have to step back to put enough space between us. She doesn’t.