Page 58 of Christmas with Three Firemen

I press the heels of my hands into my eyes until colors bloom.

When I sit up, I stop halfway.

I don’t know why. I sit on the edge of the mattress and scan the room. Bed. Desk. Duffel on the chair. String lights dead over the headboard. Everything where it should be. I keep scanning anyway, but nothing raises its hand. After a minute, I grab my towel off the hook, give up, and go shower.

The hot water takes the headache down from a shout to a mutter.

Back in the room, dressed, hair dripping down my collar, I reach past the desk for my hairbrush.

My hand stops in the air.

The legal pad is crooked.

I keep it square to the left edge of the desk, pen on top. The pad sits an inch off square. The pen lies next to it.

I stand there with water running down the back of my neck. Then I look at the file stack.

The permit folder is second from the top.

It goes third. Oldest at the bottom, and I have restacked that pile every night for three weeks, and the permit folder goes third.

The desk drawer is open half an inch. Through the gap, the corner of my external drive.

And the mug. I use last night’s mug as a paperweight on the finished stack, and it’s sitting there now, except it’s sitting a thumb’s width off the dried coffee ring it left on the top page. The ring shows at the edge like a brown crescent moon. Whoever put that mug back put it where a mug should go.

Not where mine was.

I don’t touch anything. I kneel and go through the stack folder by folder, page by page, my pulse tapping in my throat. Insurance filings. Permits. Subsidiary registrations. The rebuilt case, all four hundred pages of it.

Every page is here.

I sit back on my heels on the floor of my room. Down the hall, a door opens; somebody’s footsteps pass, ordinary, the building going about its noon.

Somebody stood where I’m kneeling. While I was on a gym floor two stories down, somebody turned these pages one at a time, read what I’ve built, and squared the stack back up an inch off true.

They didn’t take anything. They didn’t need to take anything. Reading it was enough.

I look at the door. No lock on the inside, never has been, it’s a firehouse dorm. Sixty strangers came through this building during the storm. Couriers. Utility crews. Off-shift rotations trading through the bay.

I get up, wash my hands, and stand at the window until my breathing slows down.

Then I open my laptop and start typing the incident report, and stop, because the report goes to the station captain, and delete it, and close the laptop.

Tomorrow.

***

Lunch runs in shifts. I take the second one after his voice starts up in the bay, running Callum through ladder evolutions.

Mid-afternoon I come down the main stairs with two folders, and Grant turns into the far end of the hallway with a clipboard.

We both keep walking. His eyes come up. Mine come up. Ten feet out, he nods, one short drop of the chin. I nod back. We pass, his sleeve close enough to brush mine, and neither of us slows down, and I hit the stairwell door harder than it needs.

At four Mateo sets a plate next to my laptop, grilled cheese cut on the diagonal, and walks away without a single word about it. I eat facing the wall.

At six I open the incident report draft again. My cursor sits in the empty field where his name goes.

The tones drop at six forty.