Page 60 of Christmas with Three Firemen

“Somebody went through my room last night,” I say.

Her head turns.

“While I was in the gym. My files. All of them, page by page, put back almost right.” I keep my eyes on the streetlight. “And tonight a fire runs against a building’s layout and Rico’s in a burn unit. I’ve been standing here trying to make those two things live in separate boxes, and they won’t go.” My arms tighten over my stomach. “This crew fed me. Carried me to bed. And I’m the reason dangerous people are looking at this station. He’s in that bed, and I keep thinking I carried it in here with my luggage.”

Tara doesn’t answer right away. When I look over, she’s watching me with her jaw set sideways, tired, thinking.

“You know when the first station burned?” she says. “November eighth. You know when I first heard your name? December. Somebody was lighting firehouses while you were still forty blocks away, not knowing we existed.” She shrugs, and winces, the shoulder catching. “This thing’s been ticking under the city for months, Noelle. It was always going to blow up near somebody. You didn’t build it. You’re just the first person who showed up looking for the wires.”

“Rico’s still burned.”

“Yeah. He is. And you still didn’t light it.” She peels the sticker off her shirt, folds it in half, and puts it in her pocket. “Both those things stay true. Nobody said it was a comfortable arrangement.”

I don’t have anything to say to that. It doesn’t wrap around me; it doesn’t ask anything of me; it just stands there in the hallway, level.

“Visit him tomorrow,” she says, pushing off the sill. “He’s unbearable without an audience. Bring the good coffee, the hospital stuff is punishment.”

Her footsteps fade toward the bunks. I stay at the window with her words, turning them over, testing the weight.

I don’t know if I believe her yet.

I keep every word.

***

Near midnight, my throat is dry, and the vending machine upstairs is empty, so I go down.

The bay is dark except for the strips along the floor and the tree glowing in the common room. I’m halfway to the kitchen before I see him.

Grant, at the workbench along the far wall, under the little bench lamp. Rico’s helmet is in his hands. The shell is scorched along one side, the shield fogged white with heat, and he’s turning it slowly under the light, and his thumb keeps moving over the burned place, back and forth, the same slow line, like the mark might come off, like it might tell him something.

His hands stop.

He looks up and finds me across the dark bay.

The bench light carves his face in half, one side lit, one side gone. He doesn’t say anything. I don’t say anything. Between us the whole day stands in the dark, my room, his hallway nod, the radio, the helmet in his hands, the gym before all of it, and the tree lights blink through their colors against the trucks, red then green then gold, patient, oblivious.

His thumb moves over the scorch mark once more.

I fill my glass in the kitchen and carry it up the stairs, and his light is still on below me when I go.

Chapter seventeen

Chapter Seventeen: Noelle

Morrison calls at ten past nine, and I know it’s bad because he starts with my first name.

“Noelle.”

He has called me Meadows for seven years, through two commendations and one disciplinary review and the three weeks of my exile to this station, and the sound of my own first name in his mouth lands like ice cracking underfoot.

“Just say it,” I tell him.

He exhales down the line. Behind him I can hear the office, phones and printers forty blocks and one blizzard away.

“Delaney Urban Partners retained outside counsel. Yesterday their attorney filed a formal complaint with the department. Harassment. Improper investigative conduct, overreach of assignment scope, targeting of a private entity without cause.” He pauses. “There’s language in there about you specifically.”

“Of course there is.”