Page 74 of Christmas with Three Firemen

Then I do the math I’ve been refusing to do since Rico.

Every timestamp is after my arrival. Not one photograph from November, when the fires started. He didn’t watch this station when it was just the next historic firehouse on a list. He started watching when the city moved its investigator inside. The crew going in and out. Their faces, their groceries, their hydrant checks, all of it collected the way you collect information about obstacles.

Rico in a burn unit. My files read page by page. A lawyer with my handwriting in his filing. And now proof, timestamped and hand delivered, that a man who burns buildings has spent eighteen days learning the faces of everyone I eat dinner with.

Down the hall, a door opens and closes. Mateo, moving slow on his bruised ribs, running water in the bathroom. He hums two bars of something and stops, because humming probably hurts.

I pull my duffel out from under the bed and open it on the mattress.

The logic assembles itself while I pack, clean, and airtight. He follows me. That’s what the timestamps say. Move the investigator, move the surveillance.

I check into a hotel, I file remotely through Morrison’s channels, the lens swings away from this building and follows me across town, and the people at this station go back to being firefighters rather than subjects.

Files into the bag. Laptop. Chargers. The legal pads, all three. The evidence sleeves. The envelope with the archive photograph, soft at the corners now; I hold it a second and put it in.

My hands are steady the whole time. My breath isn’t. I note both facts and keep packing.

The last thing left is the string lights over the headboard. I reach up and pull, and the tape lets go on the first try, like it was never fighting me at all. I stand there with the dead strand looped over my hands, the little bulbs cool against my palms.

The first week, I spent twenty minutes trying to rip these down and lost.

I coil them on the desk, kill the lamp, and pick up my bag.

***

The bay is dark and warm and smells of diesel and pine. I cross it quietly, past the tree burning its patient colors in the common room, and let myself out the side door into the cold.

The snow has stopped. The lot is blue-white and still, unplowed, my breath standing in the air in front of me.

A flashlight beam swings around the corner of the building.

I freeze on the step, and Grant comes around the side of the station in his coat and watch cap, walking the fence line with the light, and stops when the beam finds my boots.

He clicks it off.

We look at each other across the lot. Snow sits on his shoulders and dusts the front of his cap.

There are two lines of footprints behind him tracking all the way around the building and back, half filled in already, which means this isn’t his first lap tonight, which means the captain of this station has been walking its perimeter in the dark while everyone sleeps, for how many nights now, and I never knew.

His eyes go to the duffel on my shoulder.

He doesn’t ask. That’s the thing I’ll keep from this, after everything. He looks at the bag, and he looks at my face, and he doesn’t ask, because he already knows, the same as I’d know.

“There’s an envelope upstairs,” I say. My voice comes out low in the cold. “Somebody left it in the vestibule. Photographs of the station. Fourteen of them, timestamped, going back eighteen days.” I make myself say the rest. “The crew. The building. Me. Every single one taken after I got here. He’s watching this place because of me, Grant. I’m the reason he’s at that bus stop.”

Grant looks at the bus stop across the street, empty in the dark, its bench holding a pillow of snow.

“So you’re leaving,” he says. Not a question. Not an accusation. Just the fact, laid out on the snow between us.

“I check into a hotel. I file remotely. The lens follows me, and this goes back to being a firehouse.” My grip tightens on the strap. “It’s the only version where you people aren’t standing in my crosshairs.”

He’s quiet. His breath fogs and drifts. Somewhere down the block a plow scrapes past on the avenue, and its yellow light sweeps the buildings and is gone.

“First fire was November eighth,” he says. “Station 17. I knew guys there. We covered their box for two weeks while the city figured out what to do.” He shifts his weight, boots creaking the snow. “November, Noelle. Nobody had ever heard of you. My crew’s been in this thing since before you knew we existed.”

“He wasn’t photographing your crew in November.”

“No. He was burning firehouses in November.” His voice doesn’t rise. It comes across the lot level and worn, like something he’s been carrying up and down the fence line for hours. “You want to talk about what changed when you got here? What changed is somebody finally scared him enough that he’s doing reconnaissance instead of lighting matches. You’re reading those photographs as a target list. I’m reading them as a man who’s stopped feeling safe.”