Page 75 of Christmas with Three Firemen

I open my mouth, and he keeps going, quiet, giving me no place to put an argument.

“And say you’re right. Say he follows you to some hotel on the other side of town. You’re alone in a room with a door that locks from a hardware store, no crew down the hall, no rig in the bay, nobody counting you in at night.” He shakes his head once. “You don’t protect anybody by leaving. The danger stays. The fires keep coming. The only thing that actually changes is you’re not here. That’s not protection. That’s just leaving.”

The cold works through my coat while I stand there with that.

Because I’ve built the whole night on the first version, the airtight one, and he’s just held it up to the light and shown me the seam. Leaving looks like protecting. It looked like it upstairs with the duffel open on the bed. Out here, in the blue dark, with his footprints circling the building behind him, it looks like what it is.

Everyone I’ve ever left, I left telling myself something true-sounding.

“He’ll move again,” I say finally. “Whether I’m here or not.”

“Yeah.”

“And when he does, I’m the only person in this city who can read what he leaves behind.”

“That’s my math too,” Grant says.

Neither of us says anything else for a moment. The snow on his shoulders has started to melt at the edges, dark spots spreading on the wool.

He looks tired. He looks like a man who walks fence lines at two in the morning and tells no one.

I come down off the step. My boots punch through the crust, loud in all that quiet, and I cross half the lot and stop in front of him, close enough to see his breath and mine mixing in the air between us.

“How many nights have you been doing this?” I ask. “The perimeter.”

His jaw works. “Since Rico.”

“Does anybody know?”

“You do now.”

I look at him, the snow in his stubble, the flashlight hanging from his fist, this man who stood in a doorway and couldn’t cross it, who hangs stockings in the dark and patrols his sleeping station like a lighthouse keeper, and who came around a corner tonight and looked at my packed bag and didn’t ask, and something in my chest turns over, slow and heavy, like an engine deciding to start.

“I was going to leave the lights,” I say. “On the desk. I couldn’t figure out how to write the note.”

“Don’t write it,” he says.

I adjust the strap on my shoulder.

Then I turn around and carry the bag back up the step and through the side door, and I hear him knock the snow off his boots and follow me in.

We cross the bay together in the dark, not touching, the tree throwing its colors across the concrete ahead of us. At the bottom of the stairs he stops, and I go up two steps and stop too, and for a second neither of us moves, me above, him below, the whole building asleep around us.

“Goodnight, Noelle,” he says.

“Goodnight, Grant.”

Upstairs, I set the duffel on the floor without unpacking it. That much honesty I’ll allow myself.

Then I take the coiled lights off the desk, climb onto the bed, and press the tape back over the headboard until it holds.

I plug them in.

They blink on, red and gold, cheerful.

I lie down in my clothes and watch them go, and somewhere below me a flashlight beam is moving along a fence line one more time.

Chapter twenty-three