Page 95 of Christmas with Three Firemen

I think about the girl she carried out of this same kind of fire a year ago, through a different window, in a different storm, doing for someone else exactly what was done for her, without stopping to think about it, because apparently that’s what this building teaches everyone eventually. You stay. You hold on.

You don’t let go, even when the building’s coming down around you.

I look down at her, at the top of her head where it’s tucked against my chest, at the way her hand’s come up to rest against my ribs, easy, unguarded, nothing braced about it at all.

She leans into me instead of standing alone.

She does it without thinking now, the way you lean into something you trust to hold you.

I’m the one who still notices, every time, because I remember the version of her who used to hold herself apart from every good thing, the same way I used to hold myself apart from every good thing, both of us learning, somewhere along the way, how to stop.

“Merry Christmas, Grant,” she says.

“Merry Christmas.”

Chapter thirty-one

Epilogue: Noelle

Three Years Later

Snow falls outside the kitchen window, the same slow, patient kind that used to feel like a countdown to something dangerous and now just feels like weather.

I stand at the counter with a mug of decaf, which I still haven’t gotten used to, three years of black coffee undone in nine months by a very insistent obstetrician, and watch it come down over a backyard that belongs to us, an actual deed with our names on it, four blocks from the station that used to be the only home any of us knew how to imagine.

The house still smells like cinnamon most mornings. Some habits never needed breaking.

“That’s too much garlic,” I say, without turning around, because I know exactly what Mateo’s doing at the stove without having to look.

“There is no such thing as too much garlic. That’s a myth invented by people with no ambition.”

“You said that about the last three things you’ve cooked.”

“I stand behind all of them.” A pan sizzles. “Sit down, you’re supposed to be resting.”

“I’m standing in a kitchen. It’s not exactly demanding.”

“You’re seven months pregnant standing in a kitchen. Sit.”

I sit, because arguing with Mateo about my own wellbeing has never once worked in three years and I don’t expect this to be the year it starts.

He slides a plate in front of me a few minutes later, eggs and toast and fruit cut into shapes that are technically for the toddler currently commandeering the living room but have somehow ended up on my plate instead, because apparently pregnant women also deserve pineapple shaped like a star.

“Dada, higher!”

That’s Emma, just past two, standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room in fleece pajamas with reindeer on them, one small fist gripping the doorframe like she owns the building, which, functionally, she does.

Wes appears behind her a second later, on his hands and knees, halfway through the architectural undertaking of a blanket fort that has been under construction since seven this morning and shows no signs of reaching completion anytime soon.

He’s got a couch cushion balanced against one hip and the particular expression of a man engaged in serious structural engineering.

“Roof’s coming,” he tells her, entirely serious. “Structural integrity first.”

“Higher,” Emma insists.

“After the roof.”

She considers this negotiation, decides it’s acceptable, and returns to arranging a small mountain of stuffed animals inside the half-built fort with the gravity of someone furnishing a very important building.