Page 104 of Fighting For You

My father stood by the window with his hands at his sides. He looked at the floor for a moment, then at me.

"I owe you an apology. More than one."

He paused. I could hear my mother and Nora talking in the kitchen through the closed door.

"The night you brought Nora to this house, I treated her poorly. I listened to gossip from people who had their own reasons to say what they said, and I made judgments about a woman I didn't know." He looked toward the door where Nora's voice was carrying, faint and warm. "I've worked beside her for over a year now. She is an exceptional nurse and a good person, and I was wrong."

I waited.

"And that brings me to the harder one." His jaw tightened. "Because what I did to Nora, I did to you for twenty years."

He looked at the photograph on the shelf.

"You were twelve years old. You were a child, and I held you responsible for something no child should carry. Your mother tried to tell me. For years, she tried." His voice roughened. "I wouldn't hear it."

He turned back to me.

"I'm sorry, Knox. For all of it."

The room was still. My father had never said those words to me. Not after Gage. Not after the beam. Not once in thirty-four years.

"Thank you, Dad."

My father crossed the room and put his arms around me. He held on, one hand on the back of my head, his breathing uneven against my shoulder.

He hadn't held me since I was twelve years old.

Nora and I started a tradition. Every year on my birthday, we visit Gage.

The next morning, Nora crouched beside the headstone and set the flowers against the base. She brushed a leaf off the stone and straightened the stems.

Gage Michael Sullivan. Beloved Son and Brother.

She stood up and leaned into my side. I put my arm around her.

"When I was a kid and I had a nightmare, Gage would hear me from down the hall," I said. "He'd come into my room, sit on the floor beside my bed, and stay there until I fell back asleep. He never said anything about it the next morning."

Nora's hand tightened on my arm.

"I think he's looking after Ian for you."

She looked up at me. "You think so?"

"Yeah. I do."

She pressed her face into my shoulder. We stayed like that for a while, standing in front of my brother's headstone with the sun going down behind the trees.

"We should add the banana split to the tradition," I said. "Gage's grave, then the diner for a banana split."

Nora looked up at me. "That sounds like a good tradition."

Travis got my birthday out of me three weeks after he came back to full duty.

He'd healed well. The burns scarred over on his neck and jaw, and the cast came off in December. He was back on shift by February, lighter on his feet than before, cracking jokes about the scar like it was a trophy. But he waited. He timed it perfectly.

We were cleaning the engine after a call when he brought it up.

"You know I went back into a burning building for you."