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Then Bo gets on a swing and can’t get it going.

He’s pumping out of sync, leaning the wrong way, losing height instead of building it. I’m up off the bench instantly, ready to help.

So is Luke.

We stand at the exact same second, nearly clip shoulders, and do the small clumsy dance of two people who moved for the same kid.

“Sorry,” I say. “Go ahead.”

“No.” He’s already lowering back down, and there’s something pleased living under it. “You go.”

So I go. I cross the mulch toward a frustrated ten-year-old, feeling Luke’s eyes on me.

“Lean back when you go back,” I tell Bo. “Legs out when you come forward. Back, out. Like you’re kicking the sky.”

He tries it. Back, out. Back, out. The swing catches, climbs, and then he has it all at once.

“I’m doing it!”

“You sure are.”

“Don’t push me. I want to have done it myself.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

He swings higher than I’d strictly sign off on, grinning at the sky.

I look back at the bench to see if Luke caught it.

He’s leaned all the way back, both arms spread along the top of the bench like he owns it, ankles crossed out in front of him, and his t-shirt is doing absolutely nothing to disguise the fact that the man carries hoses up ladders for a living. The sun’s on him. He looks obnoxiously good and is fully aware of it.

And his hat is on backward.

It was not backward a minute ago. I would have noticed.

When did he flip it around?

He catches me looking, holds my eyes, and winks. Like he knows exactly what I’m thinking. Which he does, because I’m not hiding it even a little.

I turn back to Bo on his swing, so I don’t do something undignified in a public park.

Chapter 24

Luke

Some shifts you drive home from. This one I mostly aim the truck at the house and let muscle memory do the rest.

I’m not going to lay the call out. There’s a rule I keep, mostly for Bo, sometimes for me. What happens on shift stays on the truck. Some of it isn’t mine to carry into a house where a kid’s eating cereal. Some of it I just don’t have words for, and hunting for them only sands the edges sharper.

I’ll say this much. It was a bad one. The kind where you did everything right, everything you know, and it wasn’t the day for everything-right to be enough. We don’t win all of them. Nine years in and I still take that personally, which our captain says is why I’m good at the job and also why I sleep bad.

The crew went still the last two hours, the specific quiet a firehouse gets after a call like that, where everybody’s fine and nobody’s fine and the fix is bad coffee and a card game nobody’s really playing. Wade clapped me on the shoulder at shift change and told me to get some sleep. We both knew I wouldn’t. He clapped me anyway, because that’s what you do.

I get home a little after seven-thirty. Dottie takes one look at me in the doorway and doesn’t ask. She says Bo’s already off to school and there’s coffee, and she puts a hand flat on my chest for a second on her way past, and then she leaves me alone with it, which is the kindest thing she knows how to do.

I shower until the water runs cold. It doesn’t do what it usually does.

Usually the shower resets me. I stand under it and let the shift wash off with the smoke and walk out a man who can move on with his day. And if that doesn’t work, I go find something with a broken part and put my hands on it until my head goes silent. That’s the whole system. Water, then work. It’s carried me through nine years of this job and the years before it that taught me how to need it.