Page 115 of Never Alone
I'd lain awake in the dark for a long time after she'd fallen asleep.
I'd been waiting thirty-four years to know what that felt like.
I woke up next to her every morning now.
Sometimes I woke up with my face in her hair. Sometimes I woke up with her nose in my neck, her hand flat over my chest where my heart was. Sometimes she was on her side, and Iwas curled behind her, my arm was across her ribs, holding her where I'd held her in my sleep.
In every version of it, the first thing I did was kiss her.
Sometimes she saidCole, go back to sleep,in the voice she used when she was still half in a dream. Sometimes she kissed me back. Once she'd turned in my arms, looked at me with her hair a mess on the pillow and her eyes half open, and saidhi.Justhi.Like she was surprised every morning to find me there. Like she was glad about it.
I thought, sometimes, about what I'd say if I could send a message back to the kid I'd been at sixteen.
Standing in a parking lot in some other town, raw from a fight with a girl whose name he'd remember for eighteen years. Carrying the weight of having done a thing he wasn't sure was right. Telling himself, the whole walk home, that he should have stayed out of it.
I'd tell him to keep going. I'd tell him the girl wasn't wrong about him in any way that mattered. I'd tell him the boy who was hurting her was going to spend the next ten years in prison for what he'd done. I'd tell him that the girl, eighteen years later, was going to walk into his firehouse with her son and ask for help, and he was going to give it to her, and she was going to end up in his bed with her hand over his heart and her hair on his pillow and her name on the lease of his apartment.
I'd tell him not to carry the grudge so long.
I'd tell him she wasn't a girl who ran. She was a girl learning how to come back.
It was a thing I couldn't tell that kid. So I told it to myself instead, every morning, while Tessa slept against me.
I slipped out at six. Tessa was on her side, her hair falling across her face. I brushed it back and kissed her forehead. She made a sound—soft, half-aware—and reached for the warm space I was leaving. I tucked the blanket against her hand and let her hold the blanket instead.
The apartment was quiet. Noah was still asleep down the hall.
I got dressed in the dark, and I drove to the station.
Sam clocked me before I'd put my bag down.
"Looks like someone slept well last night."
"I've been sleeping better lately, thank you."
"Took you long enough."
He clapped my shoulder.
"Happy for you, kid."
He walked off.
That was the whole conversation. Sam was not a man for speeches. Sam was a man for one clap on the shoulder and akidhe hadn't called me in years, and he was right that it had taken me long enough, and he was happy for me, and he was going to be happy for me from a distance because that was the deal at the station. We didn't, as a crew, sit each other down for talks. We clapped a shoulder, we walked off, and we let the other man have his moment without watching him have it.
The shift was quiet.
We ran drills in the morning. Hose drag, ladder raise, a confined-space exercise Tyler had been running us through since the spring. I showered before lunch. We ate. The radio was quiet—a kitchen fire on the south side that the other shift handled, a med call that didn't need us. Two o'clock came. Davisand I took the truck to the warehouse for the fridge stock—milk, eggs, bread for sandwiches, the protein bars Pete had been on a kick about for three months, and the rest of us had stopped arguing with.
We came back at four.
The car was parked at the curb across from the station entrance. Black. New. The kind of car a man rented when he didn't want anybody to recognize it.
I knew it the way I knew most things at four in the afternoon after a quiet shift. Not because I'd seen the car before. Because of the way the man was leaning on it.
Hands in his pockets. Suit jacket open. Watching the station.
"Davis," I said.
