Page 62 of Igniting Her

Footsteps sounded in the kitchen. Cassie lowered her hand. “Get something to eat.”

The retreat was small enough to pass as care and complete enough that Ellie heard it. She nodded. “Yes, Captain.”

She carried the towel away. Cassie remained at the sink with cold water running over the hand that had touched her.

Cassie tried to go with them.

She wiped the command board from the harbor call though Mo had already cleaned it. She checked the radio batteries, found every light green, and checked them again. She moved the next morning’s drill fifteen minutes earlier, then restored the original time because there was no operational reason for the change.

The machinery engaged but carried nothing.

Distance failed next. Cassie sent the crew to eat and remained in the bay. Ellie passed within three feet of her on the way to the shower. “Captain.”

“Ridge.”

The exchange was flawless. Love remained.

By midnight, the station had gone quiet. Mo turned off the kitchen lights. Teak and Jamie climbed the stairs. Priya left two glasses of water beside the coffeemaker and disappeared after them. Ellie was last. She paused at the bunk-room door as if she might look back, then didn’t.

Cassie waited until the floor above settled.

Her office lamp was still on. Inside the bottom drawer, the photograph remained face-up. Cassie had not turned it over after the night Ellie left. Jules’s smile had occupied the dark beneath the desk for an entire shift, unseen and no longer hidden.

Cassie left the office and crossed the empty apparatus bay.

Engine 12 stood beneath the overhead lights, washed and ready. The brass plaque beside it caught a narrow strip of reflection.

FIREFIGHTER J. CALLOWAY

GONE, BUT ON EVERY CALL WITH US

Cassie stopped in front of it. She had stood there countless times during equipment checks, memorial observances, and the private hours when sleep would not come. She had never allowed herself to address the dead woman as if absence could still receive anything.

The name felt impossible until she said it.

“Jules.”

The bay gave it back softly from concrete and metal.

Cassie put one hand against the cool edge of the plaque. “I loved you.”

Her voice broke on loved. She did not correct it.

“I loved you, and I never told you. I let you leave every room believing silence meant less than it did.” The words came slowly, with twelve years of disuse between them. “Then you were gone, and I made not saying it into the last thing I could still control.”

The scar along her left forearm tightened beneath the station lights. Cassie kept her hand on the brass.

“I was your captain. I knew how to give you orders, but I never told you why your safety had become personal. I made fear sound like anger and called the distance discipline.” Her throat closed. She waited and continued. “I could not bring you home. I have never forgiven you for making that true. I have never forgiven myself for being the one who had to live with it.”

No image of the last fire formed. Cassie had lived too long with its pieces to require one. A door. A radio. The impossible quiet after a voice should have answered. She left them unassembled.

“I turned your death into rules,” she said. “I called them leadership because grief sounded less defensible. I used them to keep everyone safe, and then I used them to keep everyone out.”

Her reflection wavered in the polished brass.

“Now there’s Ellie.”

Saying the first name here felt like bringing a living woman into a room Cassie had kept sealed around the dead. She did it anyway.