Page 75 of Igniting Her

“Jamie says the office light hasn’t gone off before four all week. Priya left electrolyte packets on the desk. Everett filed them with the medical supplies.”

Ellie shut the cabinet harder than necessary. “She’s their captain.”

“I know.” The woman paused. “I didn’t say she was yours.”

Ellie turned. The hall behind them was empty.

“Good,” she said. “Because she isn’t.”

The words held until she reached home.

Her apartment had not changed. The crooked kitchen cabinet remained crooked. The academy photograph stayed on the windowsill. Her navy duffel had moved from the bedroom to the closet, but she had not unpacked it so much as hidden the evidence.

At one in the morning, Ellie opened her laptop at the kitchen counter and addressed a letter to Chief Marsh.

She wrote it the way Cassie would have: direct purpose, supporting facts, no unnecessary emotion. She requested release of her personnel and certification records to pursue a lateral position outside Santa Vera. She acknowledged the pending review and thanked the department for the opportunity to serve.

The letter contained none of what Station 12 had taught her: the sound of a full table, Mo’s carnitas, Priya’s merciless honesty, Jamie’s terrible haircuts, or Teak treating every direct order as an opening position. It read as though leaving Santa Vera were merely administrative, not the first departure that felt different from being sent.

Ellie printed the letter.

Her signature went at the bottom in quick black strokes. Beside it, the date line waited.

She uncapped the pen.

The apartment gave her no reason to stay. Cassie had ended the arrangement. A shift had learned to love Ellie in the careful, sideways way people did when they knew the job could send any of them elsewhere without asking. Every crossing in the bay reopened something she had no use for. Another department would see the footage, read the findings, and decide whether one saved child outweighed one disobeyed order. Ellie understood that calculation. She had survived versions of it all her life.

The pen hovered.

Nothing prevented her from writing the date.

She put the cap back on.

For eight days, the letter traveled folded in the inside pocket of her jacket. Ellie carried it to work, home again, and once as far as the municipal building where Fire Administration occupied the third floor. She bought coffee across the street, watched two uniformed officers enter through the glass doors, and walked toward the harbor instead.

The bar sat one block back from the marina between a closed tackle shop and a restaurant that sold oysters for more than Ellie believed any food should cost. Fishing photographs covered the brick walls, and the television above the bottles played a baseball game with the sound off.

Ellie took the last stool at the short end of the bar. She ordered a beer and drank slowly enough that the bartender stopped asking whether she wanted another.

She had been there twenty minutes when Mo sat beside her.

His mustache entered her peripheral vision before the rest of him. He wore jeans, a department sweatshirt, and the expression he usually reserved for damaged equipment someone had tried to hide with tape.

“If this is a coincidence,” Ellie said, “Santa Vera needs more bars.”

“Teak wanted to come.”

“That’s a terrifying answer to a question I didn’t ask.”

“Priya stopped her.” Mo settled both hands on the bar. “Jamie offered to drive.”

“And yet here you are, a committee of one.”

The bartender approached. Mo ordered soda water with lime.

He had not come for a drink.

Ellie looked back at the silent game. “I’m not going back to A shift.”