Page 88 of Igniting Her

“No,” she said. “I have not told her.”

Teak put both palms on the table. “Then with respect, Captain, why are you sitting here?”

“We are on duty.”

“A temporary technicality.”

“One the city remains attached to.”

Mo passed Cassie a tortilla. “Eat first. Make declarations after relief arrives. Nobody needs you confessing love with low blood sugar.”

The crew returned to dinner by degrees. Not away from the truth, but around it. Priya asked what Battalion Three covered. Jamie wanted to know who would inherit A shift and was informed that Cassie did not yet control the chief’s appointment process. Teak proposed herself and received four immediate objections.

Then Mo asked whether Jules had truly cut her own hair with kitchen scissors.

Cassie looked at him.

“You told me never to repeat it,” he said. “That restriction appears to be under review.”

For a moment, the old photograph existed at the table: the yellow towel, the dark uneven points, the grin turned toward Cassie.

“She caught it in a mask strap,” Cassie said. “She refused to wait until morning.”

“The left side was two inches shorter,” Mo told the others.

“It was functional.” Cassie heard the defense in her own voice and, beneath it, affection that no longer had to disguise itself as technical assessment. “Approximately.”

Teak laughed into her napkin. Priya asked how a haircut could be approximately functional. Jamie reached for more pork. Jules’s name stayed with them and did not become a memorial.

The station absorbed the truth the way it absorbed everything else: through food, argument, interruption, and the certainty that no one at the table would be required to carry it alone.

Cassie ate the carnitas while they were warm.

Two evenings later, after B shift had ended and the roster put Ellie off duty, the wet season’s first rain began.

It was not the violent summer storm that had driven Ellie to Cassie’s house months earlier. This rain arrived carefully, darkening the pavement one drop at a time and lifting months of dust from the eucalyptus along the road.

Cassie dressed at home. Dark jeans. Black sweater. No captain’s bars. No radio. Ellie’s transfer request remained in her coat pocket beside the appointment copy from Fire Administration.

She drove downhill with rain moving across the windshield in slow, clean arcs. Harbor fog merged with the low clouds. Storefront lights reflected on wet pavement, and the streets near the water shone as if the city had been given another surface beneath the first.

Ellie’s building stood above the closed surf-repair shop. Rain had deepened the old wood of the exterior stairs and brought the resin smell out through the walls.

Cassie parked, took one full breath, and climbed.

Light showed beneath Ellie’s door.

Cassie stopped on the narrow landing. Water slipped from her hair into the collar of her sweater. She did not rehearse. Every version practiced in the car had been one more attempt to control how truth would be received.

She lifted her hand to knock.

22

ELLIE

The knock came once.

Ellie had been standing at the kitchen counter with the kettle heating and the undated transfer request absent from the drawer where she kept looking for it. Rain moved against the windows. The surf shop below had been closed for hours.