Page 96 of The Faceoff

They let us in eventually, one at a time, a soot-faced fireman walking me through the wreck of the ground floor with a flashlight while I grab what I can in ten minutes — clothes stuffed in a duffel, the laptop, my good boots, the toiletries, the books that matter, and last, from the windowsill in my room where the smoke didn’t quite reach, the framed photo of Danny in his dress uniform that is the only object I own that I would have run back into the fire for.

I hold it the whole way out.

Beau’s waiting on the lawn with my duffel already in his truck, and he sees the photo in my hands and doesn’t ask. I climb up into the cab of his truck for the second time in one morning, except this morning I’d had the best night of my life and this afternoon I’m homeless and moving in with him and holding a picture of the only person who never left, and the two facts sit in me at the same time, refusing to resolve.

“Okay?” he says, getting in.

“No,” I say, because it’s true, and because I’m too tired to perform okay, and because — this is the part that frightens me most — because it’s him, and somewhere in the last fourteen hours him became a person I tell the truth to. “Not really. But I will be.”

He doesn’t try to fix it. He doesn’t tell me it’ll be fine. He just reaches over and takes my hand, the one not holding Danny, and holds it, and pulls out onto Sailmaker Lane, and drives me toward the Raven House. I look down at the photo in my lap. Danny in his blues, nineteen years old, grinning, the week before he shipped out.

Don’t get attached to things you can lose, he told me once, the older-brother version of a hug, the only philosophy our childhood ever gave either of us. It’s the only way out clean.

I’m holding Beau’s hand.

I do not let go.

And somewhere under the smoke smell and the exhaustion and the photo and the warm, certain weight of his hand in mine, the oldest part of me — the nine-year-old on the kitchen floor, the one who learned the floor always opens — files the only report she knows how to file:

This is going to cost you everything you have.

Chapter 21

Beau

She owns less than I expected, and packs it like she’s done it before.

That’s the thing I notice, standing in the wreck of her smoke-stained room while a fireman waits in the hall — that Sloane Beckett can fit her whole life into one travel bag and a laptop case, fast, no wasted motion, folding things flat and setting them by the door the way she does everything. Clothes. The laptop. A stack of books she chooses one at a time, like triage. The toiletries. And last, off the windowsill where the smoke didn’t reach, a framed photo she wraps in a sweater before she puts it in the bag, careful, the only thing she handles like it might break.

I don’t ask about the photo. I’ve learned not to ask about the things she handles like they might break.

“That’s it?” I say, when she zips the bag.

“That’s it.” She looks at me, daring me to make it a thing. “I travel light. It’s a virtue.”

It’s not a virtue. It’s a girl who’s learned to be able to leave any room in under ten minutes. I take the bag off her shoulder before she can argue and carry it out to the truck.

I load it in the bed and then I go find Margo and June, because somebody should, and because Sloane’s busy being useful and won’t think to need it herself.

“You two set?” I ask. June’s got a duffel and Margo’s got two and a tote and the vibrating energy of a person running on adrenaline and triage. “Rides? You need anything hauled, I’ve got the truck all day.”

Margo blinks at me, like she didn’t expect the captain to be checking on her welfare on a frozen lawn. “We’re — yeah. Priya’s coming for me. June’s got Hana.” A beat, and something softens in her face, the pre-law armor dropping a notch. “Thanks, Beau. For staying. You didn’t have to.”

“Sloane’s house. Sloane’s people.” I shrug, because it’s not complicated to me even if it seems to surprise everyone. “That makes you mine to check on too. For today, anyway.”

I catch Sloane watching me when I say it. She’s a few feet off, by the porch, and she’s gone still in the way she does when something lands somewhere she wasn’t guarding, and when I look over she looks away too fast. But she heard it. Sloane’s people, that makes you mine to check on. I didn’t say it for her. That’s probably why it landed.

Margo’s on the phone with Wren when we come back around — Wren at practice, just getting the news, and I can hear the tinny shape of her voice asking the questions Wren asks, calm and fast, is everyone out, what do you need, what time. Margo’s relaying and packing at the same time, one-handed, and Sloane steps in without being asked and starts pulling Wren’s things — she knows which drawer, knows which jacket Wren actually wears versus the ones she doesn’t, packs for her roommate with the same fast economy she packed for herself.

“She’s staying with one of the team,” Margo says, hand over the phone. “Tash. The D-pair partner. There’s a couch.”

“Tell her the team’ll sort her,” I say. “Whatever she needs. Tash is solid.”

Margo relays it. I hear Wren’s voice change — relief, the relief of an athlete finding out her people have already closed ranks — and Sloane zips Wren’s bag and sets it by the others, and stands up, and looks around the lawn at the three bags and the smoke-stained house and her two roommates, and I watch her do the count again, the head-count, the one she’s done a hundred times today.

“I’ll see you on campus,” she tells them. “Both of you. Today. I mean it — I’ll find you between classes, we’ll figure out the rest.” She hugs June, who holds on too long, and squeezes Margo’s arm, and that’s as much as Sloane does, that’s her whole register of falling apart, a squeezed arm and a promise to find people later. “Go. Priya’s here. Go.”

And then it’s just us and the truck and the cold.