Page 2 of The Kiss

"I need you to crawl to it. Stay low the whole way. Tell me when you get there."

I heard shuffling, then breathing, then the faint hiss of something I didn't want to think about.

"I'm here."

"Can you open it?"

A grunt. The sound of the frame sliding up. "It's open."

"Stay right by that window and breathe the fresh air. You're going to hear the firefighters pull up, and it might be loud. There are going to be sirens and big trucks and lots of voices. That's all for you. That's all the people coming to get you."

The radio crackled.

"Engine 19 to dispatch. On scene, smoke showing, second floor. Crew is making entry."

Captain Holloway. His voice cut through the static. My breathing leveled the second I heard him. It always did, on the shifts we shared.

"Copy, Engine 19." I keyed the radio with one hand and kept the other on my headset, Tammy's breathing still in my ear. "Be advised, I have a child on the line in apartment 4B. She's at the east window."

"Copy. 4B, east window. Moving to her now."

I'd never met the man. I only knew what he sounded like over a radio channel, and I couldn't have picked him out of a lineup if someone offered me money. But his voice was the one I listened for on every call, and I'd been listening for it longer than I'd ever admitted to anyone, including myself.

"Tammy, the firefighters are inside your building. They're coming to get you."

"Will they find me?"

"They're going to find you. Stay by that window so they can see you."

Ninety seconds later, Tammy's voice came through the line saying "Mommy," and a deeper voice told her she was safe and they had her.

The radio. "Engine 19 to dispatch. Child is secure. She's with her mother."

"Copy, Engine 19."

I closed the call, logged the disposition, and sat for three seconds with my eyes shut and my hands flat on the desk.

A child, home alone in a smoke-filled apartment, calling 911 because there was nobody else to call.

I opened my eyes and took the next one.

The break room at end of shift smelled like burned coffee and someone's leftover Thai. I pulled my jacket from my locker and checked my phone. Nothing from Erin, which meant the afternoon was running smooth.

Dara came in behind me, already scrolling. "Did you see the thing Glenn posted?"

She held the phone out. I shook my head.

"You are literally the only person in this building without an Instagram."

I gave her the same easy smile I always gave when this came up. "I like hearing things from people. It hits different when someone actually tells you."

"That is unhinged."

"Probably." I zipped my jacket. She laughed and went back to her phone.

I had no accounts because a photograph was a location and a location was a thread, and one thread was all it would take for the wrong person to pull until he found us. Every choice I'd made for six years pointed in the same direction: the apartment, the job, the city, the silence. The dispatch center sat inside a police precinct on Tremont. I went to work every day behind bulletproof glass, surrounded by officers, inside a building no one got into without a badge. I'd chosen that on purpose.

Hazel was safe because I had made us invisible. The cost of invisible was a life lived in the margins, but what he would do if he found us was a thought I never let myself sit with for long.