Page 23 of Light My Fire

I could push. The next sentence is right there, I half-woke and your side was cold. I look at her wrist, and at her, and at the eggs about to go past, and I hear myself say, “Plates?”

“Cabinet on your left.”

We eat breakfast at her island like people who do this, her ankle hooked over mine on the stool's rung, and the eggs are good and the coffee's better than any I've bought. She asks me questions while we eat, when my next tour starts, whether I sleep before nights or after, who covers if I trade away a shift. I answer all of it with my mouth full like a fool, and it's only later, in the truck, that I'll hear that conversation back and notice it was a schedule. Right now, it just feels like a woman in silk wanting to know my life.

“You set my boots straight,” I say, somewhere in the second coffee.

“They were in my way.”

“They were by the door.”

“They were in my way,” she says again, even, and color comes up her throat, actual color, the first blush I've ever gotten out of her, and she puts her attention into the eggs like they need supervision, and I add the discovery to the pile I'm building. Zara Whoever-She-Is can narrate a fire to my face without blinking, and lining up my boots by her island is what embarrasses her.

I hate, with my whole chest, how easy this is, how much of me would sign for it every morning sight unseen, burns and locked doors and all, and that, more than her wrist, is what scares me on the drive home.

The drive home is worse than I budgeted for, twenty minutes of wet gray streets with everything replaying on a loop I can't shut off. I replay her voice cracking on fill me, the marble cold under my thighs, her mouth a furnace, the orchestra she pulled out of me twice, the second begging barely cooled, and I flush at a stoplight, alone in my own vehicle, a grown woman blushing at traffic. And spliced into all of it, frame for frame, the other reel runs, a half-second pause before bacon, a blister line too straight for grease, a cold bed at three in the morning with a thread of light under a locked door, and a column of smoke over Camden she stood and watched with me like we were watching our kid's recital. I grip the wheel and I think, not for the first time, that there are two complete women named Zara and I'm falling for both of them, and only one of them can be real, and I've stopped being sure which one I'm rooting for.

Shift starts at six. I sleep a few more hours in my own bed, which smells like nobody, eat standing over the sink, and walk into Station 9 at 5:40 with my game face installed, and it survives all of six minutes.

“Serrano.” Val's voice, from her office door. “Got a minute?”

Val's office has a visitor chair nobody sits in twice and a wall of commendations she's never once mentioned, and she closes the door behind me, which she doesn't do for chore assignments. She sits on the edge of her desk instead of behind it, arms folded, and looks at me the way she looks at a building that's showing her smoke from someplace smoke shouldn't be.

“The warehouse survivor,” she says, with no preamble at all. “The woman you carried out. I asked you to come to me first if she made contact.”

“You did.”

“That was nearly two weeks ago.” Val's eyes don't blink enough, it's a known fact of the house, probies write home about it. “Marshal's office still has no ID on her. There's no insurance claim filed by any private party, no walk-in, nothing. A woman survives a fire that's still open as undetermined and never surfaces to so much as ask about her own rescue. You're the last person on record who spoke to her.” She lets that sit. “So I'm asking. Has she made contact?”

And here's where I live now. Here's the exact address.

Because the truthful answer is a list. She found my engine at a gala fire and stood at the curb in pearls. She has my number off a coat-check stub and texts me at midnight. I know how she takes her scotch and what she sounds like when all that control gives, I was inside her thirty hours ago, I'm wearing her soap right now because my own shower felt like a waste of her, and there are burns on her wrist this morning that didn't come from any bacon, and Chief, by the by, she asks about you. She asks about you like she's already read your file.

Val waits. The station hums on the other side of the door, somebody's boots on the apparatus floor, the murmur of the TV in the dayroom, Lena's laugh, brief and bright, at something Quinn said, the whole warm machine of the only family I've chosen. I stand in front of the woman who rebuilt this house and taught me half of what keeps me alive inside a fire, and I feel the lie come up my throat smooth as water from a standpipe.

“No,” I say. “Couple of texts right after the rescue. Thank-you stuff. Nothing since.”

Val looks at me for three full seconds. I know they're three because I count them, like she taught us to count a roof before trusting it.

“Okay,” she says, and unfolds her arms, and just before I'm through the door, at the exact range where I can't see her face, “If that changes, Serrano. Me first.”

“Copy that,” I tell the hallway, and keep walking, past the commendations and the dayroom and Lena looking up from the couch with the beginning of a question she's too good a friend to ask in public, out onto the apparatus floor where the rigs sit gleaming and patient, and I stand at the workbench checking a saw that doesn't need checking with my pulse banging in my ears.

Lena gives me until the saw's third inspection. Then she's beside me with two mugs, sets one at my elbow without being asked, and leans her hip on the bench, facing the bay doors instead of me, which is how she does mercy.

“Closed-door meeting,” she says. “You're checking equipment that got checked Tuesday. And you've smiled at your phone twice since you walked in.”

“Once.”

“Twice.” She drinks her coffee and watches the rain start up again outside the open bay, fine and silver against the streetlights. “I'm not asking, Dani. I'm saying I'm here for when the not-asking stops working.”

She pushes off the bench and goes, squeezing my shoulder once on the route, and I stand there with the mug she brought me going warm in my hands, and the count I'm keeping ticks up again, three conversations I owe her now, and the worst part is knowing she'll never collect, she'll just keep bringing me coffee while I dig.

That's it, then. That's how it happens. No crossroads, no lightning, no devil with a contract. A closed office door, a direct question from the person I respect most alive, and eight easy words I didn't even rehearse. The lie didn't catch in my throat or taste like ash or any of the rest of what they promise you. It came out smooth and helpful, in my own friendly voice, and Val nodded, and the world kept going, and the only person in the building who knows what just died in that office is me.

I check the saw twice. I check it a third time.

My phone buzzes against my leg. One line, no greeting, and even her texts have her accent.