“You liked almost nobody,” I say.
“That is not true,” he replies. “I like plenty of people. I like old Mrs. Keene because she gives me cookies every Christmas and calls me handsome. I like your mother because she once smuggled me lasagna while I was on probation from Sunday dinner. I like Lark because she told me to shut up with her whole face before she ever said it out loud.”
I shouldn’t react to that last part, but I do anyway. My mouth almost curves before I kill it. Beckett notices.
“Oh, he’s got it bad.”
“Beckett.”
“No, really.” He looks delighted now, which feels deeply unfair. “This is actually helping me understand your mood for the last week. You’ve had that whole haunted, intense, half-feral thing going on. Turns out it wasn’t sleep deprivation. It was pining.”
Ray makes a sound into his coffee that might be a laugh and might be sympathy. Hard to tell with him.
I push off the counter. “You’re all exhausting.”
“That’s not a denial,” Beckett sings after me.
I keep walking. Mostly because if I stop, I’ll probably hit him. Partly because he’s not entirely wrong, and that’s a much more dangerous problem.
The hallway to the bunk room is dimmer than the bay, the light softer, the walls narrowing the farther back I go. I stop outside my locker again, not because I need anything from it but because the quiet back here gives me somewhere to think without Beckett narrating the process. I brace one hand on the metal door and let my head tip forward.
This is not how I wanted this to go. Not with Lark. Not with someone who already looks like she’s one bad week away from being pulled in twelve directions by people who think they know what’s best for her. Not with someone who showed up in town carrying grief and pressure and enough determination to rebuild an entire inn because walking away would’ve meant losing one more thing tied to her father.
And especially not with someone who looks at me like I’m something steady. Because I’m not. I know exactly what my life looks like. Twenty-four-hour shifts. Late-night calls. Risk threaded through ordinary days so quietly that it stops feeling extraordinary to the people who live it. Long stretches whereI’m here and completely present, followed by moments when I disappear into fire or wreckage or whatever version of someone else’s worst day the tones send me toward.
Lark deserves easier than that. Safer than that. The thought hits hard enough that I straighten and drag a hand over my face. And then, because my brain clearly hates me, it gives me the memory of her standing in the yard at the farm this afternoon, phone still in her hand after talking to her mother, looking like she was trying so hard to hold everything together that it physically hurt. It gives me the sound of her saying “you scared me” like she hadn’t meant to let the truth out and couldn’t pull it back once it was there. It gives me the way she’d stepped into my space after that, choosing instead of drifting, and how much that had undone me.
Safer. Maybe. But easier? I don’t think she wants easy. I think she wants real. And that’s a worse kind of temptation.
The tones drop before I can push the thought any farther.
Instantly, the whole station changes shape. Stillness snaps into motion. Voices sharpen. Chairs scrape back. Boots hit concrete in quick, practiced rhythms. I’m moving before the dispatch fully finishes, body sliding into the sequence of gear and gloves and air tank like it has a life of its own.
Vehicle fire. Highway shoulder. Possible spread to brush. Contained, probably. Manageable. Still enough to matter.
The night outside is darker now, the station doors yawning open to swallow the truck and spit us out under flashing lights and a siren that cuts through town hard enough to wake dogs and babies and anyone else lucky enough not to live like this every third night. The road unfolds in front of us, familiar and fast, and I brace one hand against the dash as we take the turn toward the highway.
This part always strips things down.
Whatever else is living in my head gets forced into the background the second there’s a job to do. The truck becomes noise and light and movement. The body learns again that there’s no room for anything but the next right step. Sometimes it feels like freedom. Sometimes it feels like cowardice.
Tonight, it feels like relief.
The car is fully involved by the time we get there, flames rolling out from under the hood in thick, aggressive waves, the shoulder lit orange against the dark. Brush nearby is catching at the edges, small tongues of fire testing their reach into the dry grass. We move fast. Hose line. Perimeter. Suppression. Heat pushes at my skin through the gear, familiar and dangerous and impossible to respect halfway.
I work the fire with clean focus and no wasted motion, backing Beckett while Ray moves the line farther out to keep the grass from taking hold. Mac is in command mode, voice steady and clipped as he repositions us by feet and seconds. For a few minutes, there’s only heat and spray and the roar of something trying its hardest to become more than it is. Then all that’s left is steam and blackened metal and the smell of burned rubber thick enough to sit on the tongue.
I stand there a second longer than necessary, looking down at the twisted remains of the car while water runs in dirty streams toward the ditch. The driver is long gone, according to the deputy on scene. Left the vehicle after calling it in. Claimed smoke started under the hood. Claimed they didn’t know what happened.
The deputy shines his flashlight across the shoulder while one of the medics packs up a jump bag that turned out not to be necessary. He says something to Mac that I don’t catch, and thetwo of them move a few feet away to talk. I crouch by the edge of the brush line and study the way the fire spread.
Not random. Not quite natural either. The breeze shifts. Something sweet and chemical rides the air under the usual smoke and gas. Accelerant.
I straighten slowly.
“Wright,” Ray says behind me.
I turn. He tips his head slightly, reading my expression with the kind of ease that comes from years of shared shifts and worse calls than this one.
