I did not know what I was doing. Not with electrical wiring. Not anymore. I’d done plenty of minor repairs in this apartment—shelving, a garbage disposal, a stand mixer I’d rewired myself with my phone propped against the backsplash, playing a tutorial. But that was before the panel behind the bakery’s kitchen wall had sparked and caught and sent fire racing up to the ceiling. The thought of opening a wire connector right now, even for a smoke detector, made my hands go cold.
So I picked up my phone and called Gabriel.
He’d given me his number at the cookout—written it on a napkin that Bev had watched him hand me. She hadn’t said a word. I’d put it in my phone under “Gabriel Hall.” Changed it to “Gabriel.” Changed it back. His first name sitting alone onmy screen felt too familiar. Too much like I’d already decided something.
It rang twice.
“Hall,” he answered. His voice was low and slightly rough, like he’d been breathing hard or talking over noise.
“It’s Brenna. Are you—is this a bad time?”
“Just got off a call. Structure fire on the county line. What’s going on?”
“It’s not an emergency.” I felt stupid immediately. The man fought fires for a living and I was calling him about a smoke detector. “The smoke detector in my apartment is hardwired, and I need to swap it out. I bought a replacement, but after everything with the electrical panel, I don’t—” I stopped. Took a breath. “I don’t want to touch the wiring myself.”
Silence for a beat. Then, “I’ll be there in twenty.”
He hung up before I could tell him there was no rush. Before I could say he didn’t have to come right now, tonight, straight off a call. Before I could backtrack and tell him I’d figure it out myself.
Twenty minutes. I looked around my apartment and panicked.
Not because it was messy—I kept the place clean. The kitchen and living room were one open space divided by a half wall, and the bedroom was a short hallway away. But the smoke smell from the fire downstairs had settled into everything, and I’d been burning candles so aggressively that the apartment smelled like a Bath & Body Works had collided with a campfire.
I blew out two of the four candles. Then I relit one. Then I changed my shirt, looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, changed back to the original shirt, and stood in the middle of my living room in cutoff shorts and a thin cotton tee, wondering when I’d become a person who changed shirts for a man coming over to install a smoke detector.
His knock came in exactly nineteen minutes. I knew because I’d been counting.
When I opened the door, the first thing I registered was the uniform. He was still in his turnout pants—the heavy canvas ones with the reflective strips at the knee—and a dark navy department T-shirt that was damp at the collar and across the chest. His hair was pushed back from his forehead, slightly damp. There was a faint streak of soot on his left forearm, just above the old burn scar.
He smelled like smoke. Real smoke—not the stale, lingering kind that lived in my walls, but fresh. Sharp. The kind that clung to a man who’d just walked out of a burning building.
My pulse kicked up.
“You didn’t have to come straight here,” I said. “You could have showered. Changed. Eaten.”
“You said you needed a smoke detector installed.”
He looked past me into the apartment, scanning the space with the automatic, assessing sweep I’d seen him do at the bakery. Ceiling, walls, exits. He did it without thinking, the same way I checked oven temperatures without thinking.
“Come in.” I stepped back and held the door open. “The ceiling mount is in the hallway. Right above the bedroom door.”
He toed off his boots by the door without being asked—dropped them on the mat next to mine, heavy and scuffed and still warm from the call—and walked in in his socks. My apartment immediately felt smaller. Not because he was doing anything—he was just standing in my kitchen, looking at the smoke detector package on the counter—but the physical reality of Gabriel Hall in my personal space was something I hadn’t adequately prepared for.
He picked up the smoke detector, tore it out of the packaging, and walked to the hallway. I followed and watched him reach up and twist the old unit off the ceiling mount. He let it hang bythe wiring harness—three thin wires connected by a small plastic clip.
“Same harness,” he said, glancing at the new unit. “Direct swap.”
He unclipped the connector, matched the new harness, and snapped the wires together with a cleanclick. Then he twisted the new detector onto the mount and pressed the test button. The chirp was loud and sharp in the small hallway, and I flinched.
He noticed. His hand came off the detector and looked at me, and the shift in his expression was immediate—from task-focused to fully present, his eyes on my face, reading me.
“Sorry,” I said. “Loud noises and me aren’t great right now. Apparently.”
“That’s normal.”
“Is it?”
“After what you went through, yeah. It’ll ease up.”
