"He's had a hard time," I say. "But I think meeting you is going to make him very happy."
"I hope so." She pauses, then asks quietly, "Are you okay, Mom? You look like you're going to cry."
I am going to cry, but not here. Not yet. I've got to hold it together for Ruby, for Cade, for whatever comes next.
"I'm okay," I lie, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. "Just a lot of feelings, you know?"
"I know." She hugs me tight. "It's going to be okay though. I can tell."
I wish I had her confidence. Her certainty that things will work out just because she wants them to.
But as I sit there in the conference room of the Blackwater Falls Fire Department, holding my daughter and waiting for her father to come back, I let myself hope.
Maybe she's right.
Maybe it will be okay.
Or maybe I've just made the biggest mistake of my life for the second time.
I guess I'm about to find out.
Chapter 3 - Cade
I make it exactly three steps into the hallway before my crew is on me like a pack of wolves who've just caught the scent of blood.
"You have a kid?" Rowan is the first to speak, his voice pitched somewhere between disbelief and awe. "You have an actual, living, breathing kid?"
"Apparently." The word comes out hollow.
I keep walking, heading toward the locker room, but they follow. Of course they follow. This is the most interesting thing that's happened at the station since Asher accidentally set his own jacket on fire during a training exercise.
"How did you not know?" Griffin asks, his brain already trying to piece together the logistics. "You've been here eight years. That kid is what, seven? Eight?"
"Seven." The number feels surreal. Seven years of birthdays and first days of school and scraped knees and bedtime stories, and I wasn't there for any of it. "She's seven."
"Fuck," Hudson mutters, and coming from him, the quietest member of our crew who uses words like ammunition, only when necessary, it carries weight.
Dallas hasn't said anything yet. He's just walking beside me, his presence solid and steady, waiting for me to either break down or lash out. He knows me well enough to recognize I'm barely holding it together, that the shock is the only thing keeping me upright.
I push through the locker room door. The smell of industrial soap and clean gear is grounding, something normal in a world that just tilted completely sideways.
"So that woman," Asher starts, leaning against a locker as I yank mine open. "Sierra, right? That's your… What, ex-girlfriend? Ex-wife?"
"Ex-girlfriend." I pull out my civilian clothes, trying not to think about how Sierra looked standing in that conference room. Still beautiful. More beautiful, maybe, in the way that comes from growing into yourself. And absolutely terrified, her hands shaking even as she tried to stand strong for our daughter.
Our daughter.
Christ.
"And she just... didn't tell you?" Rowan sounds personally offended on my behalf. "For seven years? That's… I mean, that's—"
"Cold," Asher supplies. "That's cold as hell."
"You don't know the situation." The words come out sharper than I intend, defensive in a way that surprises me.
I'm angry at Sierra. Furious, hurt, confused, but I'm also the only one who gets to be angry at her. These guys don't know her, don't know what we were, don't know what the fire did to us.
"Then explain it to us," Dallas says, and it's not a command. It's an offer. A lifeline.
