“Good call on the hallway,” he said.
“You would’ve found him.”
“Maybe.” He pulled his mask up and looked at me sideways. “You were focused today.”
“I’m always focused.”
“You were somewhere else in the truck,” he said. “And then you weren’t. I’m just noting the transition.”
I didn’t answer. He wasn’t wrong, and we both knew it.
The thing about this job was that it burned off everything that wasn’t essential. Whatever I’d been carrying when I climbed into that truck—the café, the coffee, the way Becca had looked at me when she thought I wasn’t watching—all of it had gone quiet the moment the smoke hit my face. Not gone. Just quiet.Waiting, patient as it always was, for the moment when there was room for it again.
That moment was apparently now, because as I pulled off my gloves and rolled my shoulders and watched the last of the steam rise from the ruined kitchen, it all came back. The look on her face when she’d taken the napkins. The stubborn set of her jaw. The way she’d stood in the rain outside Violet’s before she came in, like she was steeling herself for something.
I was so gone for that woman, it was genuinely inconvenient.
Jude tipped his helmet back. “You know, you don’t have to act like you don’t care. It’s not a crime to want to talk to her.”
“Drop it,” I said. “Please.”
But my mind was already back at Violet’s, where Becca Hartford had stood with wet hair plastered to her cheeks, clutching her tote bag like a lifeline. And even further back—a few months ago in Holloway’s parking lot, with whiskey burning my throat and a proposal I couldn’t stop replaying.
She’d smiled, thinking it was a joke. Enlisted Harper to help put me in her car and tucked me into her bed. She was gone when I woke up, and I’d cleared out of her place as fast as I could.
The radio crackled. I barely heard it.
Same brown eyes. Same stubborn set to her mouth. Same way she pretended she didn’t need me when I knew damn well she did.
I’d told myself a thousand times I’d keep my distance. Then she broke things off with Travis, and Matt had made us all promise to watch out for her, and now every time I turned around, I was back in her orbit. Not that I minded. I just wasn’t sure how many more times I could stand that polite, prickly version of her—the one who looked through me like I’d never been her best friend, the one pretending not to remember Holloway’s parking lot.
Every time I tried to bring it up, her eyes would go wide, and she’d find a way to leave.
We climbed back into the truck. The adrenaline had faded, leaving me hollowed out in the pleasant way a hard call sometimes did, like the job had wrung something out of me that had needed wringing.
Jude’s stomach growled audibly.
I looked at him.
“Don’t,” he said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Mom’s,” he said.
“Mom’s,” I agreed.
Chapter 3
Levi
Inside the firehouse, the fluorescent lights buzzed overhead as Jude and I shrugged off our turnout coats, boots thudding onto the rubber mats by our lockers. My shirt clung to my back, damp and smelling of sweat and old fire, and I peeled it away with a tired groan. Jude tossed his helmet onto the top shelf, his hair sticking up in every direction. Locker doors banged shut up and down the row as the rest of the shift filed past, offering tired nods and a few wisecracks.
After quick showers and the familiar sting of hot water on tired muscles, we pulled on soft, worn t-shirts and jeans and ran hands through damp hair. By the time I laced my boots and tugged on clean socks, I felt almost like myself again—more brother than firefighter, just another Barrett kid heading home for a meal.
We grabbed our keys and headed out to Jude’s battered pickup, sliding into the seats with the ease of habit. The engine grumbled awake, and we rolled down the windows to let in the cool air, the world outside painted in the flat grey light of a rain-washed afternoon. Familiar streets passed in a blur—the bakery, the hardware store, the sprawl of Sweetbriar’s Christmas treefarms—until we turned onto the long brick driveway that Dad had laid himself, one crooked brick at a time.
The family house sat at the end of it, the kind of house that had never been planned so much as accumulated. What had started as a modest two-bedroom ranch had grown with every new Barrett baby—a sunroom here, a dormer there, a whole extra wing tacked on one summer when Dad got ambitious. The place rambled in every direction, more patchwork than blueprint, with porches that didn’t quite match and a roofline that looked like it had been sketched by a committee that couldn’t agree on a theme. But it sat proud on several acres of pines and pasture, big enough for family barbecues, football games, and all the noise that came with eight kids growing up under one roof.
