Page 122 of The Goat Next Door

He freezes.

He searches my face, looking for even a flicker of the playful, sunshine girl he pushed away, but I hold his gaze until he sees nothing but the finality of a closed door.

He lets out a long, shuddering breath, his shoulders finally slumping under the weight of it all. The fight leaves him, and he looks like a ghost of the man who walked in here minutes ago.

As he turns to go, he stops, his back to me. He doesn’t look back, his voice barely a breath of air in the quiet room.

“I love you, city girl,” he whispers, the title hitting me differently now—less a playful nickname, more a testament to the distance between us. “And I’m going to spend every day for the rest of my life wishing I’d been brave enough to tell you that before I burned it all down.”

He doesn’t wait for a response, and I don’t give him one.

I watch, paralyzed, as he walks out.

The engine of his truck cranks to life, the low rumble vibrating through the glass of my kitchen window, shaking the frame. He pulls out of the driveway, the tires crunching against the gravel, a sound that stretches out for an eternity before it finally dies out into the valley breeze.

32

Brooks

“Not every knot means failure.

Some are just evidence that something was pulled too hard.”

— The Stitch & Bitch Bulletin

The shift crew is staring at me, and I don’t give a fuck.

I’m sitting at the long oak table in the firehouse kitchen on Tuesday morning with a pair of reading glasses perched on the bridge of my nose, a yellow legal pad in front of me, and three library books on basic textile mechanics stacked by my elbow.

Because apparently heartbreak has turned me into a man who researched yarn architecture at three in the morning.

“Chief,” Davis says, hovering near the coffee maker with a look that suggests he’s evaluating whether he needs to relieve me of duty under the psychological distress clause of the county charter. “Is that… are you looking at a diagram of a purl stitch?”

“The tension is wrong,” I mutter, not looking up from the page. “If the gauge of the yarn doesn’t match the needle diameter, the whole row collapses. It’s basic physics, Davis. Why the hell do they call it a ‘bitch’ loop when it’s just a standard reverse orientation?”

Davis blinks, lowering his mug. “I think the ‘bitch’ part refers to the conversation, Brooks. Not the engineering.”

“Get the grease trap on Engine 2 cleared,” I command, finally looking up. “And if I see one more speck of soot on the rear intake valves, the whole C-shift is doing hydrant inventory in the rain on Thursday.”

“Copy that,” Davis mutters, backing out of the kitchen.

I drop the pen, leaning my head onto my hand.

Ember’s voice hasn’t left my ears since Monday afternoon.

I went home, I picked up Sophie, I made her mac and cheese, and I sat on the living room rug for two hours while she showed me how to apply pink glitter to a drawing of a ladder truck.

Every time the glitter spilled onto the hardwood, my chest caved in.

Ember would have laughed. Ember would have helped her spread it into the corners of the room. Ember would have looked at me through her messy curls and told me my living room was finally meeting municipal code for personal expression.

I don’t know how to do this.

I know how to calculate fire spread based on wind velocity and fuel load. I know how to manage forty-ton vehicles on narrow mountain roads.

But I don’t know how to make a woman love me again.

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