Page 57 of Christmas with Three Firemen

I keep waiting for him to come in. Some part of me, some eight-year-old part that has apparently been waiting twenty-one years, keeps expecting him to cross the room the way he crossed the snow that night, to kneel down, to do the thing he already knows how to do. He did it once anyway.

He doesn’t come in.

He stands there with the doorframe on either side of him and his hands loose at his sides, and his face has closed back over, not into control, into something worse, a kind of paralysis wearing control’s clothes, and I understand with sudden and complete clarity that he has imagined this moment for three weeks and has no plan for it.

The man who has a protocol for everything. Standing in a doorway with no protocol at all.

Say something.

I don’t know if I mean him or me.

I could do it. I could hold up the photograph and say I found this, or when were you going to tell me, or it was you. Three words. I’ve interrogated arsonists and fraud investigators and men twice my size who lied with their whole chests, and I cannot get three words across the floor of this gym.

Mateo says, very quietly, “Cap?”

Grant’s eyes don’t leave mine.

Then they do.

He steps back out of the doorway, and he’s gone.

“What just happened?” Mateo asks.

He asks it softly, and not really to me, more to the room. Wes says nothing.

They both don’t understand why he left.

Mateo shifts his weight. “Noelle. Do you want me to get him back?”

“No,” I say.

My voice works. That’s something.

Wes turns his head, finally, and looks at me, and whatever he sees, he doesn’t ask about it either. He just settles back against the wall, shoulder an inch from mine, staying.

The radiator ticks. Above the high windows the sky is starting to think about gray. The blizzard keeps going, wave after wave against the glass, burying the city, burying the street, burying the whole night under something cold and clean and quiet.

I hold the photograph in both hands and sit very still between two men who won’t leave, and listen to the footsteps of the third fade somewhere above us, and I don’t cry.

I’m still braced. That’s the thing about me. I’m always braced.

But for the first time in twenty-one years, I no longer know what for.

Chapter sixteen

Chapter Sixteen: Noelle

Light is sitting high on the wall when my eyes open.

Late morning light. I stare at it without moving. My head is pounding behind both eyes, my mouth is dry, and I’m lying on top of the covers in yesterday’s clothes.

My boots are at the foot of the bed. Side by side. Paired.

I drop my boots where I stand. Every night, one thuds by the desk, the other ends up wherever it ends up. These are lined against the bed frame with the laces tucked in.

I close my eyes again and the night comes back in fragments. The gym floor, cold through my jeans. The photograph. Grant filling the doorway, then the doorway empty. Mateo’s voice, low and steady, going on and on about nothing. Wes’s shoulder. And then a gap, and inside the gap, movement. An arm under my knees. Stairs. Someone’s heartbeat under my ear, slow, unhurried, climbing.

Carried. I was carried to bed, and someone tucked my laces in, and I slept eleven hours in my clothes.