Page 66 of Christmas with Three Firemen

“Your people are already the bait.” She doesn’t raise her voice. Not yet. “That’s the existing condition. I didn’t create it. The first fire in this pattern was in November, before either of us knew the other existed. The only decision left is whether the next attempt happens with a net under it or not.”

“Then we harden the building. Double the patrols, wire it loud, make it a target not worth hitting.”

“And he goes quiet.” She leans forward, hands on the back of the chair she won’t sit in. “He waits out the patrols, Delaney’s lawyers finish strangling my case, and eight months from now some other historic house burns with nobody inside it watching. You know how patient this man is. You’ve seen the pattern. He picked targets for two months before anybody even called it a pattern.”

She’s right about the pattern. I hate that she’s right about the pattern.

“There are forty people in this house,” I say. “There were sixty during the storm. Kids come through that bay every week.”

“I know. I carried their cocoa.” Her jaw sets. “I’ve done the math with every one of their faces in it, Grant. That’s what took me two days. I don’t have a version where the trap works without the house in it, and believe me, I went looking.”

“And where are you in this math?”

Her chin comes up. There it is.

“I’m where I’ve been for three weeks. Inside it.”

“Inside the bait.” My voice is still level. I can hear the effort in it, which means she can too. “Somebody went through your room because you’re in this. Rico’s in a burn unit because your file had his address in it. And your professional recommendation is that you stay right in the middle of it, and the rest of us just carry on like nothing’s wrong.”

“My exposure is my call.”

“Not in my house it isn’t.”

“Then whose is it?” Now her voice is rising. “Yours? You already carry responsibility for forty people in this building. You want to add me to that list too, without asking me?” She steps closer. “I don’t get a say in how you weigh your crew’s safety. You don’t get one in mine.”

She doesn’t step back. She never steps back.

She plants her hands on my desk and leans in, and her eyes are bright and furious, and we are three feet apart with the whole thing roaring between us, the case, the crew, the crosshairs, and underneath all of it the other thing neither of us has said one word about since the gym.

I try. God help me, I try to say it.

“Noelle. About what you found in the archives—”

“No.” One word, fast, like slamming a hand on a table. “Not that. Not tonight.”

“We’re going to have to—”

“I can do one of these, Grant.” Her voice cracks down the middle of my name, and she hates it; I watch her hate it. “I can stand here and fight you about the plan, or I can fall apart about the other thing, and I don’t get both in one night, so pick, because I already picked.”

The door I’ve been walking up to all week, the one I’ve shredded four notes about, the one I finally put my hand on.

She just closed it from her side.

I straighten up off the desk. Something in my chest is going in a direction I don’t authorize, ten days of drafts and swallowed sentences and her pen scratching behind a door I couldn’t knock on, all of it converting into something hot and unfair and true, and I know better, twenty years of command and I know better than to speak while it’s converting.

“You still looking for reasons to leave us?”

The room goes silent.

She pulls back off the desk like the wood burned her, and her face does something fast and open and hurt before it closes, and I stand there having said it.

Us.

Not the station. Not the crew. I had twenty years of cooler sentences available, and my mouth reached past every one of them and took that one, the one that accuses her of running and confesses me in the same sentence, and it landed harder than I meant it to; I can see exactly how much harder, and there’s no form for this either. No box. Narrative of injury event.

“Noelle.”

She picks up her folder.