Page 69 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

Over his shoulder, through the doorway to my kitchen, the vitamin bottle sits on my counter in plain view. Big honest label. Twelve feet from where he's standing.

Everything I have wanted him to say for two weeks, he came here and said it. All I have to do is step back and let him in and slide that bottle across the counter and watch his face do whatever it's going to do.

He fell ten feet so I wouldn't fall six.

One casket. Two names.

"Owen." My voice comes out steadier than any part of me. "My contract's up in a month."

He goes still. "Nellie—"

"Let's not make this harder than it has to be."

I watch it hit him. He doesn't argue. That's the worst part, he doesn't argue, he takes it standing up like a man who's been practicing taking things standing up, and he nods once and holds out the flowers anyway.

"Keep 'em," he says. "They were always yours."

I take them because my hands are traitors.

He walks down my steps into the dark. The truck door. The engine. Headlights swinging off my kitchen wall, and gone.

I close the door on the best man I have ever met.

Then my legs quit, and I slide down the door to the floor with the carnations crushed against my chest, and I press my other hand flat over the little black room my body built, over the one secret in this whole town that Debbie Sue Monroe is keeping, and I tell it the same lie I told its daddy.

"It's better this way."

Somewhere out on Route 9, his taillights are headed home believing I don't love him.

It's the bravest, worst thing I have ever done.

Chapter twenty

Carried, Not Worn

OWEN

The door closed four nights ago and I'm still standing.

That's the part I keep checking, like a man patting his pockets for keys. Four nights since Nellie Greer looked at me over a fistful of gas station carnations and said let's not make this harder, and I have not thrown a punch, kicked a bag, or split another knuckle on a steering wheel.

I went home. I slept bad. I got up.

Two years ago that door would've put me through a wall. Now it puts me in a plastic chair in Doc McKinly's office on a Thursday at four o'clock, third session, hands flat on my knees like I'm waiting on a call.

"You're quiet today," Doc says.

"I'm always quiet."

"You're a different quiet today."

The man was Army before he was this. He sits like it. Waits like it. The clock on his wall doesn't tick, which I suspect is on purpose, and the silence stretches until I fill it because that's the trick and I know it's the trick and it works anyway.

"She turned me down."

"The nurse."

"Nellie." Her name comes out rough. "I did it right this time. Showed up. Said the words. Told her about you, even." I look at my hands. "She's got a month left on her contract and she doesn't want to spend them on me."