Page 81 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

The cottage.

Chapter twenty-four

The Last Box

NELLIE

Rewind: nine p.m.

The tones are still ringing off Debbie's fence posts when I point my car at the hospital instead of the highway.

Because that's the deal I make with myself in the dark. You can leave, Nellie Greer. You can pack tonight and be gone before sunrise. But first you work. They're about to need every nurse in the county, and you are still, for a few more hours, one of theirs.

The ER is already turning over when I badge in. Charge nurse Dottie sees my face and doesn't ask why I'm here on my night off. She hands me a gown.

"Feed mill," she says. "Fully involved. Smoke inhalations inbound, two rigs."

"How many inside?"

"Don't know yet."

Those three words sit in my chest like a swallowed stone for the next four hours.

The first patient rolls in coughing black. A volunteer from the mutual aid crew, forty-ish, soot to the elbows. I get him on oxygen and high-flow humidified air and he grabs my wrist with his filthy glove still half on.

"Kids in there," he rasps. "Two kids on the second floor."

"Breathe," I tell him. "In through the nose."

"They sent guys in. I saw 'em go in."

I don't ask which guys. I know which guys. I knew the second the pagers went off in that lantern-lit yard and Owen Peterson kissed me like a promise and ran toward the trucks.

I work. That's the trick nobody tells you about loving somebody in turnout gear. You don't get to fall apart. You get a blood pressure cuff and a suction line and a radio bolted to the wall at the nurses' station, spitting out the worst night of your life in ten-codes.

"Command to all units, second floor access west side—"

Suction. Chart. Oxygen at fifteen liters.

"—two occupants located, repeat, two located—"

IV in the second patient, a teenage boy's mother who drove up on the scene and fainted flat on River Road.

"—watchman still unaccounted for—"

Dottie catches me staring at the radio and puts a cup of water in my hand like it's medication.

"Drink," she says. "You look like the ones we admit."

The boy comes in next. Sixteen, maybe. Soot rings around his eyes where a mask got pressed to his face by somebody who gave up their own air to do it. He's crying and coughing at the same time, and between fits he keeps saying the same thing.

"The fireman went back in. He got us out the window and he went back in."

My hands don't shake. Not on shift. Not ever. It's the rest of me that's gone somewhere far away, standing in a yard full of lanterns, watching a man run toward the thing that widowed him.

"Which fireman," I say. Flat. Even. Not a question, a vital sign.

"Big guy. He talked to us the whole way down the ladder. Called me 'son' like my granddad does." Cough. "He went back."