Page 89 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

"You don't understand what you're asking for."

"Then explain it to me." He holds up the photo, and his hand is shaking, and his voice isn't. "Explain this. Explain finding out from a piece of paper under a porch bench that I'm gonna be a father."

"I was protecting you!"

"From what? From good news?"

"From Claire!"

The name lands between us like a dropped tray. The whole room goes still.

"Debbie told me," I say, quieter. "About the baby. About your daughter. I know about Rosie, Owen."

He doesn't flinch. That scares me more than if he had.

"So you know," he says. "You know I lost a wife and a baby girl in one night, and you looked at that, and you looked at this"—the photo, trembling—"and you thought the kindest thing you could do was let me lose another one without ever knowing she existed."

"I thought it would break you!"

"IT ALMOST DID!" The roar fills the room and then he catches it, hauls it back, breathes. "Not the baby, Nellie. You. Standing on that porch reading her name off a piece of paper. Thinking you were forty miles gone and never coming back. That almost broke me."

I'm crying. When did I start crying.

"I saw you," I say, and it rips coming out. "The morning after. On my porch. You had her ring in your fist and you were shaking, Owen, you were coming apart, and I stood there in my own hallway and understood I would spend my whole life competing with a ghost, and I couldn't—"

"I was thanking her."

I stop.

"What?"

"That morning." He drags a hand down his face, smearing soot. "I woke up next to you happier than I'd been in two years and I didn't know what to do with it. So I went out to the porch and I held her ring and I thanked her. For the time I got. For teaching me how, so I'd recognize it when it came back." His eyes are wet and furious. "You weren't watching a man grieve his wife, Nellie. You were watching a man say goodbye to her. And you filed it wrong."

"You went cold. The next morning you went cold, you moved out, you—"

"Because I'm a coward who ran from being happy."

A ragged breath. "I was punishing myself, not you. I know it looked the same from your side. I'm sorry. God, I'm sorry. But you never asked. You watched me through a doorway for thirty seconds and sentenced us both."

"Because asking doesn't work!" And now it's all coming, the whole ugly spool of it. "You know what asking gets you? My mama asked. Every town, every man. Is this real, do you love me, are we staying. And they said yes, and she believed them, and we packed the car eleven times before I turned sixteen. Eleven schools, Owen. I learned to read a room before I learned cursive. I keep one box packed on purpose because the packed box is the only thing that never lied to me."

He listens. He doesn't try to fix it. Somewhere in the last month he learned that from me, and it's unbearable, being known like this.

"So yes," I say. "I ran. I ran because you run into fires, and men who run into fires leave people standing in yards. I watched you kiss me and sprint for those trucks last night, straight at the thing that widowed you. Then I stood in that ER all night listening to the radio, waiting for your name to come across it, and a boy with smoke in his lungs told me the fireman went back in. Back in, Owen. I could not put a baby in that yard. I couldn't. I'd rather be the villain."

"Debbie said that." His voice cracks. "She said you loved me so much you left. You people have got to find a different way to love me."

A laugh punches out of me, horrible and wet.

He crosses the last of the carpet. Close enough that I can smell smoke and cold night air and underneath it him, the smell I've been sleeping in for a week of flannel and lying about it.

"I went in," he says. "Last night. First entry in two years. Alarm screaming, whole building talking, and I froze, six seconds, same as always. And then I stopped fighting them and took them with me. Walked in with my girls and walked out with everybody. The kids. The watchman. All of them, Nellie. I got there in time."

"This time."

"Every time from now on I've got a reason to."

"You can't promise that." My voice comes out small, and I hate it, and I let it. The last question. The one under all the armor, the one I've been carrying since I watched his taillights chase a fire. "What if you run in someday and don't come out? What happens to us then?"