Page 61 of Igniting Her

“Of course I did.” A breath caught halfway between a laugh and a sob. “She said I was bossy.”

Ellie stayed where she was while the woman spoke in broken pieces. A library. A courthouse two counties away because their own clerk had made the process ugly. Thirty-nine anniversaries, one postponed by a hospital stay. Tomatoes planted too close together every spring. The same argument about cupboard doors for nearly four decades.

The rest of the crew moved quietly around them. Jamie disconnected the monitor and covered the patient. Priya completed the required confirmation and contacted the appropriate authorities. Teak called the number the wife gave her for a niece who lived ten minutes away. Mo carried the equipment outside one bag at a time.

Cassie remained near the front door. She had seen Ellie with frightened children, injured firefighters, angry supervisors, and a crew determined to love her sideways. She had never seen her make herself this still for a stranger. Ellie did not fill the pauses or reach for a promise. She let the woman hold on as hard as she needed.

“What do I do when you leave?” the wife asked.

“Your niece is coming,” Ellie said. “We’ll stay until she gets here. After that, you do the next thing somebody who loves you can help you do. You don’t have to know the rest tonight.”

The woman bowed over their joined hands. Ellie moved closer, allowing the woman’s forehead to rest against her shoulder. She looked toward Cassie then. Grief had stripped every defense from her face.

Cassie had no command for what the sight did to her.

The niece arrived in slippers and a coat thrown over pajamas. She crossed the room without seeing anyone but her aunt. Ellie gave up the chair-side space and rose slowly. The wife caught her hand before she could step away.

“Thank you for not lying to me.”

Ellie squeezed once. “I’m sorry we couldn’t bring her back.”

Outside, she stood beside Rescue 12 and scrubbed both hands with sanitizer although she had worn gloves. Smoke from the boat fire still marked her jaw. Cassie wanted to wipe it away. The impulse arrived with such ordinary tenderness that she turned toward the apparatus before anyone could see her face.

They returned to Station 12 without sirens. Ellie sat in the rear cab of the quint beside Jamie, looking through the window as Mariner Lane gave way to the lights of the harbor. She had cleaned her hands. She had not cleaned the soot from her face.

Nobody talked. Mo drove. Jamie watched the floor between her boots. Cassie could see Ellie in the small mirror above the windshield, her reflection appearing and disappearing beneath streetlights.

At one intersection, Ellie lifted a hand to her mouth. She pressed two fingers against her lips, then lowered them. The gesture was brief and unguarded. Cassie remembered those same lips against her shoulder in a dark apartment.

I’m falling in love with you.

The answer arrived without permission or preparation.

Cassie loved her.

There was no controlled version of the fact. No professional term that made it temporary, no arrangement narrow enough to contain it. She loved Ellie’s reckless courage and the discipline she was learning. She loved the jokes, the silences that meant something had reached bone, the hands that could haul a stranger through fire and hold an old woman through the first minutes of widowhood. She loved her fully enough that the knowledge felt catastrophic.

Cassie looked away from the mirror.

At the station, the crew reset the medical equipment. Used supplies went into disposal containers. The monitor was cleaned and returned to charge. The oxygen cylinder was replaced. Priya checked the drug box seal while Teak entered the restock numbers. Every item moved back to its assigned place.

Ellie took a towel to the bay sink and scrubbed the soot from her face. It came away in gray streaks, leaving the skin beneath pink from cold water and effort. When she straightened, Cassie was standing behind her.

“You were good with her,” Cassie said.

Ellie looked at their reflections in the dark window above the sink. “We didn’t save her wife.”

“No.” Cassie would not soften the fact. “You helped her survive the first ten minutes after.”

Ellie folded the towel once, then again. “That isn’t the part they put in commendations.”

“Most necessary work isn’t.”

Her gaze met Cassie’s in the glass. Grief remained in it, but so did the question Ellie had refused to ask since the apartment. Cassie felt the answer press against her teeth. Three words. She had repeated them through every turn of the ride back.

Ellie turned. The sink forced them close. A drop of water ran from her jaw into the collar of her shirt. Cassie lifted her hand before she could stop herself and wiped it away with her thumb.

Neither woman moved.