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"Copy, Engine 19. Second unit is four minutes out. Medical is en route."

Dispatcher 41. I'd never learned her name and she'd never offered it, because dispatch ran on voices and numbers and nothing else. But I'd been hearing hers since the summer, and by now I recognized it as easily as I recognized my own crew. Steady without being stiff, warm without being soft, a voice that sat in my ear during the worst moments and made everything feel like it was going to turn out fine.

We ran the extrication like we ran every other. Bert charged a line and laid it in case the fuel caught. Amos and Julio cribbed the vehicle and got it stabilized. Sawyer positioned himself at the driver's window, talking to the man, keeping him still, covering him with a blanket before the cutting started.

"Engine 19, how are we looking on that entrapment?"

"Sixty seconds. Dashboard is clear, we're working the pedals."

"Copy, Engine 19. Medical is pulling up now."

"Copy. We're two minutes from having him free."

We got him out. The driver was shaking, gripping the gurney rail with both hands like he wasn't sure the world had stopped moving yet. One of the medics draped a blanket over his shoulders and he looked up at me.

"Thank you," he said. His voice cracked on it.

"You did good. You stayed calm." I put a hand on his shoulder. "Let them take care of you."

I pulled my crew back and did a headcount out of habit, then walked the scene to confirm we hadn't left any equipment on the road.

A police cruiser was parked at the far end of the intersection, lights going. Detective Westbrook was leaning against the hood. He lifted his coffee cup when he saw me. "Clean work, Holloway."

"Appreciate it."

"Buy me a beer sometime."

"Noted."

He laughed. I didn't. Westbrook had recently made detective. When he was still in patrol, I trusted him more than most of the officers who showed up to first-responder calls. Someday I'd buy him that beer. Someday was a word I used a lot.

We loaded the engine and cleared the scene.

I keyed the radio. "Engine 19, clear and available."

"Copy, Engine 19. Clear and available."

Her voice lifted on "nineteen." Just barely. Like out of every unit she'd confirmed that shift, ours was the one she was glad to hear from.

I sat in the officer's seat with the radio still in my hand as the engine pulled into traffic.

The apartment was dark when I got home. I turned on one light, dropped my keys on the counter, and stood in the kitchen listening to the silence.

The apartment was clean. Everything was where it belonged, organized by a logic that made sense to me and would have made sense to anyone who'd ever run a station house. It looked like a place someone had staged for a showing.

I pulled a beer from the fridge and walked into the living room, where two shelves held the only evidence that I'd ever been anyone other than Captain Alex Holloway of the Boston Fire Department.

The top shelf: a piece of Roman tile from Hadrian's Wall, bought from a gift shop in Northumberland for four pounds. A small bronze replica of a Viking longship from a museum in Oslo. A coffee cup from a café in Prague that I'd carried in my backpack for three countries because I couldn't make myself leave it behind.

I had the money, the vacation days, a passport in a bedroom drawer that hadn't been stamped in years. Nothing was stopping me from walking into a museum in Rome or standing on a battlefield at Normandy except the fact that the person who used to do those things felt like someone else's life.

I stopped looking at the shelf.

The bottom shelf was worse. A cardboard box, taped shut, that I'd brought with me from three apartments ago.

I hadn't opened that box in years. But I couldn't throw it away, either.

My phone buzzed.