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He looked at the brightly lit storefronts along the highway. McDonald’s had a huge OPEN 24 HOURS sign out front.
“Text Adam,” he said. “Tell him we’re bringing breakfast. What do you guys want?”
Hannah stood under the stream of hot water in the firehouse locker room and put her forehead against the shower wall.
Even odds said she could fall asleep right here. Or put her fist through the wall.
Or cry.
She saw a lot of terrible things in her line of work. Last night had been among the worst—and she hadn’t even been part of the recovery crew, pulling dead bodies out of collapsed homes. She hadn’t heard a total body count yet, and she wasn’t going out of her way to look for one.
She’d seen a half-melted Elmo car on one of the driveways of a collapsed home—the same toy James had at home—and she’d almost lost it.
Sometimes her brain would form a story around something like that. She’d imagine the little boy who played with that toy, and then imagine his home engulfed in flames. She’d imagine him inhaling the smoke, choking, maybe trying to scream for his mother—
Stop. She would be crying against the wall of this shower if she didn’t knock it off. It wouldn’t do for the fire marshal’s daughter to be a blubbering mess, even in the privacy of the shower. If she started letting herself get worked up here, she’d never keep the few shreds of respect she’d managed to earn.
Think of something else.
So she thought of Michael. She thought of him in the back of the ambulance, the way he’d clutched at her.
She’d never seen him like that.
He hadn’t come to find her after her father was done with him, though. She’d finished dragging the fire hoses back onto the trucks with Irish, and then Chief had ordered them to pack up and head home. She’d sent Michael a text to tell him she was leaving, but then she’d noticed that his truck was gone.
And then he didn’t respond to her text.
Before tonight, she hadn’t been sure where things stood between them. Dragging him out of a fire and watching him in the midst of a tragedy hadn’t changed that. He’d grown distant enough that she’d started to think his feelings toward her had cooled—but tonight he’d gripped her hand while they were walking through his ruined home, showing no indication of letting go.
Maybe he would have been like that with anyone who offered him a shoulder to cry on, but she didn’t think so.
She remembered a few weeks ago, when Michael had been concerned that Nick, one of the twins, was hiding something. He was failing tests at school and getting in fights with his brothers. Michael had confided in Hannah, and they’d tried to figure it out. Based on her own experience, she’d been certain that Nick had gotten his girlfriend knocked up.
She couldn’t have been more wrong: Nick wasn’t interested in girls at all. His girlfriend had just been a cover.
The night Michael found out the truth, he’d sat on the back porch with Hannah and told her what happened.
“Are you okay with it?” she’d asked.
“Of course,” he’d said, not even needing to think about it. “If I’m not okay with it, he’s never going to be.”
And he was like that with everything. Strong. Stoic. A rock for anyone who needed one.
If she examined their relationship too closely, it looked a little strange. She’d given up hope that she’d ever be able to date someone, what with her pseudo-cop father and her five-year-old son. Guys her age—twenty-two—never wanted a ready-made family, and they didn’t understand why she couldn’t go clubbing ’til two in the morning or spend the night at their place. They didn’t understand that work and school and motherhood barely left her with five spare minutes in a row.
But then she’d run into Michael Merrick. Only a year older than she was, with his own ready-made family. He worked as many hours as she did, and he hardly had time to scrape together for a girlfriend either. In a way, their relationship felt very high school. The closest they’d come to “spending the night together” was one morning when she’d gotten off work at 3 AM, and “early cup of coffee at his place” had turned into making out. She’d showered in his bathroom and borrowed one of his T-shirts—leading his brothers to get the wrong idea—but they’d never gone farther than that.
Back in high school, they’d never run in the same circles. He’d played baseball and worked for his parents, while she’d rebelled against her father’s strict parenting. Michael had been a year older, too, and she’d dropped out halfway through her junior year. It wasn’t like they would have bumped into each other at the prom. Still, she remembered eighteen-year-old Michael so clearly. He’d walked through the hallways like he owned the place, every pore on his body radiating don’t mess with me.
He carried himself like that now. When they’d first gone out—for a cup of coffee, nothing more—she’d been a bit wary, worried that when he learned about her profession, he’d act like he needed to “out-man” her. But there really wasn’t anything macho about him. No bravado, no chest-puffing, no sign of a domineering ass**le.
He’d been a gentleman. He’d bought her coffee and pulled out her chair—little niceties she wasn’t used to, because she sure didn’t expect that around the firehouse. But every time he talked to her, his voice had been rough and quiet, as if every word were a secret just for her. It had made her shiver in a good way.
Tonight, he’d looked broken. She’d been afraid to touch him, as if one brush of skin would send him shattering into a million pieces. But then she had, and he’d clung to her as if he’d been afraid to let go. Some people might see it as weakness, but she didn’t. She knew how it felt to have life yank the rug out from under you. She knew what it meant to need someone to hold you, to share the weight of the world for a minute. For a second. She would have held him all night.
And then her father had shown up to act like Detective Dickhead.
As usual.
