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I get up. I let go of Lindsey’s hand and kiss the top of her head, and I walk out into the hallway and close the door behind me. This part isn’t mine. It belongs to a mother and her daughter, and to the woman who waited seventeen years for that phone call.

I lean against the wall outside her room. The dressing on my neck pulls every time I turn my head, and my legs feel heavy now that the adrenaline is gone.

A nurse walks by, looks at me, and keeps walking. An orderly pushes a cart past. Through the door, I can hear three women talking at once.

I dig my phone out of the belongings bag, from under my wallet and what’s left of my shirt.

There’s a text from Rob, an hour old. Caleb says you’re off till Monday. Also Cassia says she’s bringing you a casserole and you don’t get a vote.

There’s one from Nate. Barn’s out. West end of the loft is gone. East wall’s fine. Pinky says thanks. He also says you’re an idiot.

Under it, Nate sent a picture. It’s the carving on the barn wall, D.H. + L.N. PORTLAND, with the lopsided heart. He took it after the fire was out, with the late sun coming through the boards and ash still floating in the air. Under the picture he wrote: Pinky made me go back for this. For Lindsey.

I look at that picture for a while. Two girls carved that with a car key on a summer night. Today it almost burned, and two of my crew went back for it anyway.

Then I scroll to a number I finally used this week. Marisol Alvarez, San Antonio.

I send her the picture I took this morning of the sunflower Lindsey left on my kitchen table. Under it, I write: This is Lindsey. She’s the reason I called you. Tell Sofia I’ll be at her recital in December. I owe her dad twenty bucks.

Marisol writes back in about thirty seconds.

She says you better bring the twenty.

I laugh out loud in the hallway, and the nurse at the station looks up again. I don’t care. I keep laughing.

When I go back in forty minutes later, Carol is sitting on the bed with Lindsey. The two of them are leaning against each other, and the phone is still on the blanket between them. It’s a video call now. On the screen is a woman in Portland with dark curly hair and wet mascara, holding a toddler on her hip. A girl of about five leans into the frame next to her with a gap in her teeth.

The woman on the screen looks up when I come in.

“Is that him?” she says. “Linds. Is that the firefighter?”

Lindsey turns and holds out her hand to me. Her face is a mess. It’s swollen and blotchy, there’s still soot along her hairline, and the oxygen tubing is still under her nose.

She’s never looked more beautiful to me.

“Danny,” she says. “This is Travis. Travis, this is Danny.”

I come around the bed and lean down into the frame.

Danielle Hayes Morrow looks at me through a phone screen from eight hundred miles away. She’s a pediatric nurse and somebody’s mom now, but I can still see the girl from the prom picture by Lindsey’s register.

“You went in after her,” she says. “Mom says you drove a fire truck across a field in the smoke to get her. And then you went into a burning barn after somebody else.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She studies me. “Thank you,” she says. “Thank you for taking care of her when I couldn’t.”

“She takes care of me,” I say. “Mostly.”

Lindsey laughs against my arm, and it comes out wet.

Danielle smiles through her tears. Then the little girl next to her pushes her face right up to the camera and says, very loudly, “Are you Aunt Lindsey’s boyfriend?”

Everybody stops. Lindsey and Carol both look up at me. On the screen, Danielle has her hand over her mouth.

“Yes,” I tell the little girl. “I am.”

“Did you get the sunflower I painted?”