Page 89 of Never Forget
"I told him I didn't know how to thank him. He told me not to because he was just doing his job." Jenna's voice caught. "He said if his little girl had been in there, he'd have wanted someone to go back for her."
Jack had thought about Rosie.
He'd thought about her that night and he'd gone back into a building that killed him because the thought of another parent losing her daughter was more than he could carry. That was who Jack was. That was what it cost him.
I sat there with Jamie's hand warm in mine. The same hand I'd held through every good moment of the last month. The same hand that would be in someone else's if Jack were alive. In New York. In another life.
All of this was mine because Jack wasn't here to have it.
All of this wouldn't have been here if it weren't for me.
And I didn't know how to tell her.
CHAPTER 23
Jamie
I cried in the truck on the way home.
Sam had pulled into a parking lot halfway back and let me cry without saying anything, one hand on my knee, and then he'd driven the rest of the way with my hand in his. I'd held myself together long enough to pick Rosie up from preschool and get her fed and bathed and into bed. Then I'd come out to the living room and cried again into the couch cushion so she wouldn't hear me.
Now it was morning and Jenna's words were still sitting in my chest.
He said if his little girl had been in there, he'd have wanted someone to go back for her.
I'd dropped Rosie at preschool an hour ago. The apartment was quiet. My coffee had gone cold on the counter twice before I'd remembered to drink it, and a legal pad I'd been using for notes was open on the kitchen table where I'd left it last night after Rosie went down.
I heard Jack's story in a way I hadn't before. An eyewitness. A mother on the grass who had watched him go back in. A direct quote from the man himself, days before he died, explaining himself to the woman who owed him her daughter's life.
I had what I needed.
I just didn't know what to do with it.
Bryce Montgomery sat at the top of the page from a week ago.
I'd drawn a line through his name, and under it I'd written the shape of what he'd told me in his office. Insubordination. Fiscal responsibility. Dangerous precedent. The version of Jack he'd tried to hand me across that mahogany desk, wearing a face of measured concern, explaining why my brother had earned the denial he got.
Jenna's testimony wouldn't move him. I knew that already. He would read her statement and reframe it the same way he'd reframed everything else.A grieving mother giving an emotional account. Understandable but not legally binding.He would smile when he said it.
Going through his office again was a waste.
But I had her words now. I had the dispatcher's record of the 911 call. I had Jack's own quote from a hospital visit Jenna had witnessed. I had the fact that Jack had saved a woman before he went back in for her child—which meant the insubordination framing cut both ways. If going back in for Quinn was insubordination, then carrying Jenna out was not. Jack had completed his assigned duty before he'd defied the order. That distinction had to matter somewhere.
A civil suit. Against the city. To compel reclassification.
I wrote the words down and looked at them.
I wasn't a lawyer. I didn't know the first thing about filing a civil claim against a municipality. I didn't know what it would cost or how long it would take or whether Rosie could be named as a party to the benefits she was owed. I didn't know if a judge would even hear it.
But I knew journalists who had done harder things with thinner files. I could find a lawyer. I could at least start there.
I underlined the plan. Closed the legal pad.
I was rinsing my mug in the sink when someone knocked on the door.
I dried my hands. Crossed the living room. Looked through the peephole.
Three men in the hallway. One of them I recognized as Detective Morrison, the officer who was handling the arson investigation after the fire. The other two were strangers. Dark suits. Badges on their belts.
