Page 4 of Second Alarm
"I know you are now."
"Yeah." A beat. "That's the problem."
And then she walks out of my dorm room wearing my shirt. I sit on the edge of the bed in the forty-watt light and listen to the fire door at the end of the hall bang shut, and bang shut again, because there's an echo in that stairwell I've never noticed before. I'm going to notice it every time for the rest of the day.
The shirt is still inside out when she leaves.
I tell myself this is the part where I get up, kill the overhead lamp, go to sleep, and wake up tomorrow a firefighter.
I sit there until the blinds go gray instead.
At some point I move. I put a kettle on the hot plate we're not supposed to have in the dorms, make a cup of bad instant coffee,and drink it black, the way she takes it, and I tell myself that tomorrow I'll begin the project of forgetting Hanna Larsen.
As project timelines go, it's wildly optimistic.
Chapter 1
Hanna
Present Day
Copper Ridge, Montana
Ten years, three weeks, and roughly two hours later, I'm standing in the parking lot of Station 7 with a cup of black coffee in my hand, and my heart is doing a thing I haven't authorized it to do.
"Cut it out," I tell it.
My heart keeps doing the thing.
The coffee is from Peak Grounds, the little shoebox-sized shop at the corner of Pine and Third with the green awning and the owner who never speaks. I stopped there on my drive in because I told myself I needed caffeine and I told myself I wasn't stopping there in order to delay my entrance at Station 7 by six and a half minutes, and both of those things were lies, but at least they were lies I didn't have to say out loud.
The woman behind the counter had the coffee ready before I said a word. I didn't know her. She knew me. She had sleeve tattoos and the kind of eye contact that would make a police interrogator nervous, and she said, "You're back," in a voice that was flat and true and didn't require my response.
"I'm back."
"For real this time?" she asked.
I stared at her. "I was here twice, three months ago."
"For real this time?" The patience in her voice belonged to a woman who'd asked this question of other people's sisters before.
"For real this time."
"Good." She slid the coffee across the counter. "Black."
"How did you — " I didn't finish.
"Cal told me."
"Cal knows my coffee order?"
"Cal talks. He's a talker."
This was, I'd later come to learn, the defining feature of my brother. The talking. The endless, cheerful, oblivious, well-meaning, infuriating talking. But in that moment, at seven forty-seven a.m., with the sun coming up yellow over the ridge, I paid with exact change, because the woman behind the counter looked like the kind of person who would respect exact change, and walked out with my cup.
Her name, the hand-lettered sign on her apron said, was Nora.
I was going to like Nora, I could already tell. That was a problem. I hadn't come back to Copper Ridge to like anyone new. I had come back because my mother had a scare that turned out to be nothing, which is the Larsen family phrase for a thing we don't discuss, and because I had used every excuse in my arsenal for not moving home, and I had run out. Portland wasn't going to hold me anymore. My mother is sixty-four and alone, my brother is thirty-three and also alone, and I was the only one left to come back, so I came back.
