Page 5 of Second Alarm
I didn't come back for him.
I didn't come back for Ty Brennan.
I've rehearsed this sentence in my head for four months, and I'll rehearse it for the rest of my life, if necessary, because it's the operating principle of my current existence, and it isn't optional.
I didn't come back for Ty Brennan.
The coffee is hot. The station is in front of me. Above the roll-up bay doors, the brick facade says STATION 7 in letters old enough that two generations of Copper Ridge firefighters have retouched the paint. The engine sits gleaming inside the open bay, chrome and red, and there's a man in turnout pants and a black t-shirt leaning into the hood of it with a rag, and my brain decides, helpfully, to inform me that the man is Ty.
It's not. It's a guy with curly hair and a Deluca name patch. Deluca sees me. Deluca waves. Deluca, I'll come to understand, waves at everything.
I wave back like a functional adult. The coffee goes in the trash on my way through the doors. I can't walk in with a coffee from a shop every firefighter in Copper Ridge already has an opinion about. I don't want to look like a woman with allegiances, yet.
The locker room smells like men who run into buildings for a living, which is to say: soap, coffee, old turnout gear, and a specific mid-shift sweat that's actually not unpleasant if you grew up in this kind of house. My dad smelled like this. I can identify rubber boots and Speed Stick from three rooms away.
"Larsen!"
Cal materializes in the doorway, broader in the shoulders than he needed to be this year, which is the only way Cal has ever grown into anything, and he crosses the room in three long strides and lifts me off the ground in a hug that rattles my teeth.
"Put me down, you ape." The words go into his collarbone.
He sets me down. He keeps his arm around my shoulder like I'm a lottery ticket he's afraid to lose. "Welcome to Station 7."
"I said put me down."
"She's here, everybody!" He keeps his arm exactly where it is. "This is my little sister. This is Hanna. She's a paramedic. She was Portland FD's best, and she's ours now, and if any of you clowns give her a hard time I'll make your lives hell, and before you make any jokes about it being hell already, I want you to know that my baseline for cruelty is actually very high."
"Cal, I love you — "
"She speaks for herself just fine, by the way, so you don't have to be gentle — "
"Cal."
" — just don't be a bunch of idiots — "
"Calvin. Larsen. Stop talking."
He stops. His face breaks into the grin he had when he was eight years old and won the church raffle for a stuffed bear that was bigger than he was. My brother, ladies and gentlemen. Thirty-three years old and emotionally right now: eight.
"Sorry." His grin says otherwise. "I'm excited."
"I'm aware."
"Okay. Okay." He turns me by the shoulder, like a tour guide, and starts pointing. "That's Derek Kowalski, Big Jim’s kid — "
"Hi, Derek."
"Hi!" Derek has a mustache that's a year older than it should be. "Welcome. I run the gossip network. You can bring your concerns to me. Also, I have opinions about your love life, unsolicited, of course."
"Thanks, Derek."
" — that's Jose Rivera, he's our engineer, don't touch the pump panel, don't touch the rig, don't touch Rivera — "
Rivera doesn't look up from whatever he's writing on a clipboard. "Good morning, Larsen. Welcome."
" — that's Harrison, he's the lieutenant, he's a deeply unimpressed man, don't take it personally — "
Harrison raises one eyebrow at me. It's a whole sentence. The sentence isI'm unimpressed, but respectfully so, welcome aboard.
