Page 72 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

"She took the early-release option." Each word comes out of Debbie like it's being pulled with pliers. "Signed the papers yesterday. She accepted her next placement, Owen. It's done. She leaves Saturday."

The hallway sound cuts out. Monitors, intercom, all of it, gone, like a helmet sealing.

"Saturday," I say.

"Saturday."

Three days.

Somewhere behind me a gurney rolls past. A phone rings twice and stops. The world keeps doing its business while mine tips over quiet, no flame, no smoke, the kind of structural failure you don't hear until you're under it.

My hand's gone slack. I look down.

The wildflowers hang upside down against my leg, and the petals are coming off the firewheels one at a time, red and gold on the white tile, and I watch them fall like I watched ash come down on a street in Chicago, and Debbie Sue is saying my name.

Debbie says my name once, steady, and puts one hand on my arm, and walks back toward the station desk like a woman going on shift.

It's her hands I can't stop seeing. Knotted in her apron so tight the knuckles went white. Debbie Sue Monroe has held the hands of dying men and never once looked away, and she could not look at me past "Saturday."

I stand in the hallway with the wildflowers shedding on the tile, and I do the only math I have left.

Three days.

Chapter twenty-one

The File Stays Open

RUE

The fundraiser books balance to the penny, and I don't trust it.

Years of running events, and the ledger has never once closed clean on the first pass. Somebody always forgets to invoice the ice. Somebody always writes a check that bounces soft and apologetic in week three. But here it is, spread across the big table under the closed roof, every column adding up like it rehearsed.

The engine down payment cleared last month. The new pumper is on order out of a plant in Wisconsin. Chief Weyland cried at the council meeting and blamed his allergies, and the whole room let him.

Nothing has happened.

I want to be clear about that, because it matters. It has been weeks since the morning outside the Willow Mug, and nothing has happened. No car. No stranger. No repeat.

Some women would call that reassuring.

I call it an open file with no new entries. Those are different things. A quiet file isn't a closed one. Anybody who's ever worked intake knows the quiet ones are the files you check twice.

I stack the receipts and band them, and there under the band where I left it is Debbie Sue's invitation. Her round handwriting. Saturday, the Monroe place, come say goodbye to Nellie.

That's how facts come to me. Nobody has to whisper them across a counter. They arrive at my door on paper, delivered like a subpoena.

Nellie Greer's contract had weeks left on it. I keep every date in this county in my head, it's the job, and a goodbye party three weeks early tells its own story without one soul having to tell it to me.

Not that I needed the paper. I watched that whole match assemble itself all summer, and neither of them ever hired me.

Coffee walked down to the station on her off days, in her own two hands, for a man she swore up and down she couldn't stand. Him doing his therapy laps on Juniper Lane with her half a step behind, pretending she wasn't counting his steps. The festival. That kiss on the green in front of God and the pie table, while I stood there doing venue math like the shameless professional I am.

Then it went quiet.

Three weeks ago the coffee stopped walking. The lights came back on at the Peterson farmhouse, weeks before that leg of his had any business climbing those stairs. And two people who couldn't stay out of each other's orbit started running careful arithmetic to keep from crossing Main at the same time.

You don't need anybody's sister-in-law for that. It's written all over this town in the shape of two people not being anywhere near each other.