Page 57 of Sparking Sara

I spend the rest of dinner wishing I were eating a cheeseburger and playing Go Fish.

Chapter Fourteen

“Well, you look like shit,” Justin says when Brett comes around the corner. “Don’t take that the wrong way, Lieutenant.” Justin laughs. “Actually, no—that’s exactly the way I intended. You tie one on last night? Looks like you have one hell of a hangover.”

Brett goes straight to the coffee machine and pours himself a cup. He stands there with his back to us, just drinking and breathing.

“I was in California,” he says. “Just got back at five o’clock this morning.”

“You were in California?” Bass asks in disbelief. “But you were on shift forty-eight hours ago.”

“Flew in and out yesterday,” Brett says, still not turning around.

“Why would you do that?” Justin asks. “Isn’t Amanda coming home tomorrow?”

“No,” Brett says. “No, she’s not. She’s not coming homeever,apparently.”

The sound of chair legs scraping against the tile floor echoes off the walls as we all stand up and circle around Brett at the kitchen counter.

“What happened?” Bass asks.

“She got offered a job. A better job than she has here. So, she’s staying.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Asked me to box up her stuff and ship it. She said she hired a lawyer, too.”

“What the hell?” Justin asks. “She’s not taking Leo, is she?”

Brett shakes his head. “No. She hired a divorce lawyer. She doesn’t want meorLeo. I suppose that’s the silver lining if there is one.”

“You should be happy this happened now and not when Leo’s old enough to be messed up by it,” Justin says.

“Happy?” he bites, looking at Justin like he might strangle him. “You think I should behappyabout this? My goddamn marriage is ending. My son is losing his mother.”

“A mother he never really had,” Justin says. “And don’t kid yourself, you’ve had nothing resembling a marriage this past year.”

Everyone shoots Justin a scolding look. It’s one thing that we’re all thinking these things, quite another to say them out loud.

Brett walks away, taking his coffee over to the table. He sits down and puts his head in his hands.

J.D. puts a hand on his shoulder. “Why don’t you sit this one out,” he says. “I’ll call headquarters and get someone to cover for you.”

“No way,” Brett says. “You want me to go home and think about the fact that I just became a single father? I know exactly how it feels to grow up without a mother. But at least mine didn’t leave on purpose. How do I tell my fifteen-month-old son that his mother doesn’t love him enough to stick around? No thank you. Being here is exactly what I need today.”

The alarm sounds, putting us all into action to respond to a residential structure fire.

“That’s our wake-up call,” J.D. says. “Time to put on our dancing shoes.”

In the rig on the way to the call, I think about Brett and everything he’s had to overcome in his life. Losing his mother in 9/11 was horrible. And now this.

“We should do something for Brett,” I say.

“Like what?” Bass asks.

“I don’t know. Offer to babysit or something? At the very least, we should pass the boot.”

“That’s a given,” he says. “He’s one of us and we take care of our own.”

I nod, wondering if I’ll ever be able to say the same. I don’t try to pretend like I’m one of them. Everyone knows I’m filling in for Noah. But let’s face it, I’m a man without a home. A sheep without a flock. A player without a team.

I really, really want a team.

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