Page 59 of Tameron

Easy enough. I grabbed some bags, labels, and a Sharpie and wrote them down on the notepad. I had no doubt I would need more, but this was a good start.

Back at the truck—she needed a name, didn’t she?—I took a lot of pictures and a few videos with my phone, then grabbed a toolset and got to work. I labeled each part of the engine as I took it out and examined it for rust or damage, making notes on my phone of my findings.

Within minutes, I was lost in thought, my mind finding this strange peace as it focused on the task at hand. At least for a little while, I could forget about everything else. About Bean and Creek moving out. About Nash moving on. About me being left behind, struggling to find where I belonged. I didn’t have answers or solutions for any of those things, but this? This I could do.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

DAYTON

My job had been a little too simple lately. It had been easy to forget it wasn’t just rescuing kittens and showing up to fender-bender accidents or the occasional toaster fire in a kitchen. Sometimes, it was bad. Sometimes, it wasshake you to the core, not everything survivedbad.

It had been a good, long while since I’d stood under the heavy spray of the station shower, trying to scrub soot from the insides of my ears and the roots of my hair while doing my best not to hear the devastated cries of the victims repeating over and over in my head. But my job wasn’t over after this.

No. I had to get dressed, put on my game face, and check on everyone.

Nash in particular.

He’d been the perfect EMT on the call, of course. He’d graduated to driving the ambulance, and he’d done it with a focus that many of my people didn’t necessarily have, following close behind us. On site, he’d taken a command role in a subtle way, and he had an instinct about where people should be, so I’d followed his lead.

We got the fire out, and while not all the injuries were minor, everyone in the townhouse had lived. Even the three cats and two dogs.

But it was a total loss. Everything these people owned was ash and char, and the man in the house wouldn’t walk away unscathed. Nash had been the one to get him on the stretcher after we got him out. He’d been trapped by a fallen beam just outside of what had been his office.

I’d seen Nash dressing the man’s burns before they loaded him into the ambulance, and his recovery was going to be bad—painful, long, and expensive.

And then I’d seen the look in Nash’s eyes: hollow and haunted. He’d managed a smile when I asked if he was okay, and I had believed him when he told me yes. But I also knew it was a half-lie.

He was fine to drive the ambulance back to its bay, which shared a massive concrete parking lot with the fire station. He was fine to use my shower to wash all the soot off himself and get his paperwork finished at one of the dining tables.

He was fine to go back to a cot and lie there for a while after his shift was over.

But he also wasn’t fine.

And it was my job as a battalion chief and as his friend to make sure he didn’t spiral.

Most of the crew were subdued—a couple playing Xbox, some grazing in the kitchen on the pizzas we ordered, a couple dozing in recliners. Nash was nowhere to be found. I poked my head into the bunk room, but it was empty like always after a call like this.

Usually, the crew stuck together. It was easier to process when they were all together, and I thought Nash might enjoy our company, but I wasn’t surprised that he’d gone MIA. And I had a feeling I knew exactly where he was.

The spiral staircase was hard on the knees, but I liked the aesthetic it brought to the station. I took them two at a time, then let myself onto the massive second-floor deck. It didn’t take long to spot him, even in the dark. It was going on five in the morning now, and there was the barest hint of dark cerulean along the horizon where the sun would start to rise.

That tiny bit of glow caught on his form. He was huddled in a thick pullover, the hood tucked up over his hair, curled in on himself on one of the dining chairs at the far end of the deck. He stiffened when I walked over, but he didn’t tell me to fuck off, so I was taking that as a good sign.

My own chair made a horrific squeak as I pulled it away from the table, and I heard the faintest snort as I sat.

“No one ever accused you of grace,” he said, his voice a little hoarse from the smoke. We all wore masks, but the EMTs were often too busy handling victims to grab one.

“Growing up in a Deaf house,” I told him. “I could be as loud as I wanted and no one cared.”

He turned his head slightly in my direction. “Was it hard?”

“Nah. I mean, not in the way you’re asking.” The dining chairs out here had a light bounce to them, and I found myself rocking. The motion was self-soothing, which was exactly what I needed right then. I fought off the urge to fall into a coughing fit and cleared my throat instead. “I got to know how awful people could be at a pretty young age, and that kind of sucked. But we were normal. My parents had good jobs, we did Disneyland for milestone birthdays, and I spent my formative, rebellious teenage years smoking weed at the beach five miles from my suburban home.”

He laughed. “I get you.” He paused for a beat. “But it was different, right? Like from how other people lived.”

I had a feeling I knew where this was coming from. I knew Tameron had internalized a lot of what he’d seen at my parents’house. Needing more to live the same way as he used to would mean changing things in his house.

“I didn’t mean to disturb your peace at home.”