Page 1 of Burn Patterns

Chapter one

Marcus

Lake Washington breathed beneath me, each ripple echoing my steady stroke count.

One hundred and forty-seven.

The burn in my left shoulder was sharper today, pain threading deep into the joint, leftover from yesterday's ladder drill—six stories up, carrying Peterson's dead weight while the vinyl siding melted around us. The memory clung to me, thick as the acrid taste of burning plastic still caught in my throat.

One forty-eight.

Lake water seeped past my goggles, mixing with sweat that never quite washed off after a fire. Some things stayed with you. Lived in your skin, even after you stripped the gear away and the shower scoured everything clean. My lats screamed with every pull, my body caught somewhere between building strength and breaking down.

It was getting harder to tell the difference.

One fifty.

I adjusted my line, angling toward the curve of the shore, where a handful of other early risers cut through the pre-dawnmist. They were the regulars. Katie Brenner, who could run a marathon faster than I could drive it. Raj, training for his first Ironman with the kind of optimism I'd lost years ago. Sarah, who swam every morning rain or shine, swearing the lake kept her sane through Seattle's endless gray days.

The University crowd was starting to trickle in, too—mostly grad students and early-rising professors from UW's lakeside campus. One of them caught my eye occasionally from the shore path, tall and thoughtful-looking, always clutching a travel mug like a lifeline while he watched the swimmers with a mix of fascination and unease.

Something about his careful distance from the water's edge made me wonder about his story, but our paths had never crossed beyond distant nods.

The training watch on my wrist chirped—five-minute interval—time to push. I lengthened my stroke, ignoring the protest in my muscles. Six weeks until Coeur d'Alene 70.3. Six weeks to shave ten minutes off my time, to prove that turning thirty-two didn't meanslowing down, softening, or getting weaker. The late June summer sun would be brutal.

"You're not getting younger, big brother," Michael had said last week over Sunday dinner, his SWAT tactical belt adding yet another gouge to Mom's antique dining room chairs. "Maybe ease up on the crack-of-dawn training sessions?"

Easy for him to say. Michael never had to fight for fitness—it came with the job, same as our youngest brother Matthew, but me? I had Dad's build, solid rather than sleek, built for brute strength, not speed. I wasn't a natural athlete. Every race finish, every extra rep, and every second shaved off my time—it all came through sheer stubbornness.

One sixty-three.

The rhythm settled, the water's resistance shifting into something almost hypnotic. Not peace. Not even close. It was akind of quiet—a place where exhaustion drowned out everything else. Even after twelve years, I still sometimes caught myself expecting to hear Dad's voice calling split times from the shore.

Grief never disappeared. It settled in new places and in the habits that wouldn't die. Grief appeared in the quiet between sirens and in the muscle memory of pushing through pain because stopping wasn't an option. Finally, grief was an ongoing motivating factor in my brothers and I still showing up every Sunday for dinner as if keeping the habit meant keeping our father alive.

One seventy-one.

A loon called somewhere in the distance, its cry splitting the stillness. The lake was different at this hour—untouched before the weekend warriors churned it up and before the boats tore through the calm. Here, I was just Marcus. Not Lieutenant McCabe. Not the oldest brother, the one who had to hold everything together after Dad died.

Just another guy riding the edge between endurance and collapse.

One eighty-two.

The water around me shifted subtly as I caught a glimpse of Katie up ahead, her stroke distinctive—her left arm entering slightly wider than it should. She'd been trying to fix it, but old habits stuck hard. I knew that truth in my bones.

Dad used to say the right habits kept you alive. His last shift had been textbook—gear prepped just so, radio check perfect, and turnout routine followed down to the last snap and buckle.

And then he was gone.

One ninety-three.

The burn in my shoulders sharpened, my body screaming for relief. I clenched my jaw and pushed harder, pushed through it, like I always did.

Focus and discipline.

Dad's stopwatch ticked in my head. His voice still lived there, as real as the cold water against my skin.

What would he think of his sons now?

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