Page 103 of Between Hello and Goodbye

Chapter Seventeen

Three weeks later…

Ladder Company #9 arrived at the Hanalei structure fire at precisely 3:03 p.m. I made a quick note in the log from the front passenger seat as Travis brought the truck to a halt in front of the burning house. We flew out, along with six other men, and I began directing the operation.

My team sprang into action—two assessing the perimeter, two entering the building for occupants, two uncoiling the hose from the truck and affixing it to the street hydrant.

“Charge the line,” I ordered.

“Yes, sir,” Dickens said as the hose fattened with water. “It’s live.”

“Go.”

The two men on the hose ran to the front door. The kitchen faced the street, and flames licked up the curtains while oily black smoke billowed out of the window.

Grease fire, I noted, watching the men run headlong into danger while I remained on the street. Captain Reyes was on another call, so I was in charge. I’d only go in if I had to.

I hoped I had to.

“Manning,” I barked at one of my men who’d come around from the back. “Status?”

“Under control.”

Under controlwasn’t the same as the fire being out, but unless there were surprises, experience told me this was a simple structure fire, and my team would have it extinguished in minutes. I was proven correct when Travis emerged from the house with a blackened pan in his glove.

“Class B. Guy left a pan with oil in it and forgot about it. Curtains, cupboards went up. He’s going to need a new stove, but the structure is intact.”

I nodded, watching my guys help an elderly man around from the backyard where he’d gone to escape the flames. His face was a grimace of dazed pain, bubbling burns climbing up his right arm. The paramedics who’d arrived after us took over for my guys and packaged the occupant into the ambulance for transport to Wilcox.

“No one else?”

“None.”

“Except this little guy.” Billy joined us, a fluffy Maine coon cat in his soot-stained hands.

“Get him secured,” I told him and turned back to Travis. “We good?”

“Yep. The rest of the house is clean.”

I nodded, and we set about retracting and securing the hose, then called it a day.

In my office, I wrote up the action report and waited for some kind of relief to find me. I’d built a weird psychology for myself—a therapy where each blaze I extinguished was supposed to prove I had my shit together. That the broken parts of me would find their way back to wholeness if I just kept at it.

It wasn’t working.

I loved my job, but the conflict in my heart was no longer about control. I had none.

Because I’m in love with Faith Benson.

I rested my elbows on my desk and held my head in my hands as I let myself have the thought for the first time. No use denying it or pretending it was something else. I was fucking crazy in love with her, and the thought scared the shit out of me while flooding me with serenity at the same time. The serenity I’d been searching for my whole life.

Fuck.

It had been several weeks since I’d kicked her out of my life. The anguish of missing her and wanting her had to stop, and so I stopped us. I stupidly thought ending things would give me some control. As if I’d magically stop loving her and could go back to my old life.

But that life was gone, and I didn’t want it back anyway.

“I want her.”