We nod like obedient soldiers. Axel doesn’t take his eyes off me. He touches my sleeve. It’s nothing. It’s everything.
Then he’s gone, crossing the bay back to the ambulance with a gait I could pick out of a lineup of a thousand firefighters—loose shouldered, coil-sprung, a man who knows where every exit is and still chooses to walk toward the heat.
I drag a hand down my face and follow, trying very hard to remember how to be the version of myself that doesn’t tip toward him like a needle finding north.
The mountain will take you if you forget what you’re doing. The heart will too.
Today, neither did.
Barely.
Chapter Nine
Axel
The ambulance smells like metal, antiseptic, and adrenaline. The heater fans thrum in the ceiling; the rig rocks once as someone slams a door out in the bay. We’ve just handed Evan off to the ER, and the whole box still holds the echo of sirens, like the sound stuck to the walls.
Savannah steps up into the back without asking and closes the double doors behind her. The click lands like a bolt sliding home. For a beat, all I hear is both of us breathing—the ragged, after-a-storm kind you can’t hide.
She’s flushed and wind-chapped, hair messy from her beanie, eyes still too wide. She moves past me in the aisle, steadying herself with a hand to the cabinet—and then she touches my arm.
Just a warm palm over my sleeve, quick, like she’s making sure I’m solid.
I am. Unfortunately.
Heat hits like a freight train. Every nerve I have turns its head and looks at that point of contact. My body leans before I think better of it.
“Don’t,” she says, soft.
“Don’t what?”
“Pretend that—” She frowns. Her mouth does something like a smile and like a wince. “It’s just that you always were there. Until you weren’t.”
I go still.
She takes her hand back. The air cools where she leaves me.
“Maybe we should talk about when I left,” she finally says.
“Yeah?” I brace one hand on the counter behind me. The metal is cold. “Okay. Let’s hear it.”
“Why didn’t you—” She cuts herself off, reorders, starts again. “You can’t act like today—like the last week—isn’t dragging us into the same room we spent ten years avoiding.”
“I’m not acting,” I say. “I’m here.”
“And you’re also…” She searches my face. “You’re… hiding. You’re letting me do all the talking and you’re hiding.”
I huff something that isn’t a laugh. “You want my insides on the table?”
“Yes,” she says, sharp. Then softer: “Please.”
I should dodge. I should stall. I should send her to Cole for debrief and go punish myself on the rowing machine until my lungs stop burning with the shape of her name.
Instead I say the thing I never planned to say.
“Ask me then.”
She blinks. “Ask… you what?”
