Maddox glanced over. “What?”
“That kid”—Jade’s shoulders shook—”he spent the entire demo worried Zeus might pee on stage.”
“It’s valid,” Maddox said, but her lips were twitching more too.
“And you answered so seriously!” Jade lost the battle with composure, genuine laughter escaping. “Like it was a tactical question.”
“Itwasa serious question!”
Jade laughed harder, the sound warm and infectious, and Maddox felt something crack open in her chest. A smile broke through first, then an actual laugh, rusty and unfamiliar but real.
Zeus looked up from where he’d been drinking water, head titled in obvious confusion at the sound coming from his handler. That made it worse, and Maddox laughed harder, pointing at Zeus’s bewildered expression. “He has no idea what’s happening.”
“He’s like ‘who is this person?’” Jade managed between laughs.
“He’s probably never heard me laugh.” The words slipped out before Maddox could stop them, truth escaping in the moment’s lightness.
The laughter faded gradually, leaving something else in its wake. Maddox’s walls tried to reconstruct themselves, muscle memory and habit. “We should finish packing.”
But the damage was done. Jade had seen her laugh—really laugh, unguarded and genuine—and Maddox had admitted it was rare enough to be remarkable.
They loaded their vehicles in silence, but it wasn’t the same tense silence from before. Something had shifted into something almost comfortable, and Maddox wondered when had silence between them become comfortable? Zeus settled between them as they worked, his presence a bridge neither of them asked for but both seemed to accept.
“Thanks for letting me be a part of this,” Jade said, closing her car door. “You were right. The kids definitely wanted to see Zeus work.”
Maddox surprised herself with her response. “Your part wasn’t terrible.”
Jade’s smile reached her eyes. “I’ll take it,” she said, though they both knew it was high praise.
“Same time next month?” The words came out before Maddox could stop them. “Different school, I mean.”
She was offering to work together again, choosing proximity when she could’ve suggested they split the demos in alternate schools.
“I’d like that,” Jade said.
They parted ways, but Maddox sat in her vehicle longer than necessary afterward, the engine idling, as she watched Jade make a left toward downtown. Zeus’s head rested on the console between the seats.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Maddox muttered. “It was just work.”
Zeus’s expression clearly said he didn’t believe her. Neither did she. The laugh and ease had been real, and somewhere inthat elementary school gymnasium surrounded by fifty kids and their questions, something between them had shifted.
Maddox wasn’t ready to examine what it meant that Jade could make her laugh or that working together felt more natural than forced. She put the vehicle in gear and headed back to the precinct, but the feeling followed for—unsettled and off-balance, wall cracking in ways she couldn’t repair.
And the worst part, the truly unsettling part: She wasn’t sure she wanted to repair them anymore.
6
The woman at Jade’s wellness table was crying, and not the quiet, polite kind that could be ignored.
“I’m sorry,” she said, swiping at her face with the tissue Jade had passed her. “I don’t know why I’m— It’s just been so hard lately.”
Jade kept her voice low, aware of the families streaming past toward the K-9 demonstration area on the other side of Phoenix Ridge Community Center’s main hall. “You don’t need to apologize. Sometimes it helps to say it out loud.”
The woman—mid-forties, silver wedding band, exhaustion written in the fine lines around her eyes—clutched the Phoenix Ridge Mental Health Services brochure like a lifeline. “My husband’s a firefighter. He’s not sleeping and won’t talk about it, and I don’t know how to help him.”
“Have you talked to his department about their peer support program?”
“He says he’s fine.” The woman’s laugh was bitter. “He’s not fine. I can see it, but he won’t admit it.”
