"I'm already in school, Mom. For my Captain's exam."
"That's not what I meant, and you know it." Her voice softened. "I just worry. First your father, now Captain O'Sullivan. This job takes the good ones, Izzy. It takes them young."
The conversation we'd been dancing around for years finally lay bare between us. Carmen had loved my father, but she'd also spent every shift terrified that he wouldn't come home. When the structure fire took him — when that burning roofcollapsed — it had confirmed every one of her worst fears about the job. Now, watching Cap waste away from cancer caused by decades of breathing smoke and chemicals, it felt like the job was claiming its victims in every way possible.
"I know you worry," I said quietly. "But this is who I am, Mom. This is what I'm meant to do."
"You're meant to be happy, mija. You're meant to have a family, a life outside of that station."
"I have a life."
"You have a job. There's a difference."
The conversation ended the way it always did — with careful "I love yous" and the unspoken understanding that we'd never see eye to eye on this. After I hung up, I sat in my kitchen feeling the weight of her words. Maybe she was right. Maybe I didn't have a life so much as a series of duties and obligations.
But it was my choice to make.
I spent the evening reviewing promotion materials, memorizing policy numbers and command structures until my eyes burned. By nine p.m., I was ready for sleep, grateful for the exhaustion that would keep my mind from wandering to darker places.
The shrill ring of my phone jolted me awake. The room was pitch black, the glowing numbers on the cable box reading 1:17 a.m. My heart hammered against my ribs, my body instantly flooded with adrenaline. A call at this hour meant one thing: something was wrong.
It was Margaret, Cap's wife. Her voice was thin, stretched tight with panic.
"Izzy? I'm so sorry to call so late, but it's Michael. He's in so much pain, and … oh, God, Izzy, he's yellow."
The floor dropped out from under me. Jaundice. That meant his liver was failing.
"I'm on my way," I said, my voice all business, the calm, commanding tone of Lieutenant Delgado taking over. "Don'ttry to move him. Just keep him comfortable. I'll be there in fifteen minutes. We're going to Metro General."
I was dressed and out the door in under three minutes, my mind a blur of tactical assessment. Abdominal pain, jaundice, pancreatic cancer — it was a straight line to the worst-case scenario. As I sped through the deserted city streets, the familiar route to Cap's house felt different, fraught with a new and terrible urgency.
When Margaret opened the door, her face was pale and tear-streaked. I gave her a quick, firm squeeze on the shoulder. "Where is he?"
"In the bathroom."
I found him kneeling on the floor, leaning over the toilet, his body wracked with tremors. The bathroom light was unforgiving. His skin, normally weathered and tan from years of outdoor work, was a ghastly, sallow yellow. His eyes, when he looked up at me, were the same awful color. The pain was etched into every line on his face.
"Hey, Cap," I said softly, my professional calm a thin shield over the terror clawing at my throat.
"Izzy," he rasped. "This is … this one's bad."
"I know," I said, my hand instinctively going to his wrist to check his pulse. It was thready and weak. "We're going to get you some help. Can you stand?"
With my help and Margaret's, we got him to his feet. Every movement was a fresh wave of agony for him. Leaning heavily on me, we shuffled slowly out to my car. The fifteen-minute drive to Metro General was the longest of my life. Cap was quiet, his breathing shallow, his focus turned inward on the pain. I kept one hand on the wheel and the other on my phone, ready to call 911 if he crashed on the way.
The emergency bay at Metro General was an oasis of bright, fluorescent light in the dark of the night. I pulled up to the ambulance entrance, a place I'd been a thousand times in the engine, but never like this. Never as the terrified loved one.
I helped him out of the car while Margaret went to the triage desk. A nurse in dark blue scrubs met us at the door with a wheelchair. He was tall — six feet or more — with sandy brown hair and the kind of lean build that suggested he'd been an athlete in another life. But it was his face that registered through my panic: kind, open, with green eyes that held steady on mine as he assessed the situation.
There was an air of calm about him that seemed to soak up some of the panic radiating from me.
"What's going on?" he asked, his voice steady as he helped me ease Cap into the chair.
"This is Michael O'Sullivan," I said, the words catching in my throat. "History of pancreatic cancer. Acute onset of severe abdominal pain and jaundice."
The nurse's eyes met mine, and in them, I saw an immediate, professional understanding. He wasn't just looking at another sick patient; he was seeing the whole picture. He was seeing Cap, and he was seeing me.
"Alright, Michael," he said, his voice gentle but firm. "Let's get you inside and get you some help. My name is Jimmy. You're in the right place."
