She calmed, resting a hand on the edge of the counter. “So how do you feel?”
That was the question. Notwhat happened, butwhat now.
“I don’t know if I can trust myself with him again,” I whispered. “Not just my body. My heart.”
“Because he pulled away before?”
I nodded. “And I stayed long enough to feel it happen.”
“You gave him everything.”
“I did,” I said. “And when it mattered, he folded.”
“But he’s back now.”
“Yeah. And I don’t know if it’s because he’s ready… or because I’m still the only place he feels safe.”
That truth sat between us.
Jada took my hand. “You’re scared you’ll love him harder than he knows how to hold.”
Tears swelled. I didn’t blink them away. I let them sit there—quiet and unshed.
“I don’t want to lose myself in him,” I said. “But I already feel it starting again.”
“You’ve always been fire and intuition, Sanaa. You don’t love halfway. But don’t forget who you are.”
“I haven’t,” I said. “That’s why I’m scared.”
She reached in and held me in the kind of hug only a big sister can give you. “Just remember—you’re not the same woman who waited around last time. You’re her evolved. Her healed. And that is a good place to start again.”
The sound of Miles roaring like a dinosaur echoed through the house. Aaliyah giggled. My father started a story about ‘back when defensemeantsomething.’
Life was happening. And I was here, trying to make sense of how a man could break you once, then return with a voice that made you want to break again—just to feel his hands putting you back together.
“He didn’t say we were back together,” I whispered.
“But youfeelit?”
My silence was the answer.
“When you say his name, it still sounds like home.”
I closed my eyes. It did.
11
I’d just signed off on the latest investigation log, cataloging a suspected accelerant found in an East Liberty rowhouse—third one in a cluster that didn’t sit right with me.
Patterns had begun to trace themselves across the map, not just in structure types but in timing, in damage, in gut feeling. The kid we pulled from the last fire—barely seventeen, skinblistered, lungs smoke-thick—had tried to say something before the oxygen mask silenced him. I was going to find out what he saw. And who lit that match.
Sometimes people think the job ends at the hose line. But the fire don’t stop there. Sometimes it follows you. Sometimes it crawls up the back of your neck when you’re sleeping, whispering about what you missed.
I became a firefighter because of the fire that almost killed me.
Hot, greedy, merciless—left its mark across my shoulder and arm like it owned me. And maybe it did. But it didn’t win. I crawled out from under the nightmares. And I stayed.
And when the work stopped being about the adrenaline and started being about thewhy, I moved into investigations. I wanted answers. Still do.
