For years, David's voice had been the loudest thing in my head.Too much work. Too much mess. No one's going to want you.
Tonight, it was barely a whisper.
CHAPTER 4
Maya
The apartment was too quiet.
Millie had left an hour ago, after making me promise twice that I'd call if I needed anything. Zoe had retreated to her room. I could hear her moving around in there, the creak of her bed, the muffled sound of a video playing on her phone.
I sat on the couch with an ice pack pressed to my temple and tried to make sense of the day.
The cabinet door. The fall. Waking up in Shane’s arms. Mrs. Patterson's cruel laughter and the silence that followed after he’d pretended we had a date planned.
‘Are we still on for dinner tonight at seven, Ms. Cummins?’
Who does that? Who lies to an entire room of people to defend a woman he's never met?
Millie's question was still hanging in the air, unanswered.Who was that guy?I'd deflected with "just someone who helped me," which was technically true but felt like a lie by omission.
I picked up my phone and typed his name into the search bar: Shane Briggs firefighter
The results exploded across my screen.
NYC Firefighter Pulls Three Children from Collapsing Brownstone.
A news article with a photo of him covered in soot, a toddler clutched against his chest. The video had gone viral three years ago. Millions of views. Comments calling him a hero, an angel, the kind of man who restored your faith in humanity.
I scrolled down.
FDNY's Hottest Heroes: The Calendar That Broke the Internet.
I clicked before I could stop myself. And there he was. Shirtless, holding a Dalmatian puppy, looking directly at the camera with an expression that made my face heat up.
The comments were... a lot.
I would let this man rescue me any day.
Forget the puppy, I want HIM.
Is it hot in here or is it just Shane Briggs?
Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Women from all over the country, all over the world, were losing their minds over this man.
This man, who had spent six hours in a hospital waiting room pretending to be my boyfriend.
I closed the browser and set my phone face down on the cushion beside me.
Of course. Of course, he was famous. Of course, he was NYC's hottest hero with a viral video and a calendar spread and anarmy of women who would kill to have him look at them the way he'd looked at me in that teacher's lounge.
The dinner comment wasn't real. It was a kindness. A good man doing a good deed for a woman who’d fainted in front of her coworkers and gotten publicly humiliated.
Famous firefighters don’t date exhausted teachers juggling work and single motherhood in Queens.
I pressed the ice pack harder against my temple and told myself to stop thinking about it.
It didn't work. I lay there in the dark living room, the glow of the city filtering through the blinds, my mind circling back to the same impossible question: why had he done it?
