I told her about Tommy. About Maya. About the connection between the arsonist and the woman I loved. The teacher who’d reported his abuse nine years earlier. The target he'd been building toward. I told her about the surveillance, the profile, the escalating pattern.
Sloane took notes. Asked sharp questions. Didn't interrupt when I stumbled over the harder parts.
When I finished, she sat back and studied me.
"That's a story," she said. "But it's not why you emailed me."
I exhaled. "No."
"The article. The photo." Sloane's voice was neutral. "You want me to write something that fixes your reputation."
"I want you to write something true." I met her eyes. "I'm not the guy in that article. I haven't been for a long time. And Maya..." My voice caught. "She's not some desperate single mom who got lucky. She's the strongest person I've ever met. She raised a kid alone, built a career from nothing, and she's about to have her life torn apart because some tabloid needed clicks."
Sloane was quiet for a long moment.
"I don't do puff pieces," she said finally. "I'm not going to write 'Firefighter Hero Is Actually a Good Guy.'"
"I'm not asking you to."
"What are you asking?"
I leaned forward. "Write the real story. The arsons. Tommy. Maya. All of it. When this breaks, and it's going to break, I want the truth out there. Not some spin about the calendar firefighter rescuing his damsel. The actual truth."
Sloane tapped her pen against her notebook. Those green eyes were unreadable.
"You know I'll have to verify everything. Talk to your crew. Your captain."
"Fine."
Something shifted in her face. Just for a second. A tightness around her eyes, a flicker of something that looked almost like pain. She covered it quickly, but not quickly enough.
I didn't know what nerve I'd hit. But I'd hit one.
Sloane wrote something in her notebook. She didn't look up. "I'll be in touch."
She was packing up her bag before I could respond. But at the door, she paused and looked back.
"For what it's worth," she said, "the woman in that photo? Natalie Vance? She has a reputation. Anyone who actually reported the story would have found that out in five minutes." A pause. "Whoever wrote that article wasn't interested in the truth. They were interested in traffic."
She was gone before I could thank her.
2 AM. The station was quiet.
That hollow quiet between calls, when most guys were sleeping, and I couldn’t even close my eyes. Brian found me in the apparatus bay, sitting on the bumper of the engine, staring at nothing.
He dropped down beside me. He didn't say anything at first, just sat.
"Rodriguez told me about the calendar," Brian said finally. "You're really out?"
"Yeah. I'm done being that guy."
Brian nodded slowly. "She might never know you did it."
"Doesn't matter. I'll know."
We sat in silence. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. Somewhere in the station, someone was snoring.
Running into fire was easy.
