CHAPTER 1
Garrett
I hada system for everything except forgetting her.
A job that mattered. Brothers who'd walk through fire for me, literally. A routine so precise I could run it in my sleep.
Most mornings, I did.
Thirty-four years old. Ten years on the job. A life built brick by careful brick into something that looked, from the outside, like purpose.
It worked. Most days.
My alarm went off at 5:15. No snooze. Never snooze.
Snooze was for people who had something worth staying in bed for.
The coffee maker had already started—automatic timer, set the night before like everything else in my apartment. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat there in the dark. Listened to the gurgle and hiss from the kitchen. The radiator clanked through the wall, but I'd stopped hearing it years ago.
White noise. Background static to a life lived on mute.
Twenty minutes of weights in the corner of my living room. Pull-up bar in the doorframe. Dumbbells that had seen better days. A routine I could do without thinking.
That was the point. Thinking was dangerous before coffee.
Shower. Seven minutes exactly. I wiped the fog from the mirror with my palm, clearing just enough space to shave.
Thirty-four. Dark hair I kept short because it was easier under a helmet. Gray-blue eyes my mother once said noticed too much for my own good.
She'd been right about that.
Square jaw. Stubble I'd scrape off before shift. The scar on my left shoulder caught the bathroom light—raised and pink, skin still tight when I reached too far. Warehouse fire, three years ago. I didn't look at it long. Another scar on my right forearm. Broken glass during a vehicle extraction.
The body keeps score, someone told me once. I had the receipts to prove it.
I looked like a man who had his life together.
Ten years since a woman in a coffee shop made me forget how to speak. Eight since she walked out the door.
I looked like a man who had his life together.
Engine 295 sat on a corner in Queens that hadn't changed much in sixty years. Red brick gone pink from decades of sun and exhaust. White trim the probies repainted every spring. Three bay doors that rattled when they opened.
The building smelled like diesel and old coffee, rubber, and sweat that never fully aired out, no matter how many times we mopped the floors.
I arrived twenty minutes early. Always did.
Parked in the back lot. Grabbed my bag. Walked through the side door into the apparatus bay, where the engine sat gleaming under fluorescent lights. Someone had washed her overnight.
Martinez. Compulsive about it.
The firehouse was already alive. Lockers slamming. Boots on concrete. Coffee machine working overtime.
I moved through it like water through a familiar channel—nodding at the guys coming off shift, dropping my bag in my locker, heading for the common room to check the board.
Captain Rodriguez was in his office, phone pressed to his ear, already putting out fires that had nothing to do with actual flames.
Thirty years on the job. Married to Maria for almost as long. Two kids who treated this firehouse like a second home—Lucia, eleven, and Marco, nine. Both of them knew more about FDNY operations than half the probies we trained.
