He didn't respond. Just kept staring at the screen.
"Garrett." Softer this time. "What's wrong?"
Silence. Long enough that I thought he might not answer.
Then he turned the laptop toward me.
A news article from seven years ago. The headline: Eight-Year-Old Dies in Apartment Fire.
Below it, a photo of a little girl with blonde hair in braids, smiling at the camera.
"Emma Marsh," he said. His voice was strange. Distant, like he was speaking from somewhere far away.
"I was there that night."
My chest tightened.
"The building had seventeen violations. Faulty wiring that sparked the fire. Blocked exits that trapped residents. Sprinklers that hadn't worked in years."
He still wasn't looking at me. His gaze was fixed on something I couldn't see—a memory, maybe. A moment that had calcified into something he carried on every shift.
"We got the call at 2 AM. By the time we arrived, the fourth floor was fully involved."
I didn't speak. Didn't move. Just waited.
"I found her on the fourth floor." His voice cracked, just barely—a hairline fracture in the control he wore like armor. "Pressed against a wall that was already hot to the touch. Blue eyes full of terror. I got close enough to hear her crying through the smoke. Close enough to reach for her."
"Garrett..."
"The floor collapsed." The words came out flat now. Hollow. "I fell into the stairwell below. The impact knocked the air out of my lungs. And when I realized I was alive, that I was down there and she was still up there?—"
He stopped. Swallowed.
"I heard the sounds she made when the ceiling came down. And then silence."
He didn't say anything else. He didn't have to.
"She died because someone decided profit mattered more than her life." His voice had gone hard again. Cold with an anger that had been building for seven years. "Because inspectors signed off on violations. Because the system failed her."
He paused.
"Because I wasn't fast enough."
"That's not?—"
"I know." He looked at me finally. His gray-blue eyes were raw in a way I'd never seen before, stripped of the careful control, the professional distance, all the walls he'd built to keep the world out.
"I know it wasn't my fault. The building was too far gone before we arrived. The violations were too severe. There was nothing I could have done."
"But you still carry it."
"Every day."
He looked back at the screen. At Emma's photo, the blonde braids, the smile.
"I went to her memorial service. Didn't tell anyone. I just needed to—" He shook his head. "That's when I started documenting. That's why I've been doing this for seven years. Because Emma Marsh died in a building that should have been condemned, and nobody was held accountable. Nobody cared."
I didn't have words.
