"I'm not," I tell her.
She holds the look a moment longer, then nods and moves on.
My chest loosens fractionally. Not approval, not yet, but not dismissal either. Progress.
The first test arrives before the coffee's done. Kowalski leans toward Tran at the far end of the table and starts in on a call from last month—some tactical decision Hendricks made. His voice carries. He wants it to. He doesn't look at me while he talks, which is its own kind of look.
I top off my mug and don't turn around. "Kowalski."
The talking stops. "Captain."
"You've got opinions about that call." I face him then, because this particular conversation requires it. "Good. Bring it to me. I actually like talking through it."
He blinks, recalibrates, and nods once — slow, like a man who wasn't expecting that answer and is deciding whether to trust it.
Equipment check. Reyes moves through his report fast enough to skip two items. I let him finish before I say anything—how you handle the correction matters as much as the correction itself.
"Run it again," I say, keeping my voice level.
Reyes's teeth grind. He runs it again, hitting every item this time, and when he's done Deluca sets down his coffee mug and gives me a look across the room—brief, assessing. Recalculating.
The knot between my shoulders eases slightly. Firm but fair. Hendricks's crew needs to see I'm not here to tear things down.
Reyes nods once. Grudging respect, maybe. Or at least recognition that I'm not an asshole.
I'll take it.
The call comes before lunch: kitchen fire on Birchwood. The address crackles through the radio. The crew moves---practiced, efficient, no wasted motion. Engine roars to life beneath me.
By the time we pull up, the fire's out. Smoke drifts from broken windows, acrid and chemicals. The homeowner stands on the lawn, arms crossed, wearing the particular expression of someone rehearsing their story for insurance.
I assess the scene in thirty seconds. Burn pattern starts at the stove, spreads to the cabinets, stops at the ceiling. Electrical or negligence. That’s for the insurance company to decide.
The air tastes like burned plastic.
We clear the structure, working through each room methodically, and I watch my crew the way I always watch a crew I'm still learning — not for what they do right, because that's expected, but for how they handle the small decisions nobody's watching.
Tran opens a cabinet beside the hood and finds a hot spot the homeowner didn't know about. He soaks it and moves on without comment, doesn't check to see if I noticed. Taking care of the job, not performing it.
On the ride back, I miscalculate.
Kowalski fills the quiet with something about the morning, and before I've thought it through I crack a joke about grease fires and homeowners already texting the local news. What follows is the silence of someone who just mispronounced a word they should've known.
Reyes finds the passing guardrail deeply absorbing. Tran develops a sudden and absorbing interest in a loose thread on his sleeve. Deluca makes a sound that might be a cough.
I turn back to the windshield and watch the road go by.
Peak Grounds sits on the corner of Main and Juniper. From half a block away it smells like roasted coffee and pine in exactly the ratio that makes a person feel briefly better about their choices.
Inside there's warm wood paneling, mismatched mugs on open shelving, and a chalkboard menu featuring a drink called The Widow-Maker and two competing seasonal specials I'm not going to say out loud in uniform.
The barista's name tag readsMicah.He's attentive in the way of someone who lets other people do the talking—still hands, patient eyes, a focused quiet that doesn't need to fill the space.
"Black coffee," I say when I reach the front. "Large."
He reaches for a cup but doesn't fill it yet. He looks at me instead, with the mild expression of someone checking a detail against an existing file. "Captain Delano."
"We've met?" I ask.
