A beat. Then:i love that.
I'm still reading it when the radio goes.
Multi-vehicle accident, Route 10 north. Multiple vehicles, one overturned, possible entrapment, all units respond.
We roll.
The engine bay empties fast — gear on, doors up, bays clear before the echo of the radio dies. This is the part that never changes no matter how many times you do it: everything narrows. The phone in my pocket, the coffee going cold on the counter, Aiden mid-sentence behind me — all of it drops away. There's only the call.
Route 10 runs north out of town and climbs. The first mile is easy — wide lanes, good sight lines, the kind of road that lulls you. Then it starts to rise and the lanes pinch and the mountain doesn't care what speed you were doing when you thought you had it under control. The guardrails up here are suggestion more than structure. Tourists find that out the hard way. Locals know better and have bad days anyway.
I've worked this stretch more times than I want to count.
The smoke reaches us before the scene does — not fire smoke, just the settled dust cloud of impact, hanging in the still mountain air like punctuation. Then the bend opens up and it's all there at once: a sedan nose-first into a pine tree, a pickup sideways across the lane, and an SUV in the drainage ditch on its side, roof caved, windshield gone, one wheel still spinning slow against the sky.
Gemma's rig is already on the shoulder.
I'm out before we fully stop.
The sedan has gone into a pine tree, front end buckled. Tommy is at the driver's window with his kit open. The pickup is sideways across the lane, tire blown, driver standing on the shoulder looking confused but standing. The SUV is the worst ofit — overturned, the passenger side buried in the ditch grass, the driver's door facing the sky.
Gemma is at the rear of the ambulance. Both hands on the door handle. Her kit is on the ground at her feet, open, set down and forgotten. She is completely still in the way people go still when part of them has gone somewhere else and left their body behind.
I've seen that look before. Not on her — on firefighters who opened the wrong door. On medics who caught a call that caught them back. It's the look of someone whose brain made a wrong turn and hasn't found its way out yet.
I don't run. Running puts eyes on her, turns one person's moment into something everyone witnesses. I walk, angling to get in front of her line of sight.
Then I see what she's looking at.
Through the broken rear window of the overturned SUV: a car seat. Pink. Soft stuffed giraffe still strapped in beside it. Bright yellow against crumpled silver metal.
Which means a child could be inside the vehicle.
I step directly in front of her. I block the window. I wait until her eyes come to my face.
She's not all the way here. I can see it — that flat, fixed quality, the place Denver left in her that she's been slowly, carefully learning to work around. The appointment isn't until Thursday. She's doing that work. She hasn't gotten there yet.
My crew is on the other vehicles. Nobody is watching this.
I keep my voice low and level, the same voice I use when a situation needs to stay contained.
"You're in Copper Ridge," I say. "You're on Route 10. I'm right here with you."
Her hands tighten on the door handle.
"I can hear the kid crying from here." I can. Thin and furious — the sound of a child who is frightened, not hurt, which aretwo very different things. "You're the best paramedic I've ever watched work."
Her eyes shift. A fraction of focus sliding back.
"Come back to me, Gemma."
Something moves across her face — not a reset, not a snap back to normal. Something slower and more earned. She blinks once.
Then she reaches down and picks up her kit.
She works like she was built for it.
The hands aren't fully steady and she works anyway — smooth, fast, moving through assessment the way you do when the training has gone deep enough to stop being something you do and start being something you are. She gets to the SUV's rear window, calls back to Tommy in shorthand, clipped and precise, running a full patient check while she moves.
