“No. The affair’s fine. Well, notfine.” He closed his eyes and shook his head before opening them again. “The truth is, I’m not exactly blameless there.”
“You said she had an affair. Did you force your wife to sleep with someone else?” Her insides tightened as she waited for a possible confession that he’d been a cheater, too. “Wait. Do Iwantto hear this?”
Instead of chuckling, as she’d hoped he would, Mick sighed, his shoulders lowering.
“My story’s not unique. I left Tina alone a lot when I was working. Too much.”
Tina. The name tasted sour on her tongue, her resentment immediate.
“It happens. We sometimes forget what’s important in life.” Her need to excuse Mick surprised her, but she’d forgotten some of those things herself.
“She always said I was married to my crew instead of to her.”
“Was she right?”
“I did spend more time worrying about their problems than hers. Or even ours. Can’t blame her for resenting that.”
“No one would.” The cheating part was a whole other story.
“That’s why I never understood why she slept with one of my guys.”
Rachel pushed back her chair, nearly tipping it. “Wait. She was involved with one of your crew members?”
“It gets worse.”
How it could, she wasn’t sure, but she braced herself for it, her hands slipping beneath the table to grip the sides of her chair.
“Gavin Wheeler—we called him ‘Wheels’—was one ofthem.”
“Them?” She shook her head, his meaning escaping her.Called? Was?The skin on her hands tingled as the pieces fell into place. “Are you saying…?”
“Wheels was one of the firefighters our department lost. Him and Miguel Suárez. Both of them were good out on a call. Only one, it turned out, was also a stand-up guy.”
Though Rachel was tempted to point out that the firefighter hadn’t been alone in that bed, she kept that observation to herself.
“I’m so sorry,” she said instead. “That had to make a terrible situation worse. You couldn’t even be angry, though you had every right to be.”
“And a ten-year marriage slid down the drain.”
“Ten years?”She couldn’t imagine that amount of time in a relationship since hers had always been calculated in months. And she hadn’t bothered with dating at all in a long string of those. “Any kids?”
“Never got around to it. Timing was never right.”
The image of Mick, sandwiched between Carly and Carissa, stole into her thoughts then. So sweet. It was easy to picture him holding his own child, too, but she blinked away the impossible picture that replaced it. One with two babies in his arms.Her twins.
“I can’t imagine,” she blurted and then rubbed her forearms to stop the chill.
“Not having kids?”
“No. The fire. And all the other— Wait.” Rachel tilted her head and studied him. “Did you find out about the affair before or after the fire?”
“A few days before. I never had the chance to call him on it, man-to-man.”
“Never?” She waited for him to squirm.
“No, it wasn’t intentional. I’d compartmentalized the information from my personal life like I was trained to do, but Iwascommand on the scene, so I did send the two firefighters into that building.” He stared down at his hand as he brushed his finger along the scarred wood. “Neither came out.”
A lump swelled in Rachel’s throat over the many layers of that tragedy. “You were also cleared of any wrongdoing. Said so yourself.”
