Davison blinked his wide-set eyes as Mick stood and stepped closer to the door.
“I need to get back to the station. My crew has to be ready for the next fire, and if recent history serves as a predictor, that should be happening in the next seventy-two hours.”
“Mr. Prentiss,” Davison called as he opened the door.
Mick turned back to him.
“Remember that you serve at the pleasure of the village council, where my recommendation is highly valued. According to your contract, you are in a probationary period where termination does not have to be for cause.”
“I appreciate the reminder,” he said as he stepped through the opening. “I really have to get back. I have more fires to put out.”
Only after he’d closed the door behind him did he allow his shoulders to sag. He’d played that situation all wrong, and now he needed to help Rachel find answers while he still had a job.
Chapter 11
When her phone rang late Friday morning, Rachel shut off the water, shampoo lather still covering her head and hands. With the girls at school and her brother at the center, she didn’t have the luxury of letting a call go to voice mail. She threw open the curtain, stepped on the towel outside the tub and lunged for her cell on the counter.
An unfamiliar number appeared on the screen. Since every time Riley had reached out, it came from a different number, she couldn’t ignore solicitation calls, either. She might have to fend off a replacement windows representative or convince a determined caller that she didn’t need an extended car warranty, but if it was Riley, and she missed him, who knew when he would try to call her again.
“Come on. Come on.” Her heart pounding, she tapped the screen three times with her wet finger before the call connected. “Hello?”
“Hey, little sister.”
“Oh, Riley. I’m so glad you called.” After wiping a circle on the foggy mirror with her towel, she used it to swipe the drips already stinging her eyes as she switched the phone to speaker. If only she could see his face through her phone. His amazing smile, though she hadn’t seen much of that in a long time. The wavy dark-blond hair. And those intense sky-blue eyes that reflected their father’s side of the family while she was all her mother’s.
“If I’d known I’d get this kind of reception, I might have called more often.”
Rachel would have mentioned that he’d also resented her for taking him to rehab, but his chuckle through the line made her feel so hopeful that she kept the comment to herself. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard him laugh. He sounded like the old Riley. The jokester he’d been before breaking off his engagement to Jillian Lowe. He’d never been the same, but they never talked about that. Orher.
“How’s my favorite sister?” he said, returning to the regular script of their phone conversations, lines cemented over the more than two decades of their relationship.
Despite that nothing about their lives was close to familiar, she responded with her usual line. “Youronlysister is just fine.” That might have been a stretch, but it was all she had.
“Did I catch you at a bad time?”
She wiped at the drips on her forehead again. The back of her neck was starting to itch. “Other than that shampoo is turning into glue in my hair, no.”
“Get back in the shower and rinse it out.”
“That can wait.” She shivered, unable to wrap her body or hair with the towel when she still needed it to wipe chemicals from her eyes. “How areyoudoing? Are they treating you well? Is the food okay? How was the…uh…detox? Do you know when—”
She forced herself to stop before asking the last question. He probably didn’t know when he would be released, anyway, and she shouldn’t put pressure on him to come home. He would only face more scrutiny when he did.
“The sooner you rinse off, the sooner I can answer some of your questions.”
She didn’t miss that he hadn’t offered to answer all of them and had a guess which one he might skip. As always, he would try to shield her from the tough stuff.
“Fine.” She turned on the sink faucet and doused her head under the tap instead. In a minute flat, she wrapped herself with the towel, her reflection showing a red-faced woman with a mess of dripping hair.
“I’m back,” she called into the speaker.
“Bet you’re glad we weren’t on a video chat.”
He snickered, but this time his voiced sounded tight. She wished again that she could see his face. But this was about his recovery, not about her concerns. Even if he was probably thinner now. Paler. Different.
“I suppose you’ve met the new chief.”
At his casual question, she shifted her feet and re-tucked the towel under her arms. Had one of the crew spoken to him? Told him about the scene she’d made at the station? Or, God forbid, had someone seen her and Mick together? Though she doubted any of that had happened since Riley would have had to call them for that information, instead of the other way around, her legs turned to mush beneath her. She gripped the counter for stability as guilt seeped into her recently scrubbed pores.
