CHAPTER 1
Owen
I knewhow to be someone's safe bet. What I didn't know was how to be someone's first choice.
The station was quiet at four in the morning. It was just me and the hum of the fluorescent lights, the distant tick of the clock in the bay. I stood at the counter in the empty kitchen, watching coffee drip into a pot that had seen better decades.
The smell was familiar: burnt grounds, rubber, the sweat that never fully aired out of these walls, no matter how many times we mopped. I'd grown up breathing this air. My father had stood in this exact spot, probably staring at this same ancient coffeemaker, waiting for the same bitter sludge to brew.
I couldn't sleep. Hadn't slept properly in weeks, not since Sarah started pulling away in the small ways that meant something bigger was coming. Shorter texts. Longer pauses before she answered. The way she'd stopped reaching for me in bed, rolling to her side of the mattress like the six inches between us was an ocean she couldn't cross.
I tried to fix it.
Showing up more. Showing up less. Giving her space. Closing the distance. None of it worked. Every attempt just left mefeeling like a man trying to bail out a sinking boat with a teaspoon—working hard, getting nowhere, pretending effort alone would be enough.
The coffeemaker clicked off behind me, pulling my attention back to the room. I poured a cup, wrapped my hands around the warmth of it, and let the heat seep into my palms. Calloused hands. My father's hands. I had his build too—the broad shoulders, the arms thickened by years of hauling hose. Sometimes I caught my reflection in the engine's chrome and saw him looking back at me.
Son, the job is simple. You show up when people need you.
I was ten the first time he said it. Sitting right here in this kitchen, watching him check his gear before a shift. He'd knelt down to my height, hands on my shoulders, and looked me dead in the eyes. I remember thinking he was the biggest person in the world. The strongest. The safest.
You show up, he'd said. That's the whole thing. When someone needs you, you're there. Everything else figures itself out.
He'd been wrong about that last part. But I'd spent thirty years trying to prove the first part right, ever since his funeral, ever since the morning of my fifteenth birthday when he'd promised to take me for my learner's permit. He'd been excited. Kept talking about teaching me to drive the way his father taught him, out on the back roads where the only thing I could hit was corn.
The tones dropped at 6:47 AM, warehouse fire on Industrial. He grabbed his gear, kissed my mother, and squeezed my shoulder.
Back before lunch. Save me some cake.
He wasn't back before lunch. Wasn't back for dinner. By midnight, my mother had stopped pretending she was okay. By morning, the chief was at our door with his hat in his hands andthat look—the one I'd learn to recognize years later, the one that meant someone wasn't coming home.
I wanted to be like him. Follow in his footsteps. But I wanted a different ending.
I wanted someone who stayed.
The station creaked around me. Old bones settling, the building exhaling in the predawn dark. B-shift wouldn't roll in for another three hours. I had time. Too much time. My mind kept circling back to Sarah, to the conversation I knew was coming.
I wanted to be wrong. I wanted her to walk in this afternoon and tell me I was imagining things, that she'd just been stressed with work, that we were fine. I wanted it so badly my teeth ached with it.
But I'd been here before. Twice. I knew what pulling away looked like.
I knew what the silence meant.
Sarah came to my apartment after my shift. I'd showered at the station, changed into clean clothes, and driven home on autopilot. She was already there when I pulled up. Her silver Honda was in my spot—the one I'd given her because it was closer to the door. Small kindnesses. The vocabulary of love, written in parking spaces and saved leftovers, and the way I always made sure her side of the bed had the extra pillow.
She was sitting on my couch when I walked in. Perched, really. Like she was ready to bolt. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she was looking at the wall instead of the door.
She had keys. Had for years. It wasn’t something I’d ever questioned—just another quiet assumption, another piece of us that had never required explanation.
“Hey.” I set everything down and tried to keep my voice normal. “I didn’t expect you till later.”
“I know.” She finally looked at me. Her eyes were red-rimmed, careful. “I thought it would be easier to just… I didn’t want to do this over the phone.”
There it was. The sentence that confirmed everything I’d been dreading.
I walked to the kitchen and poured a glass of water because I needed something to do with my hands.
“Okay,” I said. “So do it.”
