Colby laughed and threw an arm around his shoulders. "Welcome back, brother. We missed you."
Brian let himself lean into it for just a second. The camaraderie. The belonging. The feeling of being exactly where he was supposed to be, doing exactly what he was supposed to do.
He still had problems. Carla Reeves was still out there. Tessa was still in danger. The future was still uncertain in a hundred different ways.
But for the first time in two years, Brian Knight felt like himself again.
And that was enough to start.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Tessa was pacing Bree's living room when Brian walked through the door.
She'd heard the sirens twenty minutes ago, had called him immediately, and spent every moment since trying not to imagine the worst. The rational part of her brain, the part that had spent seven years in trauma surgery, knew that sirens in a small town didn't automatically mean disaster. The irrational part, the part that had been stalked and threatened and violated, couldn't stop spinning scenarios.
But then the door opened, and there he was. Alive. Whole. Blood on his shirt and his hands, but standing on his own two feet with something in his eyes she hadn't seen before.
"Brian." She crossed the room in three steps and threw her arms around him, not caring about the blood, not caring about anything except the solid warmth of him against her. "You scared me."
"I'm sorry." His arms came around her, holding tight. "I didn't mean to. It just happened so fast."
She pulled back enough to look at him, her hands moving automatically to check for injuries. Some of the blood was his, some wasn't, she realized. She looked at the cuts from the glass; they’d mostly dried at this point, and they weren’t deep enough to have made this much of a mess. "Tell me."
He told her. The crash. The woman trapped in the car. The fuel leak. The extraction. Colby beside him the whole time, the two of them working together like they'd done it a hundred times before. Because Colby had, Tessa realized. As a firefighter, he'd responded to accidents like that more times than he could probably count.
"She's going to be okay," Brian said. "Eleanor. That's her name. The paramedics said I probably saved her life, getting her out before the fuel could ignite."
Tessa's throat tightened. "You did that. You saved her."
"We did. Colby and I. And some delivery guy who held her head stable while we moved her." Brian's voice was strange, rough with something she couldn't quite identify. "I didn't think. I just... moved. The training took over, and I did what I was supposed to do."
"That's who you are." She reached up and touched his face, feeling the stubble rough against her palm. "That's always been who you are."
"I called Dawson." He said it quietly, like he was still processing it himself. "The EMS chief. I told him I want to volunteer."
The words hit her like a wave. She'd been hoping for this, gently pushing him toward it without pushing too hard, but hearing him say it out loud was different. It made it real.
"Brian." Her voice cracked. "That's... I'm so proud of you."
"You said that on the phone."
"I'll say it again. As many times as you need to hear it." She pulled him close, pressing her face against his chest, not caring that it smelled like smoke and copper and sweat. "I'm so proud of you."
His arms tightened around her. "I couldn't have done it without you."
"You absolutely could have. You just needed someone to remind you that you're allowed to."
They stood there for a long moment, holding each other in Bree's living room with afternoon light streaming through the windows. Tessa could hear Bree moving around in the kitchen, giving them space, and she felt a surge of gratitude for these people who had opened their home without hesitation.
"You need a shower," she said finally. "And a clean shirt. You look like you've been in a war zone."
"Feel like it too." But he was smiling, a real smile that reached his eyes. "Join me?"
"In Hank and Bree's bathroom?"
"They're not using it."
She laughed, surprising herself. After everything, after Carla's phone call and the threat hanging over them and the constant low hum of fear, she could still laugh. Brian did that to her. Made everything feel manageable, even when it wasn't.
