I read the thread. The three fingers of smoke on the southern ridge have a name now: Elk Creek. It’s been burning in the southern drainage for two weeks at a manageable size, and overnight it jumped its containment line. Two thousand acres. Additional resources. A 0900 roll call, which means Diaz has already been on the phone with dispatch and the answer came back: this is escalating.
Two thousand acres isn’t a small fire anymore. Two thousand acres is a fire that has ideas about where it wants to go. The southern drainage has been the concern all season, the canyon runs northeast, and if it catches a wind event it funnels right toward the timber on the Breslin ridge. From there the math gets complicated. We’ve been watching it for two weeks. I checked it every night before I went to sleep because checking it was the thing I could do.
I look at the smoke.
I look at Sloane at the window.
She’s still watching the mountain. She’s been watching the smoke the whole time I’ve been reading the texts, which means she clocked it when she made the corrected coffee and didn’t say anything.
“I have to go in,” I say.
She turns. She reads my face the way she reads her patients—quick, complete, without asking.
“Another fire,” she says. Not a question.
“Elk Creek. Two thousand acres. They’re pulling additional resources.”
She nods. Not the nod of someone who doesn’t understand what that means. “Go,” she says.
She doesn’t say anything else. She doesn’t make it into something. She says go and she means it, which is either the easiest thing anyone has said to me in three years or the most complicated, and I’m going to need more than a few minutes of briefing prep time to figure out which.
I find my flannel from the chair where it ended up last night. My boots are by the door. I’m a boots-by-the-door person, everywhere I am, which she’s probably noticed. I sit on the edge of the chair and lace them up.
“The dog’s fine,” she says, from the kitchen. “I’ll check in with the station if you need anything on the animal side.”
“Thank you,” I say.
She’s made a second cup, the corrected version, and set it on the counter next to my still-mostly-full original. She’s back near the window, both mugs in arm’s reach. I stand up and cross to the counter to grab mine for the road.
She picks up a mug.
I pick up a mug.
We’re both holding mugs.
I look at what I’m holding. She looks at what she’s holding.
“That one’s mine,” she says.
“This one’s yours,” I say.
We’ve got the wrong ones. She’s holding the mug she poured for me.
She knows she’s holding the wrong one. She picked it up looking at me, which means she caught the swap and made the choice anyway.
She takes a sip from the wrong mug. “Have a safe shift,” she says.
I look at her. I look at the mug. I look at her again.
“Yeah,” I say. “Okay.”
I cross back and kiss her—short, sure, tasting like the corrected coffee. She lets me, one hand curling into my shirt like she isn’t ready to file this one yet.
“Go,” she says again, quieter.
I stand there for another three seconds. The window has the mountain in it and the smoke on the southern ridge is still doing what it’s doing, and the briefing is in less than an hour and I have every reason to go but I stand here anyway, three more seconds, because I have no functional self-preservation instincts.
Then I go.
