Josh has always had an annoying talent for sounding like he’s talking about operational standards and accidentally hitting something personal.
I stare at the edge of his desk. “If he writes one more thing that makes me look like I shouldn’t be here…”
“Then I’ll deal with him.”
I look up.
Josh’s voice is calm, but there is steel under it now. “Not you. Me.”
I blink.
He adds, “You’d still be in charge of what happens on station. If he gets in the way, you send him out. If he ignores instructions, he’s gone. If he writes anything we haven’t agreed he can observe, we end it.”
I study him. “And if I say no?”
“Then I call the editor and tell her we are not interested.”
Simple.
No guilt.
No trap.
Which makes it worse, obviously, because apparently, I am only fully comfortable when people make themselves easier to argue with.
Josh sighs and rubs a hand over his jaw. “I’m not asking because I think you owe them anything.”
“Good.”
“And I’m not asking because I think you need to prove yourself.”
My throat tightens.
He looks at me properly then. “You’ve already done that.”
I hate this conversation.
I hate it with the full, mature dignity of a woman who can manage emergency incidents but would very much like her mentor to stop quietly believing in her in an office at the end of her shift.
Josh continues, “I’m asking because people don’t understand what the job is. They don’t understand command. They don’t understand why not going in can be the bravest and most responsible decision in the room.”
The farm comes back for a second.
Smoke.
Heat.
The shape of the building.
The knowledge in my gut that nobody was going inside that structure unless I wanted to risk losing firefighters for equipment, feed and timber that were already gone.
I made the right call.
I know I made the right call.
“You don’t have to teach him everything. You don’t have to like him. You don’t even have to make it easy,” Josh says.
That pulls a reluctant breath of laughter out of me. “Good. Because I wasn’t planning to.”
