Page 54 of Igniting Her

Then she went upstairs.

She had not slammed the office door. She had guided it shut until the latch caught with a small, careful click. The care in that small click left Cassie alone with what she had done.

Cassie sat without moving. Above her, one floorboard gave beneath Ellie’s weight, then another. The bunk-room door closed. The station returned to waiting.

On the desk, the edge of the duty roster remained aligned with the blotter. Cassie squared it again. She capped the pen she had not used, crossed to the office door, and tested the latch Ellie had closed so carefully. It held. She opened it anyway. The day room was empty; the rope was gone; a crescent of water darkened the counter beside the sink. Cassie closed the door again and stood with her hand around the knob until her fingers ached, then returned to the desk.

The bottom drawer stayed closed.

She lasted four minutes.

Cassie pulled the drawer open. The photograph lay where it had lain for twelve years, face-down beneath a thin stack of old papers. Its white border had yellowed at one corner. She had touched the back of it after Coast Road and closed the drawer. She had preserved what she refused to look at with the same discipline she brought to everything else.

Her hand hovered above it.

Upstairs, the pipes shifted. Cassie thought of a blue coffee mug returned to a locker because she had reminded its owner that nothing in this house was hers.

She slid her fingers beneath the photograph and turned it over.

The old Engine 12 filled the background, red paint bright beneath a summer sun. A younger Cassie stood at the edge of the frame in a borrowed-looking captain’s shirt, her posture already too straight. Beside her, a firefighter sat on the running board with a yellow station towel over one shoulder and dark hair cut in uneven points around her face.

Jules Calloway smiled up at her.

15

ELLIE

For the rest of the shift and four days after Cassie told her not to decorate the arrangement, Ellie obeyed. She finished the shift without asking for anything that wasn’t in her assignment. She took the nozzle on a vehicle fire, completed a medical inventory, ate Mo’s eggs at the long table, and answered every version of Ridge in the same even voice. When B shift arrived, she carried her duffel out through the apparatus bay and left the blue coffee mug behind the closed door of her locker.

Cassie conducted turnover beside Engine 12. Her uniform was immaculate. Her face gave nothing away. Her attention stayed on turnover when the parking-lot door opened.

Ellie made it to her car before she understood that some part of her had expected to be stopped.

The expectation embarrassed her more than the silence did.

Her apartment occupied the second floor of an old building three blocks inland from the harbor, above a surf-repair shop that closed at five and smelled permanently of resin. She had chosen it because the lease ran month to month, the rent only offended her moderately, and the single bedroom held everything she owned without asking her to buy more. The walls were white. The couch had come with the place. Her framed academy photograph stood on the windowsill because hanging it would have required making a hole.

On the first day off, Ellie ran until the climb back from the water tightened both calves. She showered, slept badly, and ate dinner over the sink. On the second, she took the loose hinge off a kitchen cabinet, repaired the stripped screw hole, and discovered the cabinet still hung crooked because the building had settled sometime before she was born. She left it that way out of solidarity.

Her phone remained silent.

Ellie didn’t send anything. She had already given Cassie the truth in the dark and watched her carry it into an office, turn it into protocol, and hand it back sharpened. She would not follow a woman home and argue herself into being wanted. She had done too much auditioning for permanence in her life. If Cassie believed what they had was only an arrangement, Ellie could at least refuse to decorate the exit.

By the fourth evening, the hurt had stopped flaring and settled somewhere more efficient. Ellie changed the sheets, put two beers in the refrigerator, and told herself the second one was not optimism. Fog pressed against the windows after dark. The shop below went quiet. At eight forty-three, somebody knocked.

Ellie knew before she reached the door.

Cassie stood in the narrow hallway wearing dark trousers, a black sweater, and no expression Ellie knew how to trust. Her hair was twisted too tightly. Tiredness had darkened the skin beneath her eyes. One hand hung at her side; the other was closed around her car keys hard enough that the edges showed against her palm.

Neither woman spoke.

Cassie looked past Ellie only as far as the bare wall behind her, then back. She carried no flowers, wine, or other object that could be mistaken for an explanation. She had brought herself. Judging by the rigid line of her shoulders, the delivery had cost her.

“May I come in?”

The question reached Ellie before the words did. Cassie had never asked to enter a room with her. Not the gym. Not the office. Not her own bedroom. Ellie stepped aside.

Cassie crossed the threshold. Ellie closed the door and kept one hand on the knob. The apartment seemed smaller with Cassie inside it. Too much of Ellie was visible at once: the old sweatshirt folded over the couch arm, the academy photograph. Cassie’s gaze moved across each thing without comment.