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Chapter Text

The drive across El Paso felt strangely familiar now. A few months ago, Jacob would have needed GPS directions every few minutes, squinting at street signs and missing turns because Texas roads seemed determined to be both wide and confusing. Now he recognized intersections before the navigation app announced them. He knew which light stayed red too long, which lane disappeared without warning, and which stretch of road gave him the clearest view of the mountains when the afternoon haze thinned enough to reveal them.

He still was not sure if that was a good thing. Familiarity meant time. It meant repetition. It meant Eddie’s house no longer felt like somewhere Jacob visited, but somewhere he could find his way back to without thinking. On a normal day, that might have felt like belonging. Today, with Eddie in Los Angeles and Christopher sitting too quietly in the passenger seat, it felt more complicated than that.

The truck smelled faintly like dust, old coffee, and the fast-food fries Chris had insisted he did not want and then eaten half of anyway. Eddie’s truck, technically, though Jacob had been driving it enough lately that the seat no longer felt borrowed. That also felt complicated.

Chris sat with one elbow propped near the window, his gaze fixed on the city sliding past them. He had his phone in his lap, screen dark, one thumb resting against the edge. He had checked it six times since they left the house. Not because he expected Eddie to forget to text. Because grief made waiting feel like a job, and Chris had inherited enough Diaz stubbornness to take jobs seriously even when they were impossible. Jacob did not tell him to stop checking. He understood the impulse too well.

“He landed,” Chris said suddenly.

Jacob glanced over. “Your dad?” Chris nodded, reading from the screen even though Jacob had not asked him to. “Ethan's picking him up.” Jacob kept both hands on the wheel and tried not to react too visibly. Eddie going straight to the station made sense. Buck was there. The 118 was there. Bobby’s absence was there, sitting in the middle of everything like a room no one could walk around. Still, something about the update tightened the quiet inside the truck.

“Good,” Jacob said. “I’m glad he made it.”

Chris looked down at the phone for another second before locking it. “Yeah.” The word was too small for what it had to carry. Jacob waited, giving him room to add more if he wanted. That had become the rule over the last few days. Stay close, but do not crowd. Offer the opening, but do not pry it wider with both hands. Chris was nearly grown in some ways and still very much a teenager in others, and grief had a way of making both ages show up at once.

“Do you think Buck’s okay?” Chris asked.

Jacob did not answer immediately. The easy answer was no. The kind answer was also no, but with softer edges.

“I think Buck’s probably doing what Buck does,” Jacob said.

Chris turned his head. “That’s not an answer.”

“It kind of is.”

“Jacob.”

There it was. The tone that said Chris was done being handled carefully and would appreciate being treated like someone who could hear the truth without shattering. Jacob respected that. He also knew truth did not have to be thrown like a brick to count.

“I think he’s trying to take care of everyone else,” Jacob said. “And I think Eddie being there will help. Not fix it. But help.”

Chris looked back out the window. “Dad said Bobby told Buck everyone would need him.” Jacob’s chest tightened. He had heard the story secondhand, pieced together from Eddie’s quiet explanations and the parts Buck had not said directly. “Yeah.”

“That’s a lot to tell Buck.”

It was not judgment. Not exactly. Just a teenager looking at an adult’s final words and understanding, maybe better than some adults would, how Buck would turn them into something heavy enough to hurt himself with.

“It is,” Jacob said.

“I don’t think Bobby meant it like that.”

“I don’t think he did either.”

Chris nodded once, then went quiet again. Outside, El Paso moved past in sun-bleached strips: stucco walls, low buildings, shopping centers, dry landscaping, cars shimmering in the heat off the road. The sky was too bright for the kind of day it was. Jacob found himself resenting that. Los Angeles had marine-layer gray, according to Eddie’s text. Texas had sunlight sharp enough to make grief feel exposed.

They were not heading to Ramon and Helena’s yet. That would come later, because Helena had decided dinner was happening and no one in the Diaz orbit had the energy or courage to argue. For now, Jacob had driven them out under the excuse of errands: picking up a prescription, grabbing something Eddie had forgotten to mail, stopping by the grocery store for the one ingredient Helena claimed she needed despite already cooking enough food to feed half the neighborhood.

Really, he had wanted Chris out of the house for a while. Eddie’s absence had changed the place almost immediately. Not in any dramatic way. His boots were still near the door. His coffee mug still sat in the dish rack. The folded blanket on the couch was still folded the way Eddie folded things, squared and practical. But the house had gone tense around the missing shape of him, and Chris had been moving through it like he did not want to disturb anything too much in case that made the absence louder.

Jacob understood that too.

“Abuela asked if we could come early,” Chris said.

“Of course she did.”

“She said she needs help.”

Jacob snorted. “With what? Feeding the army she invented?” A small smile tugged at Chris’s mouth. “Probably.”

“Did she specify what kind of help?”

“She said moral support.”

“That means she wants to look at you while she cooks.”

“Yeah,” Chris said, sounding resigned. “I know.”

The smile stayed a little longer this time. Not enough to clear the heaviness in the truck, but enough to let air move through it. Jacob took the win without pointing it out.

They stopped at the pharmacy first. Chris waited in the truck while Jacob went inside, not because he could not come in, but because neither of them wanted to perform normal in front of strangers any longer than necessary. The cashier asked if he had any weekend plans, and Jacob said, “Family dinner,” because it was easier than explaining the kind of waiting that did not fit into small talk. When he came back out, Chris was reading something on his phone.

Jacob got in and set the pharmacy bag in the center console. “Everything okay?”

“May texted.”

Jacob stilled for half a second before starting the truck. “Yeah?” Chris nodded, eyes still on the screen. “She said thanks for the letter. Even though she hasn’t read it yet. Dad told her I wrote one.”

“That was nice of her.”

“She said Harry’s the only one still asking out loud when the funeral is.”

Jacob’s hands tightened briefly around the steering wheel. Chris looked up. “They still don’t know?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Because of the outbreak stuff?”

“That’s what it sounds like.”

Chris stared through the windshield. The pharmacy parking lot was too ordinary around them: people loading bags into trunks, a cart with one bad wheel rattling across the pavement, someone complaining loudly about sunscreen prices near the entrance. Jacob hated how many normal sounds the world kept making.

“That’s messed up,” Chris said.

“Yeah.”

“He died saving people.”

Jacob swallowed. “Yeah, he did.”

“They should let him come home.”

There was nothing soft enough to put around that. “They should.” Chris looked down at his phone again, but he did not type. His thumb hovered over the keyboard, then moved away. “I don’t know what to say to her.”

Jacob did not answer too quickly. The wrong kind of reassurance would only make Chris feel more alone with the question. “You don’t have to say the perfect thing.”

“I know.”

“You can say that it sucks.”

Chris gave him a look. Jacob lifted one shoulder. “It does.” That earned the smallest breath of a laugh. Chris looked back at the phone and typed slowly. Jacob did not read over his shoulder. He put the truck in reverse and gave Chris the privacy of pretending the message was just another message instead of a teenager trying to reach across two states toward someone else’s grief.

They drove to the grocery store next. Helena’s emergency ingredient turned out to be cilantro, which Jacob suspected she already had. Chris found two bunches anyway, inspected them with exaggerated seriousness, and chose the one he claimed looked less “emotionally wilted.” Jacob did not ask what made cilantro emotionally wilted. He only paid for it and accepted the phrase as proof that Chris was still somewhere inside himself.

By the time they headed toward Ramon and Helena’s, the afternoon had stretched wider and hotter. The sun hung high over the city, flattening color out of the roads and rooftops. Jacob guided the truck through streets that had become familiar in spite of him, while Chris rested the cilantro bag in his lap like it was a deeply important diplomatic offering.

“You think Abuela made too much food?” Chris asked.

“When has your abuela ever made the right amount of food?” Jacob asked.

Chris’s mouth curved. “Fair.”

The conversation faded again as they turned onto the road leading toward Ramon and Helena’s property. Jacob glanced over and noticed Chris watching the houses go by with a careful expression. The relationship between Chris and his grandparents still felt a little fragile around the edges. Not broken. Just cautious in places that had been bruised by the last year.

To their credit, Ramon and Helena had never made Chris choose sides. Whatever opinions they held about Shannon, Eddie, Los Angeles, Buck, or any of the complicated adult history that had shaped Chris’s life, they had not laid those pieces at his feet and asked him to carry them. As far as Chris was concerned, his grandparents had always just been his grandparents.

That counted for something.

It counted for a lot, actually. The ranch came into view a few minutes later, stretched beneath the too-bright afternoon sun. Jacob pulled into the driveway and parked beside Ramon’s truck. Before he could even kill the engine, the front door opened.

“There’s Abuela,” Chris muttered, already sounding resigned.

Helena was stepping outside before they had unbuckled their seatbelts. Jacob smiled as he shut off the truck. “She was watching for us.”

“She always watches for us.”

That, apparently, was not an exaggeration. By the time they climbed out, Helena had already crossed half the distance between the house and the driveway. The moment Chris was within reach, she pulled him into a hug that looked gentle and inescapable.

“Oh, mijo.”

Chris accepted it with the long-suffering patience only grandchildren seemed capable of possessing. “Hi, Abuela.” Helena leaned back just enough to look him over critically. “You look too skinny.”

“I’m literally the same size.”

“Nonsense.”

“Abuela.”

“You are.”

“I’m not.”

Jacob bit back a laugh as the familiar argument continued. Some things, apparently, were universal. No matter how old you got, grandparents could look at you after forty-eight hours of distress and decide the obvious solution was food.

Ramon appeared behind Helena, moving at a much more leisurely pace. Unlike his wife, he seemed content to let the reunion happen without trying to direct it. His gaze moved from Chris to Jacob, then softened with the quiet recognition of a man who understood the shape of a difficult day.

“Don’t listen to her,” Ramon said.

Chris looked genuinely relieved to have backup. “I wasn’t planning to.”

“Good.”

Helena turned on her husband. “You are not helping.”

“I thought I was helping Christopher.”

“Exactly.”

Ramon’s mouth twitched. He reached them and wrapped an arm around Chris’s shoulders, squeezing briefly before guiding him toward the house. Jacob watched some of the tension leave Chris almost immediately. It was not dramatic. Most people probably would not have noticed it. But Jacob had spent enough of the last few months learning Chris’s tells to recognize the difference.

For all the complications between the adults, Chris loved his grandparents, and they loved him. Whatever disagreements, frustrations, or old wounds existed elsewhere, that part was real. Jacob followed them inside with the cilantro.

The house smelled like dinner before they reached the kitchen. Rich, savory aromas drifted through the hallway and wrapped around them with the kind of insistence that made resistance feel pointless. Helena Diaz viewed food as both an art form and a love language, and she approached both with equal enthusiasm. If someone walked into her house carrying grief, her first instinct was to feed it until it sat down.

The dining room table looked like it could comfortably feed twice as many people as were actually present. Serving dishes covered nearly every available surface. Rice, beans, tamales, enchiladas, roasted vegetables, tortillas wrapped in cloth, two kinds of salsa, and something simmering in the kitchen that smelled like it had taken all morning. Chris took one look at the spread and groaned. “Abuela.”

“What?”

“There are only four of us.”

Helena waved a dismissive hand. “And?” Chris opened his mouth, clearly intending to continue the argument, then immediately gave up. Jacob set the cilantro on the counter. “I brought the emotionally stable one.” Helena looked at him. “The what?” Chris’s ears went a little red. “Nothing.” Ramon took the grocery bag and inspected the cilantro with grave seriousness. “Looks stable to me.” Chris made a betrayed sound. “Not you too.”

The small burst of humor did not erase why they were there, but it shifted the room enough for everyone to move. Helena put Chris to work warming tortillas despite claiming moments earlier that he looked too skinny to survive without immediate feeding. Ramon handed Jacob plates, then quietly took them back when he realized Jacob did not know where they belonged and pointed him toward the silverware instead. For a while, the tasks helped.

That was something Jacob had started to understand about families like this. They did not always talk directly toward pain. Sometimes they moved around it, setting tables, stirring pots, filling glasses, arguing about whether someone had eaten enough, building a structure sturdy enough for the pain to sit inside without taking over the whole room.

They settled around the table once Helena finally declared the food ready, though Jacob suspected the food had been ready before they arrived and she had only needed everyone assembled where she could see them. Plates filled quickly because resisting Helena was exhausting and ineffective. Chris took more than Jacob expected, then stared at it like he had accidentally agreed to a challenge.

“You don’t have to finish it all,” Jacob murmured.

Chris gave him a sideways look. “Say that louder.” Jacob glanced at Helena and wisely did not. The first part of the meal stayed gentle. Ramon asked about school, about friends, about whether Chris still liked his physical therapist in El Paso. Helena asked if Eddie had eaten before his flight and looked personally offended when Chris said probably not. Jacob kept his answers light when questions drifted toward him, focusing on errands, driving, and the fact that he had not yet gotten lost on the way to their house without GPS.

“That means you are learning,” Ramon said.

“Or the roads gave up trying to confuse me.”

“Both can be true,” Chris said.

Helena smiled at that, then looked toward the empty space where Eddie would have sat if he were there. The expression passed quickly, but not quickly enough for Jacob to miss. Eddie’s absence had followed them here too. It sat at the table between the water glasses and serving dishes, quieter than Bobby’s death but connected to it by the same thread.

Eventually, because every conversation seemed to find its way there no matter where it started, Bobby came up. It was Ramon who said his name first.

“Have they heard anything?”

Jacob already knew what he meant. Chris did too. The change in his posture was immediate, small but visible: fork lowering, shoulders drawing in, attention sharpening toward a question he already feared the answer to.

“No,” Jacob said gently. “Not yet.”

Nothing. No release. No funeral date. No update that made the waiting easier to explain. Just more calls, more process, more people in offices somewhere saying the right forms had to reach the right desks before a grieving family could begin the ritual everyone else took for granted. Helena looked down at her plate, her expression softening. “He was such a kind man.”

Chris nodded quietly.

For a moment, nobody spoke. The silence was not uncomfortable so much as heavy, filled with all the things none of them had said during the lighter parts of dinner. Jacob looked at Chris, ready to redirect if he needed to, but Chris stayed with it. Sad, yes. Tense, yes. But present. Then Ramon leaned back slightly in his chair. “You know, after Eddie got shot…”

His voice trailed off. The memory was clearly not an easy one, and Jacob watched Chris’s face shift at the mention of it. Eddie’s shooting lived in the Diaz family like old shrapnel. Not always visible, but still embedded.

“Bobby called us,” Ramon continued. “Not because he had to. Not because anyone asked him to.”

“He just did,” Helena said softly.

Ramon nodded. “He called. He checked in. Made sure we knew what was happening. Made sure we were okay.” A faint smile touched his face, sad and grateful at once. “There are people who become family because of blood, and there are people who become family because they keep showing up when it matters.” Across the table, Chris lowered his gaze.

“Bobby was one of those people,” Ramon said. “In more ways than one.”

The room grew quiet again. Jacob had known Bobby less than most of them. Less than Chris, certainly. Less than Eddie. Less than Buck, Hen, Chimney, Athena, May, Harry, everyone in Los Angeles who had been living inside Bobby’s orbit for years. But even from the outside, he understood enough to feel the shape of the loss. Some people held rooms together so naturally that you did not see the work until they were gone.

“He made that firehouse a family,” Ramon said. “Not just coworkers. Family.”

Chris nodded. “Yeah.”

The single word came out quietly, almost lost beneath the weight of everything else. But it carried more conviction than any speech could have. Chris had grown up around the 118. He had watched them show up for one another over and over again. Holidays, birthdays, emergencies, bad days, good days, the moments when family meant arriving because someone needed you and staying because leaving was unthinkable. Bobby had been at the center of that. Maybe better than anyone.

Helena reached across the table and touched Chris’s hand. “Your letter will mean a great deal to them.” Chris swallowed. “I hope so.”

“It will,” Jacob said.

Chris glanced at him, and Jacob held his gaze long enough to make it clear he was not just saying something comforting because the room required it. The letter mattered because Chris mattered. Because his grief mattered even from Texas. Because distance did not make love less real, only harder to deliver. Chris looked back down at his plate, but his shoulders loosened slightly. Jacob’s phone buzzed against the table.

Everyone looked at it.

That was what waiting had done to them. Every vibration became possibility. Every screen lighting up might be news, or no news, or the wrong kind of news wearing an ordinary notification sound. The name on the screen was Eddie. Jacob picked it up quickly. “It’s Eddie.” Chris’s attention snapped toward him. “Is everything okay?” Jacob read the message before answering. “Yeah. They’re at the station. He says Buck’s with him.”

Chris let out a breath he had clearly been holding. Helena pressed one hand to her chest. Ramon looked down at his plate for a moment, relief and grief crossing his expression at the same time. Jacob read the rest of the message. “He says to tell you he loves you and he’ll call tonight.” Chris nodded. “Tell him I love him too.” Jacob typed it exactly. Then Chris leaned over slightly.

“And tell him I ate.”

Jacob looked at his plate. “Half a tamale does not count as eating.”

“It does if you don’t tell him the fraction.”

Ramon coughed into his napkin. Helena narrowed her eyes at Chris.

“Mijo.”

“I’m working on it.”

Jacob added, He says he ate. Accuracy disputed. Eddie’s reply came a few seconds later.

Sounds right.

Then, after another moment:

Tell him I’m proud of him.

Jacob’s throat tightened unexpectedly. He looked up from the phone and found Chris watching him.

“Your dad says he’s proud of you.”

Chris went still.

Only for a second. Then he looked down, nodding too quickly, and reached for his water glass with the careful focus of someone pretending the movement was casual.

“Okay,” he said.

Helena’s eyes shone, but she did not move to hug him again. Ramon looked at Jacob and gave the smallest nod, a silent acknowledgment that sometimes the best thing anyone could do was let a teenager have the dignity of not being comforted in front of everyone.

Dinner resumed, but the shape of it had changed. The grief was still there, but it had room around it now. Eddie had reached across the distance. Chris had answered. Los Angeles and Texas were still separate, but for a moment the line between them felt less like a break and more like something stretched tight enough to hold.

Later, after plates had been cleared and Helena had insisted on packing enough leftovers to feed Eddie when he returned even though Eddie was currently in another state, Chris stepped out onto the porch. Jacob followed after giving him a minute. Not hovering. Close enough.

The afternoon heat had begun to loosen, leaving the air warm but less punishing. Chris stood near the railing with his phone in both hands, looking out across the property.

“May texted again,” he said without turning.

Jacob leaned against the porch post beside him. “Yeah?”

“She said Harry asked how long a funeral can be put off.”

Jacob closed his eyes for a second. “What did you say?”

“I said I think they can happen when people are ready.” Chris looked down at the phone. “Then I deleted it because that sounded stupid. Nobody’s ready.”

“It didn’t sound stupid.”

“It sounded like something an adult says when they don’t know the answer.”

Jacob could not really argue with that. Chris’s thumb moved over the screen. “I told her I was sorry he had to ask.” That was better than most adults would have managed.

“Good answer,” Jacob said.

Chris shrugged, but he did not look displeased. He typed for another moment, then locked the phone and slipped it into his pocket. “I hate being here.” Jacob let the words sit before answering. “In Texas?”

“Away.” Chris’s jaw tightened. “I hate being away.”

That made sense. Too much sense. “Yeah.”

“But I don’t think I could be there either.”

“Also fair.”

Chris looked at him then, frustration bright under the grief. “Both things can’t be fair.”

“They can.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah.”

For a moment, Chris looked like he might argue with the simplicity of that. Then the energy went out of him, and he turned back toward the yard.

Jacob stood beside him in the warm Texas quiet. Somewhere inside, Helena and Ramon moved through the kitchen, their voices low and steady. In Los Angeles, Eddie was at the station with Buck. Chimney was probably still making calls. Athena was probably still waiting for someone to give her a real answer. May and Harry were waiting too. Everyone was waiting in different rooms, different houses, different cities, all held in place by the same absence.

Texas held its breath with them. After a while, Chris leaned his shoulder lightly against Jacob’s arm. Not much. Barely enough to count. Jacob did not comment. He only shifted his weight to make the contact easier to keep.

“Dad said he’ll call tonight,” Chris said.

“He will.”

“And if something changes?”

“He’ll call sooner.”

Chris nodded.

They stood there until the sun slid lower and Helena opened the door to announce that dessert was ready because apparently grief required flan too. Chris made a sound of protest, but it lacked conviction. Jacob followed him back inside, close enough to stay, far enough not to crowd. For now, that was the job. Not fixing anything. Not making the distance smaller. Not pretending the waiting did not hurt. Just staying close while Texas waited for Los Angeles to call.

By the time Eddie’s flight landed, Los Angeles had gone gray. Not storm-gray, and not the kind of heavy sky that promised rain. Just the usual marine layer stretched low over the terminals, flattening the late morning light until the pickup lanes, brake lights, and concrete overhangs all seemed softened around the edges. Ethan was driving because Buck was already going to be late.

Buck’s shift had started at eight. It was a quarter to eleven and he was standing in a pickup lane at LAX in uniform, which meant that somewhere across the city Gerrard had noticed, and that Buck had decided the noticing was worth it. He had not asked permission. He had announced it in the station lot at twenty past nine, in the tone people used when they wanted to be argued out of something and had no intention of allowing it.

“You’re on shift,” Ethan had said.

“I’m aware.”

“I can go by myself. That was the entire point of me offering.”

“I know.”

“Gerrard is going to—”

“I know,” Buck had said, and gotten in the car.

“We’re fine,” Ethan had said on the 105. “His flight isn’t even on the ground.”

“It could be early.”

“Flights are never early.”

“This one could be.”

Ethan had held out his hand for the keys. Buck had looked at it for a moment that lasted slightly too long, then handed them over. Ethan was fairly sure that was the first thing anyone had managed to take off him all week. Now Buck stood at the edge of the pickup lane with a bottle of water in one hand.

He had bought it at a kiosk inside the terminal, along with a granola bar that was already in his jacket pocket, because somewhere in the last two weeks Buck had decided that people arrived places empty and it was his job to fix that. He had also checked the arrivals board twice, which Ethan knew was twice more than necessary, because Buck had memorized the gate number before they left the station.

“He’s going to be tired,” Buck said.

“Probably.”

“It’s a connection through Phoenix. That’s a long morning.”

“It is.”

“He probably didn’t eat.”

“Probably not,” Ethan said, because agreeing was easier than pointing out that Buck had said a version of this three times since the freeway, and because Buck was not actually talking about the flight.

The thing was, Eddie was not supposed to be here yet. Nobody had asked him to come. There was no date to come for. There was no service to attend, no casket to stand beside, no hour on a calendar that anyone could have booked a ticket around, because Bobby Nash was still somewhere inside a system that would not say when it planned to let him go. Coming now bought Eddie nothing except two weeks of waiting in a different state. He had come anyway, and the only reason he could was Jacob.

Ethan had thought about that most of the drive out. Christopher had someone. Not a babysitter, not a neighbor doing a favor, not Ramon and Helena stretching themselves thin around a grieving fifteen-year-old while pretending they were not grieving too. Christopher had Jacob, who was twenty-three and steady and had already proven he would sit in a room without needing to fill it. That was the entire mechanism. Eddie could leave Texas because somebody else had agreed to stay in it.

Grief made people useless in different directions. Ethan was starting to think the only real currency left was whether somebody could be trusted to hold your place while you went and stood somewhere worse. Eddie came through the automatic doors at eleven past eleven.

Buck saw him first. Ethan suspected Buck was going to see him first no matter what happened, no matter how many people came through those doors, no matter how gray the light was or how many shuttles hissed past between them.

Eddie had packed light. One carry-on, one change of clothes for a funeral that did not have a date, and Christopher’s letter tucked carefully somewhere inside, because Eddie had promised to bring it and Eddie kept promises even when grief made everything else feel impossible.

Up close, the exhaustion was worse than Ethan had braced for. Eddie’s shoulders sat too low beneath his jacket, and his jaw was shadowed with more stubble than usual. His eyes were dry, but that did not mean much. Ethan had learned over the last week that grief did not always announce itself with tears. Sometimes it looked like someone remembering how to stand upright because there were still things to do.

“Hey,” Buck said.

“Hey.”

They did not hug.

Ethan noticed it, and did not understand it, and would not understand it for another forty minutes. They only stood there a foot and a half apart in a pickup lane while a traffic officer waved a rideshare forward behind them, and something enormous sat between them unspent. Then Buck reached out and took the carry-on out of Eddie’s hand.

Eddie let him. That was the part Ethan filed away. Eddie let him, without a word, and something in Buck’s shoulders came down half an inch, and the whole exchange went in through a suitcase handle because that was the only door either of them had open on a public curb.

“How was the flight?” Buck asked.

Eddie huffed a humorless little breath. “Full.”

“That bad?”

“There was a toddler behind me who kicked my seat from El Paso to Phoenix.”

Despite himself, Ethan’s mouth twitched. “Sounds personal.”

“It felt personal.”

Buck held out the water. Eddie took it and did not open it. Buck watched him not open it with an expression Ethan chose not to examine too closely.

Then Buck’s phone rang.

He looked at the screen the way people looked at a name they had been dreading and hoping for in equal measure. “It’s Chim.”

“Take it,” Eddie said.

“It’s probably nothing.”

“Buck. Take it.”

Buck walked ten yards down the sidewalk toward the crosswalk, phone against his ear, free hand already moving as he talked. Ethan had learned to read those calls by silhouette. Buck’s calls with Chimney had not run under ten minutes in nine days.

Eddie watched him go.

“Okay,” he said, without turning around. “How is he?”

There it was. The question Ethan had known was coming from the second Eddie stepped through those doors. Maybe before that. Maybe from the moment Buck’s text had arrived two nights ago, short and steady and terrifying in how much it did not say.

I’ll be waiting.

Ethan could have answered fast. He could have said Buck was fine in the way everyone had been saying they were fine lately, which meant not fine at all but still standing. Eddie would not have believed him, and Ethan would have hated the lie before it finished leaving his mouth.

“He’s…” Ethan started, then stopped.

Eddie waited. He did not fill it. That was a thing about Eddie that Ethan had only recently learned to appreciate.

“He’s Buck,” Ethan said.

“That bad?”

“He’s trying to make sure everyone eats. He keeps asking people if they need anything. He’s at the station all the time. He looks like he hasn’t slept, but if anyone says that, he changes the subject.” Ethan rubbed the back of his neck. “He carries coffee around and forgets to drink it. Yesterday he asked Hen if she wanted anything from the kitchen while he was already standing in the kitchen.”

Eddie’s mouth tightened.

“He bought you a granola bar,” Ethan added. “It’s in his jacket. He’s been carrying it since nine.”

Something moved across Eddie’s face that Ethan did not have a name for, and did not think Eddie would have offered one.

“Maddie said he was going to crash,” Eddie murmured.

“She’s probably right.”

“She usually is.”

Ethan hesitated, then went ahead, because it felt worse to hold it. “He told me what Bobby said to him. Before.” Eddie’s jaw tightened. “Everyone would need him.”

“Yeah.”

“And Buck heard that as an instruction.”

“Pretty much.”

Eddie let out a slow breath. “Of course he did.” There was no anger in it. Not really. Only grief worn into familiarity. Buck had been handed a final piece of Bobby and turned it into a job, because that was what Buck did when love came with too much weight. He made himself useful. He moved, fixed, fed, carried, checked in, showed up. He became whatever shape the room seemed to need and hoped nobody noticed when the shape started cracking.

Down the sidewalk, Buck said something short into the phone. He did not write anything down. Ethan had watched Chimney fill most of a notebook in nine days, and there was something about Buck standing at a crosswalk with nothing to write that felt worse than the notebook did.

“Is there a date yet?” Eddie asked.

“No.”

Eddie closed his eyes briefly. It lasted less than a second.

“Chimney’s still calling everyone he can think of,” Ethan said. “County. Public Health. LAFD command. Anyone who might know anything. Yesterday I heard him say Captain Robert Wade Nash so many times it stopped sounding like a name and started sounding like a case number.”

Eddie’s mouth pressed into a thin line. “And?”

“And they keep telling him it’s complicated.”

Something dark moved through Eddie’s expression. Not surprise. He had expected that answer, which maybe made it worse. “Complicated how?”

“I don’t actually know,” Ethan admitted. “I’ve heard the word hold about forty times this week and I couldn’t tell you what it means. I haven’t asked.”

“Why not?”

Ethan turned the keys over once in his hand. “Because everyone who could explain it to me is having a worse week than I am.” Eddie looked at him a moment longer than the answer needed. “Ask anyway,” he said. “Most people would rather explain a thing than keep carrying it by themselves.”

“Athena?”

“Angry.”

Eddie looked at him.

Ethan exhaled. “Quiet angry. The kind where nobody wants to be the person who says the wrong thing, because you can tell she’s already holding herself together with both hands.”

“Yeah,” Eddie murmured. “I can see that.”

“May’s been handling some of the calls too. Or trying to. I don’t know how much they’re letting her do.” Ethan hesitated, then added, “Harry’s been asking questions nobody knows how to answer.”

“Of course he is,” Eddie said.

“They’re all just waiting.”

“Everyone is.”

A shuttle pulled away from the terminal behind them. Somewhere down the curb, a child started crying because a rolling suitcase had tipped over and spilled a stuffed animal onto the concrete. The normalcy of it felt almost rude.

“Chris wanted to come,” Eddie said, quiet enough that the words nearly disappeared under the traffic. “For about an hour, he convinced himself he should.”

Ethan looked at him. “What changed his mind?”

“He read the letter again.” Eddie’s hand tightened around the unopened water. “Then he said he didn’t think he could say it out loud. Not there. Not in front of everyone.”

Ethan swallowed. “That makes sense.”

“Yeah.” Eddie nodded once, but his gaze stayed somewhere past Ethan’s shoulder. “It does. That doesn’t make leaving him there feel better.”

There was nothing clean to say to that. No version of he’s okay that would not sound like Ethan was guessing. Christopher had people with him. Eddie knew all of that. Knowing did not change the fact that Bobby had died, Buck was breaking, and Christopher was in Texas with a letter folded around grief he was too young and too old to carry comfortably.

“Jacob’s with him,” Ethan said.

“I know.” Eddie’s mouth pulled into something that was not quite a smile. “That’s why I’m standing here.”

The sentence settled between them, simple and heavy, and Ethan understood the shape of the last nine days a little better for hearing it. Eddie had not been able to leave until somebody else could be trusted to stay. Ethan thought about Jacob in El Paso, pretending not to hover while hovering anyway, and Christopher letting him, because some kinds of support were easier to accept when nobody called them support. Buck came back with the phone already in his pocket.

“Chim?” Eddie asked.

“He’s fine.”

Eddie glanced at Ethan. Ethan did not say anything, which was its own kind of answer, and Eddie’s expression registered it without comment.

“Car’s this way,” Ethan said.

Buck was already moving, Eddie’s bag in his hand, which meant nobody had to decide anything.

The escalator down to the parking level was jammed, so they took the elevator with a family of four, two airline employees, and a man in a suit who kept sighing at his watch like impatience could move machinery faster. Buck shifted the carry-on closer to his leg to make room for a little girl in sparkly shoes. She stared up at Eddie for most of the ride, solemn and curious, then hid behind her mother when he glanced down.

On another day, Eddie might have smiled at her properly. Today he only softened his expression enough not to scare her. The elevator descended slowly. Too slowly. Ethan watched the numbers change because watching either of their faces felt intrusive.

The doors opened onto the parking garage, and concrete swallowed most of the airport noise, replacing it with engines, footsteps, and the distant squeal of tires turning too sharply somewhere on the next level down. Buck put the bag in the trunk and closed it harder than the trunk required.

“Sorry,” he said, to the car.

Nobody laughed. It helped anyway. Then Buck opened the rear door and got in. Ethan stood at the driver’s side for a second longer than he needed to, keys in hand, recalibrating. Buck rode shotgun. Buck had ridden shotgun in every vehicle Ethan had ever been in with him, usually while changing the music without asking. He had just gotten into the back seat without appearing to decide to.

Eddie noticed. Ethan watched him notice. Then Eddie walked around the trunk and got in beside him. Ethan adjusted the mirror so he would see less of them, then adjusted it back, because it turned out he wanted to know.

They emerged from the parking structure into the slow churn of airport traffic. LAX was all bad merges and impatient horns, all buses cutting across lanes and drivers pretending painted lines were suggestions. Ethan focused on getting them through it without adding a traffic accident to everyone’s week.

For a few minutes, nobody spoke. The silence was not empty. It had too many things inside it. Bobby. Christopher. The letter in Eddie’s bag. The funeral with no date. Chimney’s notebook filling with names and numbers and agencies that kept passing grief from one desk to another.

Once they reached the freeway, the city opened around them in muted layers. Concrete barriers. Palm trees blurred by low cloud. Office buildings. Billboards. Traffic moving in fits and starts toward places that mattered desperately to the people inside each car and not at all to anyone else. Los Angeles looked the same as it always did after a bad week. Busy. Indifferent. Alive.

“It’s weird,” Eddie said.

“What is?” Buck asked.

“Coming back like this.” A pause. “Last time I was here, I was trying to figure out where I fit. With you. With the station. With Chris still in Texas. With all of it.”

“And now?”

“Now I know exactly where I fit, and it still feels like I’m leaving someone behind.”

In the mirror, Ethan watched Buck not say the useless thing. He did not say Chris understands. He did not say you had to come. He did not reach for any of the sentences people had been handing each other all week like receipts.

“He’s got Jacob,” Buck said instead.

“Yeah.”

“That’s not the same as having you.”

“No.”

“But it’s not nothing.”

Eddie let out a breath that had been sitting in him since Phoenix. Ethan, merging into the second lane, thought that might be the most useful sentence anyone had produced in nine days, and that it had taken Buck about four seconds, and that nobody was going to say so.

“How much have you slept?” Eddie asked.

A beat. “Some.”

“Buck.”

“It’s been a busy week.”

Eddie did not push. He only looked at Buck for a moment longer than the answer deserved and then let it go, and Ethan filed that away as a technique he did not have yet. Somewhere around the interchange, Ethan finally understood why they had not hugged at the curb.

Buck could not have done it there. Not in a pickup lane, with a traffic officer waving cars forward and strangers walking past with their coffee and their carry-ons and their ordinary uninterrupted lives. He would not have gotten it back. Whatever that was going to be, it needed a floor that belonged to them. Eddie’s phone buzzed. He picked it up fast enough that Ethan heard the case click against his ring.

“Chris?” Buck asked.

“Jacob.” Eddie stared at the screen for another second. “Chris ate half a tamale and is pretending that counts as lunch.”

“Progress?”

“Apparently.” Eddie typed something back, paused, then added more. “Jacob says he’s got him.”

“He does,” Buck said.

Eddie nodded, but the motion was small. “Yeah. He does.” The city thickened around them as they left the freeway. Familiar streets replaced airport roads, and the closer they got to the 118, the quieter Eddie became. He checked his phone one more time, then slid it into his pocket with visible effort. Ethan recognized the choice for what it was. Not forgetting Texas. Not putting Christopher away. Just making room in his hands for what came next.

“You want to go home first?” Ethan asked as the station came into view at the end of the block. “Drop your stuff off? Shower? Eat something?”

Eddie gave him a look. Not offended. Not impatient. Just Eddie.

“Okay,” Ethan said. “Stupid question.”

“I told him you’d ask,” Buck said from the back seat.

“You did not.”

“I told him you’d say no,” Buck said. “On the way out. Ask him.”

“He did,” Ethan admitted.

That earned half a breath that might have been a laugh on a better day. Ethan pulled into a spot across the street and put the car in park. For a moment, none of them reached for a door. The station waited ahead of them through the windshield, familiar and wrong. The red bay doors were open. The flag moved faintly in the marine-layer breeze. From the outside, Station 118 looked exactly the same as it always had. That was what made it worse.

Buck checked the dash clock as they pulled in, then did not mention what it said. Three hours into a shift, most of which he had spent at an airport. His jaw set in a way that suggested he had already worked out how the next conversation was going to go and had decided to have it anyway.

Buck got out first and had the bag out of the trunk before Eddie reached it, which Eddie allowed. Then Eddie drew in a breath, opened his door, and stepped out.

Ethan followed.

Station 118 looked exactly the same from the outside. That was the first thing Ethan noticed after they crossed the street. The red bay doors were still open. The flag still moved faintly in the marine-layer breeze. The same worn strip of concrete caught the dull morning light near the entrance, and the same line of parked cars sat along the curb. Nothing had shifted out of place. Nothing had been marked or covered or rearranged to warn anyone that the center of the building had been torn out. That was what made it worse.

Eddie stopped just short of the bay doors, close enough that the threshold shadow crossed the toes of his shoes. He did not hesitate for long. Eddie was too practiced at entering hard rooms to make a performance out of it. But Ethan saw the pause anyway, saw the way his shoulders settled, not relaxing but bracing, like he was putting weight back where the flight and the drive had shaken it loose.

“You good?” Ethan asked, though he already knew the answer.

Eddie looked into the station. “No.” The honesty landed quietly between them. Then Eddie stepped forward, and Ethan followed him inside. The familiar smell hit first. Coffee, cleaning supplies, diesel, warm metal, old turnout gear, and whatever someone had started cooking earlier and then forgotten about. It should have been comforting. Usually, it was. Usually, the scent of the station told Ethan he had arrived somewhere that knew what to do in an emergency. Now it only made the wrongness sharper.

The first few days after a disaster were always strange. Ethan had learned that during CERT, where the immediate emergency was loud enough to swallow everything else. Sirens, radios, helicopters, reporters, floodlights, police tape, shouted instructions, people moving too fast because stopping meant losing time no one had. During the disaster itself, everyone had a job. Everyone knew where to put their hands.

The aftermath was different. Once the immediate danger passed and the city started pretending it could return to normal, the noise fell away. The helicopters disappeared. The cameras moved on. The crowds went home. What stayed behind was quieter, heavier, and much harder to organize into tasks. This aftermath felt worse than most.

The outbreak was over. The city was healing. News crews had moved on to other stories, emergency operations had wound down, and Los Angeles was slowly returning to its usual rhythm of traffic, complaints, and ordinary emergencies. But the 118 had not moved with it. The station felt suspended between what had happened and whatever came next.

It was still functioning. That almost made it harder. Radios crackled. A compartment door clanged somewhere near the engine. Someone downstairs asked where the replacement gloves had been moved, and someone else answered without looking up. The firehouse hum Ethan remembered from before was still there, but it had been damaged. Muted. Like the building was trying to keep breathing through a cracked rib.

Ravi came across the apparatus bay with an armful of garment bags held high and away from his body, the way people carried things they had been specifically told not to wrinkle.

“Where have you been?”

Buck stopped.

“I had to get the dress blues from the cleaners by myself,” Ravi said. “Do you know how many there are? Nine. She made me sign for them individually. She had a clipboard. I had to initial next to every single—”

“I had to go to the airport,” Buck said.

“You had to go to the—”

Ravi stopped.

He had found Eddie standing half a step behind Buck’s shoulder, and Ethan watched the thing that went through his face, the same thing he had watched go through a dozen faces in nine days. The reflex to be glad, caught partway up, then dragged back down by the reason.

“Good to see you, Rav,” Eddie said.

“It’s great to see you too, man.” Ravi shifted the garment bags to his other arm. “I wish it were under different circumstances.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “We all do.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” Ravi added, quieter, and then looked at the floor, which was the most Ravi sentence Ethan had ever heard out loud.

Ethan was looking at the garment bags. Nine sets of dress blues, pressed and sealed in plastic and hanging off a probationary firefighter’s arm on an ordinary Tuesday morning. He did the arithmetic before he could stop himself, and it took him somewhere he did not want to go.

“There’s a date?” he asked.

The bay went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with volume.

“No,” Buck said.

“Then why are they—” Ethan stopped, because he could hear how the rest of it was going to sound.

“Because they had to be done either way,” Ravi said. “And because when there is a date, there won’t be time.”

Ethan nodded like that made sense, which it did, and went on standing there holding the rest of it, which did not. He had known there was a delay. Everyone knew there was a delay. He had listened to Chimney say the word hold into a phone until it stopped sounding like a word, and he had never once asked what it actually meant, because asking felt like taking something from people who had less of it than he did.

Ask anyway.

“Can I ask something?” Ethan said.

Buck looked over at him.

“Why won’t they release him?” It came out smaller than he intended. “I don’t understand what they’re still doing.”

“Because he’s evidence.”

Hen was at the mezzanine railing above them. Ethan had not heard her get up from the table and had no idea how long she had been standing there.

“Not of a crime,” she said, before he could ask. “Of a public health failure. He died of an engineered pathogen inside a containment breach, and that makes his body the last physical record of what that thing does to a person. County wants it. Public Health wants it. The people whose lab built it very badly want it. And not one of them wants to be the office that signed the release before somebody else was finished looking.”

“So he’s just…”

“Downtown. In a refrigerated unit, under a case number, waiting on three agencies to agree on the same sentence.” Hen’s hand stayed flat on the railing. “And every one of them will tell you it’s almost finished.”

“How long can they do that?”

“As long as they want,” Hen said. “That’s the part nobody puts in the letter.”

Nobody added anything to it. Eddie had gone very still beside him. Buck was looking at a point on the concrete about four feet ahead of his own boots. Ravi shifted the garment bags again, because they were getting heavy, and because he needed somewhere to put his hands.

“I’ll hang these in the bunk room,” he said, to nobody in particular, and went.

Ethan watched him go. Nine sets of dress blues, cleaned and bagged and ready for a service that did not exist, on their way to a hook in a hallway to wait however long it took.

They moved toward the stairs, and the loft came into view above them in pieces. The rail. The edge of the kitchen table. Someone’s abandoned jacket over the back of a chair. The counter where Buck usually leaned when he was talking too fast, drinking coffee too late, or stealing something from a plate while insisting he was not stealing anything.

Buck went up ahead of them with Eddie’s bag still in his hand and set it down beside the table carefully, like he did not want to put it anywhere that looked permanent.

Hen sat at the table with Karen beside her, both of them speaking quietly over cups that had probably gone lukewarm ten minutes ago. Karen’s hand rested near Hen’s on the tabletop, close enough to touch without making a display of it. Hen’s posture looked mostly normal, but not completely. Every now and then, her shoulders lifted a little too carefully with her breath, as if her body still remembered the places it had been opened and repaired.

Ethan clocked it before he meant to. Guarded inhale. Slower exhale. One hand briefly touching her side before she seemed to catch herself and lower it again. He looked away before she noticed him noticing.

Eddie did not. His gaze passed over Hen, paused for half a second, and moved on with the kind of restraint that came from knowing the difference between observing and intruding. He saw the stiffness. He saw Karen’s hand near hers. He saw the coffee no one was drinking. Then he saw Buck. Something in Eddie’s face changed.

Not dramatically. Nothing Eddie did in grief was dramatic unless it had nowhere else to go. But the set of his shoulders shifted, and the breath he took was slow enough that Ethan could hear him choosing it. Because Buck had not stopped moving.

He got a mug down that nobody had asked for. He looked at the coffee pot, decided against it, and started a fresh one. He moved the muffin plate three inches to the left for reasons Ethan could not identify. He asked Hen if she wanted a refill, and Hen said no, and he refilled it anyway. Eddie watched him do all of it.

Then he said, “Buck.”

“There’s food, I can just—”

“Buck.”

Buck stopped with one hand still on the handle of the pot. Nobody else spoke. The station continued around them in small, ordinary sounds: the refrigerator humming, a chair creaking as Karen shifted, the distant roll of traffic outside, the faint buzz of fluorescent lights overhead. Life was still happening. The world was still turning. But in the loft, everything seemed to hold its breath around the space between Buck and Eddie.

Then Eddie crossed the kitchen and pulled him into it. It was nothing like the curb. That had been a foot and a half of open air and a suitcase handle passed between them in a pickup lane. This was Buck folding into Eddie with a kind of exhausted relief that made Ethan look away for a second, because witnessing it felt too close to overhearing a confession.

Eddie’s arms came up around him immediately. One hand settled between Buck’s shoulder blades. The other pressed briefly to the back of Buck’s neck, firm and grounding. Buck did not break down. Eddie did not either. They only stood there in the middle of the kitchen, holding on while everyone else pretended not to stare and failed in different directions.

Hen looked down at her coffee. Karen looked at Hen. Ravi had stopped halfway across the bay below, visible through the railing with his clipboard still in one hand. Ethan found himself watching the captain’s office door instead.

It was open.

He looked away quickly. Not yet. When Buck finally pulled back, he kept one hand on Eddie’s arm for another second.

“Gerrard’s going to write you up,” Eddie said.

“Probably.”

“For me.”

“For being three hours late,” Buck said. “The reason is incidental.”

“Buck.”

“It was going to be me,” Buck said. “That part wasn’t up for discussion.”

“Buck.” Eddie waited until Buck actually looked at him. “I should’ve been there.”

Buck went still.

“Not at the airport,” Eddie said. “Here. Two weeks ago. When it happened.”

“You were in El Paso.”

“I know where I was.”

Buck’s hand came back to Eddie’s arm, and this time it stayed. “You’re here now.” Eddie did not answer that. He only nodded once, and Ethan watched something pass between them that had nothing to do with forgiveness and everything to do with permission.

“How are you?” Eddie asked.

Buck blinked, like the question had caught him unprepared despite being the most obvious one in the room. “I’m okay.” Hen made a small sound into her coffee. Buck turned his head. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“That was not nothing.”

“It was a medically significant nothing,” Hen said, deadpan.

Karen’s mouth curved faintly. “Very serious.” For the first time since they had stepped inside, a thread of something warmer moved through the loft. It was small, fragile, and gone almost as soon as it appeared, but it changed the air anyway. Buck’s shoulders eased by a fraction. Eddie’s hand dropped from Buck’s arm, but he stayed close.

“You eat yet?” Buck asked Eddie.

Eddie stared at him.

Buck looked defensive. “What?”

“That’s your first follow-up?”

“It’s a valid question.”

“I landed an hour ago.”

“Airports have food.”

“Airports have crimes against food.”

Karen pointed lightly toward the counter. “Hen brought muffins.” Ethan had not noticed the container until she said it. Someone had arranged the muffins on a plate beside the coffee pot, probably Karen, because even grief had not stopped her from making things look intentional. Blueberry, chocolate chip, banana nut. Simple choices. Ordinary choices. The kind of everyday details Ethan might not have noticed before all of this happened. Now they stood out. Now they mattered.

“Muffins,” Eddie repeated, glancing toward Buck.

“Don’t sound so suspicious,” Hen said.

“I’m not suspicious.”

“You look suspicious.”

Buck reached for the plate and offered it to Eddie with more focus than muffins required. “Take one before Hen starts charging for them.”

“I heard that,” Hen said.

“You were supposed to.”

A faint ripple of amusement moved through the room. It wasn’t much, and it didn’t last long, but Ethan had come to recognize those moments for what they were. Lately, laughter arrived in brief flashes before fading away again, like sunlight breaking through heavy cloud cover. Nobody seemed capable of holding onto it for very long. Still, even a few seconds of normal felt precious.

Eddie accepted a blueberry muffin. Ethan took one too because Buck looked like he needed someone to say yes to the care he was offering. The muffin was a little dry, probably because it had been sitting out too long, but it tasted like something ordinary enough to hurt. Buck picked his mug back up and took a sip.

Immediately, he grimaced.

Karen didn’t even look up. “You’ve been carrying that same mug around for twenty minutes.”

“I have not.”

“You have.”

Buck stared down at the mug as though it had personally betrayed him. “Okay. Maybe.” Hen let out a soft snort, then pressed one hand briefly to her side when the laugh pulled wrong. Karen’s attention sharpened at once, but Hen shook her head before anyone could ask. “I’m fine.”

“Medically significant fine?” Ethan asked before he could stop himself.

Hen pointed at him. “Don’t start.”

“I’m just clarifying the scale.”

“The scale says I’m allowed to eat my muffin in peace.”

“That seems fair,” Eddie said.

Hen looked at him, and her expression softened. “Good to see you, Diaz.”

“You too.” Eddie’s gaze dropped briefly toward her side, then returned to her face. “Really.”

Hen heard what he did not say. Everyone did. The lab, the outbreak, the collapsed lung, the terrible math of how close they had come to losing more than Bobby. She held Eddie’s gaze for a moment, then nodded once.

“Yeah,” she said quietly. “Really.”

The silence that followed was not empty. It gathered in the corners of the kitchen, under the table, around the coffee pot, beside the plate of muffins no one was hungry enough to finish. It was the kind of silence Bobby used to prevent without anyone noticing he was doing it.

Ethan realized that now.

Whenever conversations stalled, Bobby would find something to say. Not because he liked hearing himself talk, but because he had an instinct for people. He knew when someone needed a joke, when someone needed a task, when someone needed food, when someone needed to be left alone but not abandoned. He filled gaps before they turned into holes.

Without him, the gaps felt larger. Conversations that would have flowed naturally stumbled and faded, leaving stretches of quiet that nobody seemed to know how to cross. Buck stared down at the counter, turning his cold coffee slowly between his hands. Hen looked away first. Karen reached across the table and covered her wife’s hand.

Nobody mentioned Bobby.

Nobody had to.

The silence did it for them. Ethan looked toward Eddie and found him staring at the captain’s office. The door was open. From where they stood, Ethan could see only part of the desk and the edge of a chair, but that was enough. Enough to make his stomach tighten with the familiar, stupid expectation that Bobby would appear in the doorway any second now, reading glasses in hand, expression patient and mildly amused because someone had done something ridiculous in his kitchen.

The expectation lasted less than a second. Reality caught up anyway. Eddie looked back first. His expression had gone carefully blank, which on Eddie meant the opposite of nothing. Buck noticed, followed his gaze, and froze just long enough for the room to feel it.

Then Buck moved.

Not toward the office. Toward the coffee pot. He dumped the cold coffee into the sink, rinsed the mug, refilled it, and set it back down without drinking. The whole sequence looked purposeful until it didn’t. Until Ethan realized Buck had no idea what to do with his hands except repeat a task that had already failed to help.

Eddie watched him but did not call attention to it. Instead, he leaned back against the counter beside him, close enough that their shoulders almost touched. Buck noticed the nearness. His fingers loosened around the mug.

For a few minutes, the conversation drifted toward safer ground. Karen talked about Denny’s chemistry project, which had apparently involved a titration, a decimal point in the wrong place, and one deeply unfortunate kitchen towel. Hen complained about hospital paperwork and the specific injustice of being told to rest by three different doctors who had never met a firefighter in their lives. Ravi reappeared long enough to steal a muffin before disappearing again after muttering something about inventory. The discussion wasn’t particularly important.

That was the point.

Everybody seemed desperate for things that were not important. Ethan leaned against the far counter and let himself listen. He had spent enough time at the 118 to know what the station was supposed to sound like on an ordinary day. This was not that. The shape was familiar, but the rhythm was wrong. Everyone paused too long before speaking. Everyone watched Buck too carefully and then looked away before he noticed. Everyone avoided the office without agreeing to avoid it. And under all of it, Chimney moved.

Ethan caught sight of him through the loft railing, crossing the apparatus bay below with his phone pressed to one ear and a notebook tucked against his chest. Chimney did not look up. He paced from the engine toward the open bay doors, stopped, wrote something down, then turned back before he reached the threshold.

There was a restless precision to him that made Ethan’s chest tighten. Chimney had survived the outbreak. He had come home from the hospital. He was standing, walking, talking, making calls, being Chimney in all the ways that should have reassured everyone. But he looked like survival had not brought him back to himself. Not yet. Eddie followed Ethan’s gaze. “Is he still at it?” Buck’s hand tightened around the mug. “Yeah.”

“All morning?”

Hen’s expression went flat. “All week.” That killed what little normal they had managed to build. Not violently. Just completely. The conversation folded in on itself, and the station’s damaged hum filled the gap again.

Below them, Chimney ended one call. For half a second, he stood still with the phone lowered and his notebook open in his other hand. His shoulders sagged so slightly most people would have missed it. Then he looked down at the page, tapped another number, and lifted the phone back to his ear.

Forward. Always forward.

Ethan thought of the airport, of Eddie’s carry-on and Christopher’s letter, of Jacob sending photos of food from Texas because sometimes proof of care was easier than saying I am scared and I don’t know how to help. Everyone was doing some version of the same thing. Feeding people. Making calls. Checking phones. Counting supplies. Standing in kitchens. Moving because stopping meant feeling the full weight of Bobby’s absence.

The station tones stayed silent overhead, but Ethan could feel the building waiting for them. Waiting for the next call. Waiting for the next update. Waiting for the thing that would finally move them from one terrible stage of grief into the next. Buck looked toward Eddie. “You sure you don’t want to sit down?” Eddie glanced at the table, then at Buck. “I just spent most of the morning sitting.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“I’m okay.”

Hen made the same small sound into her coffee.

Eddie turned. “What?”

“Nothing,” Hen said.

Karen patted her hand. “Another medically significant nothing.” Then, without changing her tone at all: “You still have a hole in your chest cavity.” Eddie’s eyebrows lifted faintly. “I walked into that.”

“You did,” Buck said.

The brief warmth returned, softer this time. Eddie took a small bite of the muffin, more to satisfy Buck than because he wanted it. Buck noticed anyway. His shoulders eased, and Ethan felt something in him ache at how little it took to make Buck feel useful.

That was the problem Maddie had been warning about. Buck could survive for days on fragments of usefulness. A muffin accepted. A ride arranged. A text answered. A chair pulled out. He could mistake those fragments for stability until the moment there was no one left in front of him to help.

Eddie seemed to know it too. He stayed beside Buck, not pushing, not crowding, just present in a way that made the room’s center of gravity shift. Buck still looked exhausted. Hollow. Too still in some places and too restless in others. But he no longer looked like he was standing alone at the counter waiting for someone to tell him what to do with grief. Ethan let himself breathe around that. Then he looked toward the captain’s office again.

The door remained open. The room remained empty. Even from across the loft, the absence inside it seemed to take up space, larger than the desk, larger than the chair, larger than anything Bobby had physically left behind.

For now, everyone stayed in the kitchen. Eddie beside Buck. Karen beside Hen. Ravi somewhere downstairs, pretending inventory required his full emotional attention. Chimney moving below them with a phone and a notebook and too many agencies refusing to give him a straight answer. The 118 was still standing. Still answering calls. Still making coffee. Still feeding whoever walked through the doors. But the firehouse hum was broken. And every person inside could hear the missing note.

Ethan did not mean to walk toward the captain’s office. At least, he did not decide to. One moment he was standing near the kitchen counter with a half-eaten muffin in his hand, listening to Buck and Eddie speak quietly beside the coffee pot while Hen pretended not to watch them too closely. The next, his attention had caught on the open office door again, and his feet had started moving before the rest of him caught up.

The loft did not stop around him. Buck was saying something about needing to check the ambulance restock list. Eddie answered low enough that Ethan could not make out the words. Karen murmured something to Hen, and Hen gave the sort of soft laugh that turned into a careful breath halfway through. Downstairs, Chimney’s voice drifted up from the bay, polite and strained around another phone call.

Everything kept happening.

That was the part Ethan still could not get used to. He stopped just outside the office threshold. The door stood open like it always had, angled toward the loft, making the room feel less like an office and more like an extension of the station itself. Bobby had always seemed to understand that. He could close the door when he needed privacy, but most of the time, he left it open enough that anyone could find him. For half a second, Ethan expected him to be there.

The reaction was automatic. Stupid, maybe, but automatic. His mind filled the room before reality could stop it: Bobby behind the desk, reading glasses low on his nose, one hand wrapped around a coffee mug while he looked over a report. Bobby glancing up with that patient, mildly amused expression he got when someone hovered in the doorway too long instead of admitting they needed something.

Then reality caught up.

The office was empty.

No Bobby. No voice calling out from behind the desk. No paperwork spread across the surface waiting for his signature. No half-finished cup of coffee beside his computer. No reading glasses folded neatly near the edge, ready to be picked up again. Just a room that looked almost normal, which somehow made it feel worse than if someone had already packed it away. Ethan’s hand tightened around the muffin until crumbs pressed against his palm.

The room looked untouched.

Not abandoned. Not cleaned out. Not officially changed.

Just paused.

As if everyone in the station had silently agreed that moving anything would make Bobby’s absence more real than it already was. As if the desk, the chair, the shelves, and the framed photographs were all holding their breath with the rest of them, waiting for someone who would not walk back through the door.

Ethan stepped inside.

Only one step at first. The boundary felt strange under his shoes, though there was nothing special about it. He had been in Bobby’s office before. Plenty of times. To ask questions, to deliver something Buck had forgotten, to sit in the chair across from the desk while Bobby talked him through a problem with the steady patience of someone who did not mind being interrupted.

Now entering felt intrusive.

Like grief had turned the office into someone’s bedroom. Behind him, the kitchen quieted by a fraction. Not completely. No one called after him, and no one told him to stop, but Ethan felt attention shift across the loft anyway. Buck noticed. Eddie probably noticed Buck noticing. Hen noticed everything. Karen would notice because Hen did. Ethan kept his eyes on the desk.

The first photograph sat near the corner, angled toward the chair where Bobby would have seen it every time he sat down. Athena, Harry, May, and Bobby, all smiling into bright daylight. Ethan remembered the day it had been taken because Bobby had shown it off afterward with a pride that looked almost shy on him. He had tried to act casual about it, but everyone knew better. Bobby loved his family with the kind of steadiness that made other people feel safer standing near it.

In the photo, Harry stood at Bobby’s shoulder, close to the same height now, grinning like someone had said something ridiculous right before the shutter clicked. May stood beside Athena, looking older than Ethan remembered and younger than she probably wanted anyone to think. Athena’s smile had that sharp warmth Ethan always associated with her, the kind that could turn protective or dangerous depending on who stood in front of it. Bobby stood behind them all.

Right where he belonged.

Ethan looked away from the photograph before the ache behind his ribs could sharpen into something worse.

Another frame sat closer to the middle of the desk. The 118, squeezed together in front of the station after a shift months ago. Hen was laughing at something Chimney had clearly just said. Chimney looked far too pleased with himself. Buck’s arm was thrown around Eddie’s shoulders, both of them smiling in a way that made the camera feel like an interruption. Ravi hovered near the edge as if he still had not decided whether he was allowed to take up space. And Bobby stood in the center.

Not because he had pushed himself there. Because everyone else had arranged around him without thinking. Ethan remembered that day too. The noise of it. The teasing. The way Bobby had pretended to object when someone insisted on taking a picture, then stood exactly where everyone wanted him once the camera came out. It had seemed ordinary at the time. Another station memory. Another thing that would keep happening. He had not known he was watching something become precious.

The frame was crooked.

Not much. Barely enough to notice. Maybe someone had bumped the desk. Maybe the station had shaken when the engines rolled out. Maybe it had been like that for days and no one had wanted to touch it because touching Bobby’s things felt too much like admitting they were only things now. Ethan reached forward and straightened it.

That was all.

Nothing important. Just a small motion. A tiny correction. The kind of thing nobody would notice unless they were looking for it, and maybe not even then. Yet somehow it felt necessary.

“He kept that one where he could see it.”

Ethan turned.

Buck stood in the doorway. He had left his coffee on the counter, but one hand was still curled like it expected the mug to be there. Eddie stood a step behind him, close but not crowding. The shape of it made something in Ethan’s chest tighten: Buck at the threshold, unable to come fully in; Eddie behind him, steady enough to catch the retreat if Buck needed one.

“The station photo?” Ethan asked.

Buck nodded. His eyes stayed on the frame. “He said it made the office less depressing.” There were about five different things Ethan could have said to that. None of them would have helped.

“It does,” he said instead.

Buck’s mouth moved, not quite a smile. “Yeah.” For a moment, no one spoke. The three of them stood with the desk between them and Bobby’s absence filling the rest of the room. Ethan could hear the station around them more clearly from inside the office: the low murmur of Karen’s voice, Hen answering, a cabinet closing downstairs, Chimney saying, “No, I understand that, but we’ve already submitted the exposure documentation twice.” Buck flinched at the words even though Chimney had not raised his voice. Eddie noticed. He always did.

“Buck,” Eddie said softly.

“I’m okay.”

The answer came too fast. Eddie did not challenge it directly. He only stepped closer, close enough that his shoulder nearly brushed Buck’s. “I know.” Buck let out a breath that almost sounded like a laugh and absolutely did not. “That’s not usually what people say when they believe me.”

“I didn’t say I believed you.”

That did pull something from Buck. Not a laugh. Not really. But the corner of his mouth shifted, and some of the brittle stillness around him loosened for half a second. Ethan looked back at the desk, giving them the dignity of not being watched too closely.

Bobby’s computer monitor was dark. A pen sat beside the keyboard. There was a small stack of forms clipped together and aligned too neatly to be accidental. A yellow sticky note was attached to the top page, Bobby’s handwriting still visible in black ink: Follow up Monday. Monday had come and gone.

The note remained.

Ethan stared at it longer than he meant to. The words were ordinary enough to be cruel. Follow up Monday. A reminder for some task Bobby had expected to handle because he had expected to be here. Because everyone had expected him to be here. Death made large things impossible, but sometimes the small unfinished things were worse. They proved that the person had been living inside a future that stopped without warning.

“I keep thinking someone should move that,” Buck said.

Ethan glanced up. “The note?”

“All of it.” Buck’s gaze moved around the room without settling. “The paperwork. The coffee mug. The pictures. The stupid pen cup he hated but never got rid of because Chim bought it as a joke and then got offended when Bobby said it was ugly.”

Ethan looked at the pen cup. It was, objectively, ugly. Bright orange, shaped like a fire hydrant, with a chipped spot near the base.

“It is ugly,” Eddie said.

Buck gave him a wounded look. “You’re supposed to pretend it’s sentimental.”

“It can be sentimental and ugly.”

“Thank you,” Hen called from the kitchen without looking in.

Buck turned toward the doorway. “You are not in this conversation.”

“I’m in every conversation if you’re loud enough.”

For one brief moment, the office warmed around the edges. The grief did not leave. It never did. But it shifted enough to make room for the memory of Bobby rolling his eyes at an ugly pen cup while secretly keeping it on his desk because someone he loved had given it to him. Then Buck looked back at the paperwork, and the warmth thinned.

“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do with it,” he said.

Eddie’s voice stayed careful. “You don’t have to know today.”

“Someone does.”

“No,” Eddie said. “Someone will. That’s different.”

Buck looked at him, and for a second the exhaustion under his eyes seemed deeper than it had in the kitchen. “It feels like if we leave everything exactly where it is, we’re waiting for him to come back. But if we move anything…”

He stopped.

Ethan finished it silently anyway. If they moved anything, Bobby was really gone. Eddie did not fill the silence with the obvious. He let it sit, which was probably kinder. Buck did not need someone to explain his own grief to him. He needed someone to stand close enough that it did not echo so loudly.

From downstairs, Chimney’s voice rose by a fraction. Still polite. Too polite. “Yes, I understand there are multiple agencies involved. I’m asking which agency currently has release authority.”

Buck’s eyes closed.

“He’s been doing that all week,” Ethan said before he could think better of it.

Buck opened his eyes and looked toward the bay. “Yeah.”

“Does he stop?”

“When Maddie makes him.” Buck’s mouth twisted. “Sometimes.”

“And when she can’t?” Eddie asked.

“Then Hen threatens him.”

“Also sometimes,” Hen called.

Ethan could hear Karen say something low, probably telling Hen not to yell across the loft, and Hen answer that she was not yelling, she was participating from range. Buck’s expression softened at the edges, but his gaze stayed downstairs. “He thinks if he makes enough calls, eventually someone will give him the right answer.” Eddie’s voice was quiet. “And if they don’t?”

“Then he makes another one.”

There it was again. The same pattern Ethan had seen everywhere since Bobby died. Buck feeding people. Chimney calling agencies. Athena holding herself still. May answering questions. Eddie crossing state lines. Jacob sending photos of food because proof of care could travel faster than comfort. Everyone trying to turn grief into motion because motion at least looked like survival from the outside. Ethan looked around the office again.

Bobby had been good at motion too, but it had never felt frantic. That was part of what made him Bobby. He could move through chaos without making the chaos bigger. He gave orders without making people feel small. He could turn a room full of fear into a plan and a room full of stubborn firefighters into something close enough to family that none of them had noticed the architecture until the foundation was gone.

“He made this place make sense,” Ethan said.

The words came out softer than he meant them to.

Buck looked at him.

Ethan swallowed, suddenly aware that he was in Bobby’s office, talking about Bobby to people who had known him longer, loved him deeper, lost more. “I mean, I know it still does. Everyone knows their job. Calls still happen. The station still works. But it’s different.”

“No,” Buck said, voice rough. “You’re right.”

Eddie’s gaze stayed on Ethan, steady and unreadable in a way that did not feel judgmental. Just attentive. Ethan looked at the family photo again. “I didn’t realize how much of the station was him until he wasn’t here.”

Buck took that one like it hit somewhere tender. He looked down, then reached for the edge of the desk but stopped before touching it. His hand hovered near the surface for a second before curling back toward his side.

“Yeah,” he said. “Me neither.”

That surprised Ethan. “You didn’t?” Buck shook his head. “Not like this.” Eddie looked toward the station photo. “Nobody notices load-bearing walls until something cracks.” Buck let out a breath. “That sounds like something Bobby would say.”

“Probably with a better metaphor.”

“Definitely with a better metaphor,” Hen called.

Eddie glanced toward the kitchen. “Still not in this conversation.”

“Still hearing everything.”

The faint humor helped, but only because it did not try to fix anything. It was not a rescue. It was a hand on the wall in the dark, enough to prove there was still something solid nearby.

Ethan shifted the muffin to his other hand and realized he had crushed the bottom of it almost flat. Crumbs clung to his palm. He brushed them carefully into the small trash can beside the desk, then froze because even that felt like interacting with Bobby’s things. Buck noticed, and for once he did not pretend otherwise. “It’s okay.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Buck looked around the office, eyes moving over the desk, the frames, the shelves. “He’d hate everyone acting like this room is a museum.”

“Probably,” Eddie said.

“He’d say something very reasonable about how offices are meant to be used.”

“And then make you clean the coffee maker.”

Buck’s mouth twitched. “Yeah. He would.” The image sat with them for a moment: Bobby alive enough to assign chores, to redirect grief into something ordinary, to stand in the doorway and tell Buck that the coffee maker was not going to descale itself. The ache of it was sharp, but not only sharp. There was warmth there too. Love, maybe, refusing to become only pain.

Ethan understood then why the room felt so difficult to enter. It was not empty because Bobby was absent. It was empty because everything in it still knew him. The chair behind the desk knew the shape of his weight. The pen cup knew his eye-roll. The photos knew his pride. The sticky note knew the Monday he had planned to reach. The open door knew all the times he had left himself available to whoever needed him next.

“What happens to it?” Ethan asked.

Buck looked at him. “The office?”

“Yeah.”

No one answered right away. Eddie leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. “Eventually, someone else sits here.” Buck flinched. It was tiny, but Ethan saw it. Eddie saw it too, and regret crossed his face immediately, though what he had said was not cruel. It was just true, and truth had terrible timing lately.

“Not today,” Eddie added.

Buck nodded, but he did not look at the chair. “Yeah.”

“Not tomorrow either, probably.”

“Eventually,” Buck said.

The word had too much inside it. Eventually Bobby’s things would be moved. Eventually the office would belong to someone else. Eventually the station would adjust around a new captain. Eventually people would stop expecting Bobby to appear at the top of the stairs. Eventually grief would change shape, not because anyone wanted it to, but because time was relentless in both cruel and merciful ways.

Ethan hated eventually.

He looked at the photo of the 118 again, at Bobby in the center, and tried to imagine someone else sitting behind the desk. His mind refused the image. Not because it would never happen. Because happening did not mean ready. Downstairs, Chimney ended his call.

The sudden absence of his voice made everyone in the office look toward the bay. For a few seconds, there was only the station hum. Then a drawer opened somewhere below, paper shifted, and Chimney started dialing again. Buck’s shoulders dropped by a fraction.

“I should go check on him,” he said.

Eddie did not move out of his way immediately. “Are you checking on him, or are you looking for something to do?” Buck’s eyes flashed, but the irritation did not have much strength behind it. “Both.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “They can.”

For a second, Ethan thought Buck might argue. Instead, Buck looked back at the desk. His gaze caught on the crooked places Ethan had already fixed, on the sticky note, on the photographs, on the chair no one wanted to touch.

“I don’t know how to stand still in here,” Buck admitted.

The confession was quiet enough that it almost did not count as one. Eddie’s expression changed. Softened in a way that made him look almost as tired as Buck. “Then don’t do it alone.”

Buck swallowed.

Ethan looked away again, because some moments deserved privacy even when they happened three feet in front of him. He focused on the desk instead. On the photo he had straightened. On the ugly pen cup. On the note that still said Follow up Monday. The office did not feel less empty than it had when he stepped inside, but it felt cared for now. Not fixed. Not resolved. Just witnessed.

Maybe that mattered.

Maybe, for today, that was all any of them could do. Buck finally stepped into the room. Only one step. Barely past the threshold. But Ethan saw Eddie notice. Saw Hen stop pretending not to watch from the kitchen. Saw Karen’s hand close gently around Hen’s. Buck stood there with his arms wrapped around himself, eyes on Bobby’s desk, breathing like the room had changed pressure around him.

“He should be here,” Buck said.

No one contradicted him.

No one softened it.

Because he was right.

Bobby should have been there. Behind the desk. In the kitchen. At the top of the stairs. Down in the bay telling Chimney to sit down before he made himself impossible to reason with. Standing beside Athena. Answering Harry’s questions. Reading Christopher’s letter. Making Buck eat something and pretending not to notice that Eddie had come straight from the airport because of course Eddie had. Bobby should have been everywhere he wasn’t.

Outside, a cool breeze rattled faintly against the station windows, carrying the distant sound of traffic beyond the walls. Los Angeles kept moving. Emergencies kept happening. The world continued with a stubbornness Ethan found both offensive and necessary. Inside the office, time moved differently.

Buck reached out at last and touched the edge of the desk. Just two fingers against the wood. Nothing more. Eddie stayed beside him. Ethan stayed near the photographs. No one said goodbye, because this was not goodbye yet. They were still waiting for the paperwork, the authorization, the clearance, the call that would finally let Bobby come home. For now, the office remained open.

Empty.

Waiting.

Chimney was still on the phone when Ethan came back down from the loft. He had moved from the far side of the apparatus bay to the space near the ambulance, though Ethan had no idea when that had happened. Chimney seemed to be everywhere lately, pacing in tight circuits with his phone pressed to one ear and a notebook balanced in his other hand. Every time Ethan looked away, Chimney reappeared somewhere else with the same exhausted posture and the same careful voice.

“Captain Robert Wade Nash,” Chimney said. “LAFD Station 118. Date of death was during the CCHF containment incident. Yes, I can hold.”

He lowered the phone half an inch, closed his eyes, and took one breath.

Only one.

Then the line picked up again, and Chimney straightened like someone had pulled a wire through his spine. “Hi. Yes. I’m calling about release status for Captain Robert Wade Nash. I was just transferred from Public Health records. They said this had been moved to your office for clearance review.” Ethan stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

The station moved around Chimney without touching him. Ravi carried a box of nitrile gloves toward the supply shelves. Someone from B-shift crossed behind the engine with a coil of hose. Upstairs, Buck and Eddie had gone quiet near the captain’s office, their voices lowered to the kind of murmur that did not travel. Hen and Karen remained at the kitchen table, though Ethan could feel Hen’s attention pulled toward the bay.

Everyone knew where Chimney was. Everyone knew what he was doing. Nobody knew how to make him stop. Chimney listened for a few seconds, pen hovering over the open notebook. His expression stayed polite. That was the first warning sign. Chimney could be charming, sarcastic, stubborn, frantic, funny, warm, and impossible in the span of a single shift. Polite was what he became when every other response had been judged unsafe.

“No, I understand there are multiple agencies involved,” Chimney said. “I’m asking which agency currently has release authority.”

His pen tapped once against the page.

Then again.

Then stopped, because Chimney seemed to notice himself doing it and forced his hand still. Ethan’s gaze dropped to the notebook. He could not read most of it from where he stood, but he saw columns of names, phone numbers, arrows, underlines, and abbreviations written in increasingly cramped handwriting. County ME. Public Health. CDC liaison. LAFD command. FBI contact. Army contact. Funeral home. Release authorization. Exposure hold. Transport clearance. It did not look like notes anymore. It looked like someone trying to build a map through a wall.

“Right,” Chimney said. “But the Medical Examiner told us the exposure hold can't be lifted until Public Health signs off, and Public Health told us the file was waiting on federal clearance because of the pathogen classification. So if federal clearance has been issued, I need to know who sends that to the county.”

Another pause.

Chimney’s jaw tightened.

“No, I’m not asking you to violate protocol.” His voice stayed even, which somehow made it worse. “I’m asking you to tell me what the protocol is.”

Ethan looked toward Hen.

She had come to the top of the stairs without him noticing, one hand resting lightly against the railing. Karen stood behind her, close enough to help if Hen pushed herself too far but far enough back not to make an issue of it. Hen’s face had gone flat in the way it did when worry had turned into irritation because irritation was easier to manage.

“Has he been doing that all morning?” Ethan asked quietly.

Hen’s eyes stayed on Chimney. “Try all week.” Below them, Chimney nodded at something no one else could hear. “Can you transfer me to the person who does have that file?”

He listened.

“No, I’ve already spoken to that office.”

Another pause.

“Twice today.”

Ethan winced.

Hen descended the stairs slowly, each step controlled enough to make Ethan notice the effort. She was healing. Everyone kept saying that because it was true and because the truth was easier to hold when it sounded like progress. Still, every careful breath reminded Ethan of the lab, the tube they had put in her chest, the way a body could survive and still keep evidence of how close it had come to not surviving.

“You okay?” he asked.

Hen gave him a look. “Do not start with me.”

“I wasn’t starting.”

“You were pre-starting.”

Karen’s mouth curved faintly behind her. “He's been learning from us.”

“That's not comforting,” Hen said.

Their voices were low, careful not to carry too far. Chimney did not seem to hear them anyway. He had turned slightly away, one hand pressed to the notebook as if the page might move if he stopped holding it down.

“Has he slept?” Ethan asked.

Hen let out a short laugh, the kind that was not actually amused. “Not enough.”

“That’s a dodge.”

“It's the only one he’ll let anyone give.”

Karen folded her arms. “Maddie got him home for a few hours last night.”

“A few?”

“Three, maybe four,” Hen said. “Then he was back here before shift change, pretending he hadn't been awake half the night writing down phone numbers.”

Karen’s expression tightened. “And when he is home, he is not really home. Maddie says he keeps finding reasons to leave. Running, errands, another call he has to make. Anything that keeps him from sitting still long enough for the house to get quiet around him.”

“She’s pregnant,” Hen said. “Far enough along that she should not be the one chasing him out the door at five in the morning.”

Ethan had not set those two facts beside each other until she said them out loud. Chimney had a daughter who still asked to be carried and a son who was, so far, an ultrasound and a due date, and both of them had come within one decision of never having him in the room. Bobby had done that arithmetic inside a sealed lab in about the time it took most people to decide on lunch.

“Does Maddie know what he’s doing down here?” Ethan asked.

Hen and Karen looked at each other.

“She knows he leaves early,” Karen said. “She thinks it’s the counseling sessions and the running.”

“It isn’t.”

“It’s that too.” Karen’s mouth pressed thin. “He isn’t lying to her. He’s just letting her finish the sentence herself.”

Hen looked toward Chimney again, her jaw set. “He says running clears his mind.”

“Does it?” Ethan asked.

“No,” Hen said. “It gives him somewhere to put his feet while he avoids talking to anyone.”

Ethan looked back at Chimney. The dark circles under his eyes were visible even from several yards away. His hair looked like he had dragged his hands through it too many times, and the plain shirt he had pulled on instead of a uniform sat rumpled in a way Chimney would have cared about on a normal day. He was not on shift. He was not cleared to be. He was here anyway. He was standing. Moving. Functioning. All the things that made people say someone was okay when they were not.

“He almost died,” Ethan said.

Hen’s expression tightened. “I know.”

“Last week, he was still in a hospital bed.”

“I know.”

The frustration in Hen’s voice was not directed at Ethan. It was not even really directed at Chimney. It sounded more like the helpless anger of someone watching a person she loved run on fumes and stubbornness because the alternative was collapsing.

Chimney lowered the phone again. “Of course,” he said, though the person on the other end could no longer hear him. “Why would the left hand know what the right hand is doing? That would be ridiculous.” Hen took a step forward. “Chim.” He lifted one finger without looking up, already flipping to another page in the notebook. “One second.”

“No.”

That got his attention.

Chimney looked over. For a moment, his expression was almost blank, like he had been pulled too abruptly from one mode into another and needed a second to remember who was standing in front of him. Then he saw Hen. Really saw her. His face softened and tightened at once.

“You should be upstairs,” he said.

Hen stared at him. “That is a bold opening statement from you.”

“You’re supposed to be taking it easy.”

“And you’re supposed to be recovering from nearly bleeding out in a quarantine zone, so look at us, both full of surprises.”

Karen made a small sound that might have been a warning and might have been agreement. Chimney’s mouth opened, then closed. He looked briefly toward the notebook, as if the correct response might be written somewhere between County Medical Examiner and CDC liaison.

“I’m fine,” he said.

Hen’s eyebrows lifted.

“Okay,” Chimney amended. “Bad word choice.”

“Terrible word choice.”

“I’m functioning.”

“Worse.”

“I’m upright.”

“Bare minimum.”

Ethan might have smiled if any of it were actually funny. It had the shape of their usual rhythm, Hen and Chimney batting words back and forth until the room loosened around them, but there was no real lift beneath it. Every line landed against the same fact: Chimney looked like he might fall over if the phone stopped ringing long enough for his body to remember what it had been through.

“What are you even doing?” Ethan asked.

Chimney looked at him then, and Ethan immediately wished he had phrased it differently. Not because Chimney seemed offended. Because the question stripped something bare across his face before he could cover it.

Hen answered for him.

“Trying to bring Bobby home.”

The words settled heavily in the apparatus bay. Not release status. Not paperwork. Not clearance. Not jurisdictional process. Those were the words officials used because officials needed language that made grief fit into a file. Hen’s version was the only one that mattered. Trying to bring Bobby home. Chimney looked down at the notebook.

“He shouldn’t still be there,” he said.

No one asked where there was. The Medical Examiner’s office. A controlled storage unit. Some restricted facility name Ethan did not know. It didn’t matter. Wherever Bobby was, it was not with Athena. Not with May or Harry. Not with the 118. Not somewhere his family could begin the work of saying goodbye.

“We know,” Hen said.

“No, I know we know.” Chimney dragged a hand through his hair, then seemed to remember the phone was still in it and lowered both with a frustrated breath. “But every call is the same thing. Someone has part of the answer, but not enough of it to do anything. County says Public Health. Public Health says federal clearance. Federal says the county submits the request. LAFD says they’re coordinating. Coordinating what? A circle?”

“Chim,” Karen said gently.

He stopped.

The sudden stillness was worse than the pacing. For a few seconds, Chimney stood in the middle of the apparatus bay with his phone in one hand and the notebook in the other, surrounded by engines built to move fast toward emergencies. He looked less like a firefighter and more like a man carrying a burden that had been divided incorrectly, with too much of it loaded onto one set of shoulders. Then Buck appeared at the top of the stairs.

Eddie was behind him.

Neither of them said anything at first. Buck’s eyes went straight to Chimney, then to the notebook, then to Hen, reading the scene in one sweep and flinching like he had somehow failed to prevent it. Eddie’s hand hovered near Buck’s back for half a second before dropping to his side.

“Any progress?” Buck asked.

Chimney’s face changed. Not much. Enough that Ethan noticed. The softness vanished, replaced by the same brittle focus he had been wearing all morning.

“Maybe.”

Hen closed her eyes briefly. Buck came down the stairs. “Maybe?”

“The CDC liaison confirmed the pathogen classification hold isn’t the issue anymore. Or at least it shouldn’t be.” Chimney flipped back a page, scanning his own handwriting. “Which means the county should be able to request final transport clearance if Public Health sends the release note to the Medical Examiner.”

Ethan tried to follow that. He failed somewhere around shouldn’t be. Buck did not seem to do much better. “So… good?” Chimney gave him a look. “In theory.”

“I hate theory,” Hen muttered.

“Me too.” Chimney tapped the notebook. “But it’s more than we had yesterday.”

“Is it?” Karen asked.

Chimney looked at her.

Karen held his gaze with the calm, merciless kindness of someone who had spent years loving stubborn people. “Is it more, or is it just a new name for the same wall?” For a moment, Chimney did not answer.

That was answer enough.

Buck’s hand curled around the stair rail. Eddie noticed and shifted closer, not touching him yet. Just there.

“I have to do something,” Chimney said.

Hen’s face softened despite herself. “I know.”

“No, you don’t.” The words came out sharper than Chimney probably intended. He heard it, winced, and shook his head. “Sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you meant.”

“I was there.”

The apparatus bay went quiet. Chimney looked down at the phone in his hand. “I was there at the end. I was there when we couldn’t—” He stopped. His jaw worked once. Buck looked like someone had hit him. Eddie moved then, finally putting a hand between Buck’s shoulder blades. Buck did not lean into it, not visibly, but he did not move away either. Hen took another step toward Chimney. “You were dying too.”

“That’s not the point.”

“It is absolutely the point.”

“Hen.”

“You were dying too,” she repeated, quieter this time. “You do not get to turn surviving into a debt you have to pay back by running yourself into the ground.”

Chimney laughed once, but there was no humor in it. “That sounds healthy and emotionally mature. I’ll put it on the list for later.”

“Chimney.”

“I can’t stop, Hen.”

There it was. Not defiance. Not stubbornness. The truth underneath both.

Chimney looked around at all of them, and for one unguarded second, the exhaustion showed completely. “If I stop, then I’m just standing here waiting for someone else to decide when Bobby gets to come home. I can’t do that. I can’t just sit here and wait for a phone call from someone who doesn’t know him, doesn’t love him, doesn’t understand that every hour they lose another form or transfer another file is another hour Athena has to look Harry in the eye and tell him there still isn’t a date.”

No one spoke.

“I can make calls,” Chimney said. “So I’m making calls.”

“Does Athena know you’re making them?” Karen asked.

Chimney’s eyes came up fast. “Why would she need to?”

“That is not a no.”

“She has enough people telling her to wait.” He looked back down at the notebook. “She doesn’t need one more voice in the pile. I’ll tell her when there’s something worth telling her.”

Hen and Karen exchanged a look over his head that Ethan could not read at the time. It made sense to him the next morning, in the bay, with Athena standing in front of them.

Ethan understood then. Not fully. Not in the way Hen or Buck or Eddie probably did. But enough. Chimney was not trying to solve bureaucracy because he believed bureaucracy could be reasoned with if he was persistent enough. He was doing it because the alternative was helplessness, and helplessness had too much room inside it for memory.

For Bobby’s last moments.

For the quarantine zone.

For all the things Chimney could not change. Karen stepped closer, her voice gentle. “Then let someone bring you water while you do it.” Chimney blinked at her, thrown by the practical pivot. “What?”

“Water,” she repeated. “Food, eventually. A chair if we get ambitious.”

“I don’t need—”

Hen pointed at him. “Finish that sentence and I will tell Maddie.”

Chimney shut his mouth.

Buck let out the smallest breath. Not quite a laugh. Not quite relief. Something in between. Ethan looked toward the kitchen. “I’ll get it.”

He moved before anyone could argue, taking the stairs two at a time because a task was suddenly available and he understood, a little too well, the appeal of that. In the kitchen, the muffins still sat beside the coffee pot. Buck’s mug waited abandoned on the counter again, full and probably already cooling. Ethan grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, hesitated, then added another because Hen was downstairs too and he was not stupid. When he returned, Chimney was on another call.

Of course he was.

“Yes,” Chimney said into the phone. “Captain Robert Wade Nash. LAFD Station 118.”

Ethan held out the bottle.

Chimney did not notice.

Ethan stepped closer and lifted it into his line of sight. Chimney blinked, looked at the bottle as if it had materialized from another dimension, then took it with a brief nod.

“Thanks,” he mouthed.

He tucked it under his arm without opening it.

Hen stared.

Ethan reached over, took the bottle back, cracked the cap, and handed it to him again. Chimney gave him a look.

Ethan raised both eyebrows.

Chimney drank.

Only a few swallows, but enough that Hen’s shoulders dropped by a fraction. Karen accepted the second bottle from Ethan with a nod and handed it to Hen before Hen could pretend she did not need it either.

“Yes, I’m still here,” Chimney said after lowering the water. “No, I don’t have a new case number. I have the county number, the Public Health reference number, and the federal exposure file number. Which one would you like?”

His voice stayed polite.

His hand tightened around the pen until his knuckles paled. Buck watched from the base of the stairs, his expression pulled tight with a helplessness that looked dangerously close to panic. Eddie stood beside him, steady and silent. Ethan could see the restraint in Eddie’s posture, the effort it took not to step in and start giving orders nobody had asked for. This was not a battlefield. It was not a burning building. There was no door to force, no victim to lift, no exit route to find. There was only a phone call.

And another.

And another.

Chimney listened, then wrote down a name. His handwriting had started neat at the top of the page and grown jagged near the bottom. “Okay. And your extension? Direct line, if possible.”

He paused.

“No, I understand. Main line is fine.”

It was not fine. Everyone in the bay could hear that it was not fine. Chimney wrote the number anyway. When the call ended, he lowered the phone slowly. For a few seconds, he did not move. His attention stayed fixed on the notebook page, but Ethan had the feeling he was not reading it anymore.

“Chim?” Buck said.

Chimney looked up.

“What did they say?”

Chimney glanced down at the page again. “They said final transport clearance has to originate with the county once the exposure hold is lifted.”

“And is it lifted?” Eddie asked.

“Depends who you ask.”

Hen made a frustrated sound. “That cannot be the answer.”

“And yet.”

Karen’s hand found Hen’s elbow before Hen could step forward too fast. Chimney rubbed both hands over his face. The phone and pen nearly tangled together, and for one second he looked so tired Ethan thought he might actually sit down. Instead, Chimney looked toward Bobby’s office. The open door was visible from the bay if you knew where to look. Chimney knew where to look.

His face changed in a way Ethan could not name. The motion stopped. The notes stopped. The next call did not start. For a few brief seconds, Chimney was not fighting transfers or writing down extensions or turning grief into logistics. He was just standing there, looking at Bobby’s empty office. Then the phone in his hand buzzed.

Everyone heard it.

Chimney looked down so fast the spell broke. Whatever had been open on his face closed again, and the brittle forward motion snapped back into place. He checked the screen, swallowed, and answered.

“Howard Han.”

Buck straightened. Hen’s hand tightened around the water bottle. Eddie went still beside Buck.

Ethan held his breath.

Chimney listened.

His expression did not change enough. That told Ethan before the words did.

“Right,” Chimney said. “No, thank you for calling back. Yes, if you can email that contact information, I’d appreciate it.”

Buck looked away.

Not news. Not the news. Chimney ended the call and wrote something down. “Funeral home has a different transport coordinator they want me to try.” Hen stared at him. “That’s it?”

“That’s something.”

“Chim.”

“It’s something,” he repeated, and this time his voice cracked around the edge of it.

No one argued after that. Because maybe it was something. Maybe a name, an email, a number, a next step was the only kind of hope the morning had left to offer. Maybe Chimney needed to believe that every contact moved Bobby one inch closer to home, even if the map kept redrawing itself every time he reached the next door.

Ethan looked around the apparatus bay. Hen leaning carefully into Karen’s steadying hand. Buck standing beside Eddie, torn between reaching for Chimney and needing someone to hold him in place. Ravi pretending to organize supplies while watching from the corner of his eye. Chimney with his notebook full of walls disguised as instructions. This was grief too, Ethan realized.

Not crying. Not collapsing. Not speeches or casseroles or black clothes laid out for a funeral that still did not have a date. This was grief in hold music, in case numbers, in transfer loops, in names written so many times they stopped looking like people and started looking like proof that someone was trying. Chimney uncapped his pen again. Hen’s voice softened. “Take five minutes.”

“I will.”

“Now.”

Chimney looked at the notebook. Buck spoke before Chimney could answer. “Five minutes isn’t stopping.”

Chimney looked at him.

Buck’s voice was rough but steady. “It’s five minutes.” Eddie stayed silent beside him, but his presence seemed to hold the words upright. For a moment, Chimney looked like he might refuse. Then he closed the notebook. Not all the way. One finger stayed between the pages to mark his place.

But he closed it.

Hen accepted the compromise because it was probably the best they were getting. Karen guided her toward the nearest bench, and Buck moved to Chimney’s other side, not touching him but close enough to make it clear he could. Eddie stayed with Buck. Ethan remained where he was, holding the extra water cap in one hand, watching the station gather itself around the man trying to force a path through impossible paperwork.

Chimney sat down slowly.

He looked smaller once he was not moving. That was the terrible part. The pacing had made him seem relentless. The phone calls had given him shape. Sitting revealed the exhaustion underneath it all: the sag of his shoulders, the bruised shadows under his eyes, the way his free hand trembled once before he pressed it flat against the notebook cover. Buck saw it and looked wrecked.

“I’m okay,” Chimney said automatically.

Hen, Karen, Buck, Eddie, and Ethan all looked at him. Chimney sighed. “Right. Bad word choice.”

“Catastrophic,” Hen said.

That pulled the smallest smile from him. It vanished almost immediately, but it had been there. For five minutes, no one made a call. The station did not become peaceful. The office was still empty. Bobby was still not home. The notebook still waited under Chimney’s hand, full of names and numbers and walls that had to be tried again. But for five minutes, Chimney drank water, Buck stood beside Eddie, Hen let Karen fuss without arguing too much, and Ethan listened to the damaged firehouse hum continue around them.

It was not enough.

It was something.

Then Chimney’s phone buzzed again.

Everyone looked down.

Chimney did not answer immediately this time. He stared at the screen, took one careful breath, and opened the notebook with the inevitability of someone picking up a weight he had never really set down.

“Five minutes,” Hen reminded him.

Chimney nodded. “Five minutes.”

Then he answered the call.

“Howard Han.”

The station kept breathing around him.

Still waiting.

Still trying.

Still unable to bring Bobby home.

For almost an hour, the station let Chimney have his five minutes. Not literally. Literally, he had lasted seven minutes before opening the notebook again, which Hen had called generous only because she was too tired to start a fight she knew she would not win. But something had shifted after that first forced pause. The calls continued, the notebook stayed open, and Chimney still moved through the apparatus bay like momentum was the only thing keeping him upright, but now everyone else moved around him with quieter purpose.

Buck brought coffee Chimney did not drink. Karen brought a granola bar Chimney held for ten minutes before realizing it was in his hand. Hen confiscated the pen once when his grip tightened too hard around it and replaced it with a different one, as if pen rotation counted as medical intervention. Eddie stayed near Buck without announcing that he was staying near Buck, which somehow made Buck less likely to bolt toward every task in the building.

Ethan found himself doing inventory because Ravi had surrendered the clipboard to him with the haunted expression of someone who had been staring at glove counts too long. It should have been boring.

On a normal day, it would have been boring. Count the gauze. Check the oxygen masks. Confirm expiration dates. Mark what needed restocking. He had done enough CERT supply checks to know that inventory was mostly repetition interrupted by the occasional discovery that someone had put a box in the wrong place and created a mystery no one cared about solving.

Today, the repetition helped. Ethan understood the appeal better than he wanted to. Numbers behaved. Boxes either existed or did not. Dates either had expired or had not. A supply list did not ask him how Buck was doing, or whether Eddie should have left Christopher in Texas, or how long Athena could keep standing in a hallway somewhere while strangers explained process to her. He was counting trauma dressings when Chimney’s voice changed.

Not loudly. That was the strange thing. Chimney did not raise his voice. If anything, he lowered it, and the control in it sharpened enough that Ethan looked up before he understood why.

“I understand that,” Chimney said into the phone. “But this is not a general inquiry. This is regarding Captain Robert Wade Nash, LAFD Station 118, deceased during the CCHF containment incident. The Medical Examiner’s office told us your department still has the exposure hold listed as pending.”

Ethan set the box down. Buck was already watching from near the engine. Eddie stood beside him, one shoulder leaned against the rig, arms folded loosely across his chest. He looked calm in the way people looked calm when they were measuring every possible path through a room. Hen sat on the bench by the ambulance with Karen beside her, both of them turned toward Chimney. Everyone had learned the sound of another wall. Chimney listened. His pen hovered over the notebook but did not move.

“No,” he said after a moment. “No, that is not what I was told fifteen minutes ago.”

Buck’s jaw flexed.

Eddie’s gaze moved from Chimney to Buck, then back again. Chimney closed his eyes briefly. “Okay. Then can you tell me when the notation was updated?” The station around them seemed to narrow around the call. Somewhere upstairs, a refrigerator hummed. Outside, traffic rolled past the open bay doors. The city kept making city sounds, ordinary and indifferent, while Chimney stood in a firehouse trying to convince a voice on the phone that Bobby Nash was a person and not a misfiled status code.

“Today,” Chimney repeated. “Do you have a time?”

He wrote something down. The motion was careful. Too careful.

“And who submitted that update?”

Another pause.

The pen stopped moving.

“You can’t see that.”

Hen muttered something under her breath that Ethan pretended not to hear. Chimney opened his eyes. “Then who can?” His voice stayed polite too long. That was what made Ethan’s stomach tighten. There was a point where politeness stopped sounding like manners and started sounding like a locked door someone was pressing their shoulder against from the wrong side. Chimney nodded once at nothing. “Supervisor, then. I need to speak to a supervisor.”

Ethan did not realize he had moved until he was standing closer to Buck and Eddie, the forgotten inventory list still in one hand. Buck glanced at it, then at him.

“Trauma dressings?” Buck asked quietly.

Ethan looked down. “Apparently.”

“Good to know we still have those.”

The attempt at humor had no lift under it, but Ethan appreciated the effort. “Seventeen.”

“Is that a lot?”

“I have no idea.”

Eddie’s mouth twitched, almost despite himself. Buck’s did not. His eyes stayed on Chimney, tracking every shift of posture, every tightening of hand or jaw, as if he could predict the collapse before it happened and catch it through force of attention alone.

“He’s going to hurt himself,” Buck said.

Eddie’s voice stayed low. “Hen knows.”

“Knowing doesn’t make him stop.”

“No,” Eddie said. “It doesn’t.”

Buck looked like he hated that answer because it was true. Across the bay, Chimney turned away from them, then turned back almost immediately because there was nowhere else to go. “Yes, I can hold.”

He lowered the phone and stared at it. For a moment, the hold music was faintly audible, tinny and cheerful in a way that felt obscene. Hen pushed herself to her feet. Karen’s hand moved automatically toward her elbow. “Hen.”

“I’m walking ten feet.”

“You say that like you haven’t made ten feet into a personal challenge all week.”

Hen gave her a look, but accepted the steadying hand anyway. Together, they crossed toward Chimney. He did not notice them until Hen was close enough to take the notebook from under his hand.

“Hey.”

Chimney blinked at her. “What?”

“Breathe.”

“I am breathing.”

“Technically.”

“That is the only kind required.”

“Not when I’m the one judging.”

His mouth twitched, but the expression broke before it became anything. “I’m on hold.”

“I noticed.”

“Supervisor.”

“I heard.”

“They changed the status back.”

Hen’s face went still. “Back?”

“Pending.” Chimney tapped the notebook with one finger even though Hen was holding it. “Exposure hold pending. The CDC liaison said it shouldn’t be pending. Public Health says it is pending. County says they can’t request transport until it’s cleared. Funeral home says they can’t do anything without transport clearance. Everyone is very sorry and very unable to be useful.”

He said it all quickly, like speed could keep the frustration from finding teeth. Karen’s voice was calm. “Did they say why it changed?”

“No.”

“Did they say who changed it?”

“Also no.”

“Did they say who would know?”

Chimney’s laugh was short and sharp. “They are allegedly finding me someone.”

Buck stepped closer. “Chim.”

Chimney looked over, and the defensiveness was there before Buck even finished deciding what to say. “Don’t.”

Buck stopped.

That was worse than if he had kept going. Eddie looked between them, then said, “Nobody’s telling you to stop.” Chimney’s eyes cut to him. “Good.”

“But you’re allowed to be angry.”

That landed strangely. Ethan saw it in Chimney’s face, the small disorientation of being offered something he had not expected. He had been ready for argument. For concern. For someone telling him he needed rest, water, food, a chair, a break, a therapist, a wife with tranquilizer darts. He had not been ready for permission.

“I don’t have time to be angry,” Chimney said.

“Looks like you’re multitasking.”

Hen glanced toward Eddie, then back at Chimney. “He has a point.”

“Whose side are you on?” Chimney asked.

“Yours, unfortunately.”

The hold music clicked.

Chimney snapped the phone back to his ear. “Yes. I’m here.” Every person in the bay went quiet again. Ethan hated how fast they all did it. How quickly everyone had learned to stop breathing around the possibility of news. Not even good news. Just information. A name. A reason. A different extension. Any proof that the system had a center somewhere and they simply had not found it yet.

Chimney listened, pen ready.

“Okay,” he said. “Can you spell that?”

He wrote a name. Then an email address. Then a number.

“And this person has authority over the exposure hold?”

His expression shifted.

Not enough.

“Advisory authority,” Chimney repeated.

Hen’s shoulders sank.

Buck turned away, one hand dragging through his hair. Chimney’s voice stayed level. “Who has final authority?”

The pause stretched.

“County.”

Eddie closed his eyes.

Ethan felt the circle close before Chimney said another word.

“County told us Public Health,” Chimney said.

Another pause.

“Right. No, I understand that you can only advise.”

His hand tightened around the pen until Ethan thought it might snap. “Can you send that advisory note directly to the Medical Examiner and copy the funeral home?” For a second, something like hope moved through the bay. Small, unwanted, dangerous.

Chimney listened.

Then it died.

“You can send it to Public Health.”

Hen’s eyes flashed.

Karen’s hand closed around her wrist, not restraining her exactly, just anchoring. Chimney wrote something down with careful, deliberate strokes. “Okay. Send it to Public Health. Copy me if you can. Howard Han. H-A-N. Yes. Thank you.”

He ended the call.

No one asked at first. Maybe because they had all heard enough to understand. Maybe because asking would force Chimney to say it out loud, and none of them wanted to make him translate another wall into language. Finally, Buck said, “What does that mean?”

Chimney looked at the notebook. “It means someone with advisory authority is sending a note to someone who may or may not accept it as sufficient to update the hold status, which may or may not allow the county to request transport clearance from itself, depending on whether the system still thinks the file is pending by the time someone opens the email.” Ravi, who had appeared near the supply shelves at some point, said, “That sounds insane.”

Everyone looked at him.

He winced. “Sorry.”

“No,” Chimney said. “That is actually the most accurate summary anyone has given so far.”

Ravi looked uncertain whether to be proud or horrified. Hen took the pen from Chimney’s hand.

“Hey,” he protested.

“Your hand is about to cramp.”

“My hand is fine.”

“Your relationship with the word fine continues to be concerning.”

Karen reached for the notebook next. “Let me copy the last page.” Chimney looked at her, immediately wary. “Why?”

“Because if you misplace this notebook, several people in this building will have a cardiac event.”

“I’m not going to misplace it.”

“No one plans to misplace things.”

“Karen.”

She held out her hand, patient and immovable. “I am not asking to take over. I am asking to help make sure the work you have done does not disappear because you are exhausted and human.”

That was harder to argue with. Chimney still tried for three seconds. Ethan watched the attempt move across his face and fail. Finally, he handed her the notebook. Only after sliding one finger into the current page to hold his place. Karen accepted this as the victory it was. “Thank you.”

“I want that back.”

“I assumed.”

Hen took the water bottle from the bench and pushed it into Chimney’s hand. “Drink.”

“You are very bossy for someone on medical leave.”

“I contain multitudes.”

Chimney drank, mostly because everyone was watching. Ethan returned to the inventory list because he needed somewhere to put his eyes. Seventeen trauma dressings. Twelve triangular bandages. Eight adult non-rebreathers. Six pediatric masks. Two boxes of alcohol prep pads where there should have been three. The numbers sat in neat columns, absurdly orderly beside the bureaucratic spiral Chimney had just described.

He wrote down the missing prep pads and wondered if this was what drew people toward emergency work in the first place. Not the adrenaline. Not really. The clarity. Someone was bleeding, so you applied pressure. Someone could not breathe, so you opened an airway. A fire was spreading, so you found the seat of it and put water where water needed to go. Not easy. Never easy. But direct.

This was not direct.

Bobby was dead, and there was no pressure point for that. No airway to open. No hose line to advance. There were only agencies and holds and clearance notes and people with advisory authority who could not make the thing happen but could maybe send an email to someone else who could maybe update a status that might let someone else start the next step. It made Ethan’s skin itch.

“You’re doing the face,” Ravi said quietly.

Ethan looked up. Ravi had edged closer with another box of supplies, apparently deciding inventory was safer in pairs.

“What face?”

“The one people make when they want to fix something and have realized they are holding gauze.”

Ethan looked down at the gauze in his hand. Ravi nodded solemnly. “Classic gauze helplessness.” Despite everything, Ethan almost laughed. “Is that in the manual?”

“It should be.”

The moment was small, but it helped. Not enough. Nothing was enough. But the absurd phrase lodged itself somewhere in Ethan’s chest and made breathing around the helplessness a little easier.

Across the bay, Buck had moved closer to Chimney. Eddie stayed beside him, less visibly protective now but still clearly there. Hen sat again because Karen had given her the kind of look that did not leave room for negotiation. Chimney stood with his water bottle in one hand, phone in the other, waiting for the next call or email or obstruction to appear. For several minutes, nothing happened. That might have been worse.

Waiting had a texture now. Ethan could feel it in the way everyone pretended to return to other tasks while remaining tuned to Chimney’s phone. The station had become a room full of people listening for a vibration. Even the normal firehouse sounds felt softened, careful not to cover the one sound everyone feared and wanted at the same time.

Then Chimney’s phone buzzed.

He looked down. “Email.”

Everyone stopped pretending.

Chimney opened it, eyes moving quickly over the screen. For a second, his expression did not change. Then he inhaled through his nose and let it out slowly.

“They sent the advisory note.”

Buck took half a step forward. “That’s good.” Chimney nodded. “It’s not bad.”

“Chim.”

“I’m not being pessimistic. I’m being accurate.”

He forwarded the email, then opened his notebook again. Karen, still holding the copied page, watched him with the weary resignation of someone who knew the next step before he said it.

“Now I call Public Health back,” Chimney said.

Hen’s head tipped back. “Of course you do.”

“If they received the note, they can update the hold.”

“If someone opens the email,” Buck said.

Chimney pointed at him. “Exactly. You’re learning.” Buck looked like he wanted to throw something. Eddie’s hand settled briefly at the back of his neck. Buck went still under it, then exhaled.

Chimney dialed.

This time, the call connected faster. Maybe that was luck. Maybe Chimney had finally found a direct extension that worked. Maybe the universe had decided to offer one minor mercy before taking it back.

“Hi, this is Howard Han again,” Chimney said. “I’m following up on the exposure hold for Captain Robert Wade Nash. An advisory note should have been sent to your office from the federal liaison.”

He listened.

“Just now.”

A pause.

“Yes, I can hold.”

No one groaned. That felt like restraint worth documenting. The hold lasted four minutes. Ethan knew because he watched the clock above the bay doors, the second hand dragging itself around the face with insulting calm. Chimney did not pace this time. He stood still with the phone pressed to his ear, and somehow that looked harder. When the line picked up again, he straightened.

“Yes.”

Everyone looked up.

“You received it.”

Buck’s hand found Eddie’s sleeve.

“Okay,” Chimney said. “Can the hold be updated?”

The silence after that was too long. Chimney’s expression shut down by degrees.

“Why not?”

Hen closed her eyes.

Ethan felt the answer arrive before Chimney repeated it.

“Because the advisory note has to be reviewed by your director.”

Buck turned away hard.

Eddie followed him with one step, not letting the distance open too far. Chimney stared at the floor. “When will that happen?”

Pause.

“End of day.”

His jaw tightened.

“No, I understand. Thank you.”

He ended the call.

For a moment, there was no sound at all.

Then Chimney laughed.

It was quiet, cracked, and not funny. “End of day.” Hen stood again despite Karen’s hand. “Chim.”

“End of day,” he repeated. “Which means maybe today, maybe tomorrow morning, maybe after someone notices the email got routed to the wrong inbox, maybe after I call again and they explain that the director can advise but the county still has final authority because apparently everyone has authority until they are asked to use it.”

“Chimney,” Buck said, voice rough.

Chimney looked at him, and the anger went out of his face so fast it left only exhaustion behind. “I’m sorry.” Buck shook his head. “Don’t.”

“I keep thinking the next call is going to be the one.” Chimney looked down at the phone. “And then it’s just another person telling me why it isn’t.”

No one had an answer for that. Ethan thought about Harry asking how long a funeral could be put off. Chris in Texas trying to answer May with honesty instead of comfort. Athena waiting for people who kept saying protocol as if protocol had ever loved anyone back. Bobby’s office upstairs, open and empty, with a sticky note still expecting Monday. Chimney had hit another wall. Not the last one, probably. Maybe not even the hardest one. But it was enough to make the whole station feel the impact.

Karen stepped forward and handed the copied notebook page back to him. “Then we know what the next call is.”

Chimney looked at her.

“End of day,” she said. “You call again then. Not every twenty minutes before then. Not because you don’t care. Because this wall has a clock on it, and throwing yourself at it early will not move it faster.”

Hen looked at her wife with open admiration. “That was extremely hot.” Karen did not look away from Chimney. “Thank you.” Chimney’s mouth twitched despite himself. It was faint and brief, but real.

“End of day,” Buck said, as if repeating it made it less slippery.

Chimney looked at him. Then at Eddie. Then at Hen and Karen and Ethan and Ravi, all of them standing around the bay as if they could physically keep him from breaking apart by forming a loose semicircle around him.

Finally, Chimney nodded.

“End of day,” he said.

He closed the notebook.

This time, all the way. The station did not relax. Not really. Bobby was still not home. The review had not happened. The funeral still had no date. Nothing had been solved except the shape of the next wait. But for the first time that afternoon, Chimney set the notebook on the bench and took both hands off it.

Ethan looked down at the inventory list in his own hand. Seventeen trauma dressings. Twelve triangular bandages. Eight adult non-rebreathers. Six pediatric masks. Two boxes of alcohol prep pads where there should have been three.

Small facts. Manageable facts.

He wrote the final number down and underlined it once. Across the bay, Chimney sat. Buck sat beside him. Eddie stayed standing at Buck’s shoulder. Hen let Karen guide her back to the bench, and Ravi quietly returned to the supply shelves without making a joke this time.

The wall remained.

But for now, no one was throwing themselves at it alone.

Maddie’s message had been short, because short was probably all she trusted herself to send while Chimney kept dodging the harder conversations at home.

Please make sure he eats something. And if he tries to call it a run, tell him I know the difference between exercise and avoidance.

Ethan had read it twice before showing Buck. Buck had gone still at the word avoidance, then passed the phone back without comment. No one had needed to ask who Maddie meant. Chimney had been moving like a man trying to stay ahead of his own thoughts all week, and apparently the running had only given him a wider circle to do it in. Buck lasted nine minutes after Maddie’s message before he found another thing to do.

Ethan knew because he had started watching the clock without meaning to. Not in a suspicious way, or at least not in a way he wanted anyone to notice. It was more that the station had become a place where everyone measured everyone else in small intervals. How long Chimney could leave the notebook closed. How long Hen could sit before trying to stand. How long Buck could remain still before usefulness dragged him back onto his feet. Nine minutes was better than Ethan expected.

Buck had sat beside Chimney on the bench near the ambulance, one knee bouncing while Chimney picked at the granola bar Karen had supplied under threat of Maddie. Eddie stood close enough to Buck’s shoulder that Buck only had to shift half an inch to touch him, though he did not seem to realize he kept doing exactly that. Hen and Karen had returned upstairs after Karen pointed out that the stairs were not a waiting room.

For a little while, the apparatus bay settled around them. Not comfortably. Comfortable was too much to ask. But the panic edge had dulled. Chimney ate three bites of the granola bar. Buck watched each bite with the intense focus of someone monitoring a patient, and Eddie watched Buck with the same expression turned sideways. Then the silence lasted too long.

Buck stood.

“Coffee,” he said.

No one had asked for coffee.

Chimney looked up. “What?”

“I’m making coffee.”

Eddie glanced toward the stairs. “There’s coffee.”

“There’s bad coffee.”

“There is always bad coffee.”

“Exactly,” Buck said, as if Eddie had proven his point instead of undermining it. “So I’m making better coffee.”

He was already moving before anyone could argue. Ethan looked at Chimney, then at Eddie. Chimney stared after Buck with the blank exhaustion of a man who did not have enough energy to stop someone else from coping badly. Eddie watched Buck climb the stairs with a softer, more complicated expression.

“Should we…” Ethan started.

“Give him a minute,” Eddie said.

That sounded reasonable. It also sounded like Eddie had decided to give Buck exactly one minute before following him.

Ethan lasted thirty seconds.

He told himself he was going upstairs because the inventory clipboard belonged in the loft. That was not true. The clipboard did not belong anywhere in particular, and Ethan had no reason to carry it like a hall pass except that holding something made his own movement feel less like hovering.

By the time he reached the kitchen, Buck had already emptied the coffee pot, rinsed it, and started opening cabinets with too much force. The movements were efficient in the way Buck’s movements usually were in emergencies, but there was no emergency here. Only grounds, filters, mugs, and a silence Buck seemed determined to outwork.

“Need help?” Ethan asked.

Buck did not look over. “Nope.” That meant yes or absolutely not, depending on the day. Ethan stayed near the counter. Buck found the filters, pulled out three when he needed one, stared at them for a second, then shoved two back into the box. He measured coffee with the kind of concentration that made the task look tactical. The first scoop missed the filter and scattered grounds across the counter.

“Damn it.”

“It’s coffee,” Ethan said carefully.

“I know it’s coffee.”

“Okay.”

Buck braced both hands on the counter. His shoulders rose and fell once. Then he reached for a towel and started wiping up the spilled grounds with short, aggressive movements. Ethan looked toward the stairs. Eddie had appeared at the top, unsurprisingly. He did not come all the way in at first. He leaned one shoulder against the wall near the kitchen entrance and watched, letting Buck feel the option of privacy without actually leaving him alone. Buck noticed after a few seconds. “I’m making coffee.”

“I can see that.”

“Don’t do the voice.”

“What voice?”

“The one where you sound reasonable on purpose.”

Eddie’s mouth twitched. “That’s just my voice.”

“It is not.”

“Okay.”

Buck pointed the towel at him. “That. That is the voice.” On another day, the exchange would have warmed the room. Today, it only brushed against warmth before sliding off the larger grief underneath. Buck turned back to the counter and finished cleaning with unnecessary precision.

Ethan watched him start the coffee maker. The machine gurgled to life, filling the kitchen with a familiar sound that should have belonged to any ordinary shift. It helped for about three seconds. Then Buck started pulling mugs from the cabinet.

Too many mugs.

“How many people are you caffeinating?” Eddie asked.

“Everyone.”

“Everyone already has coffee.”

“Cold coffee.”

“Buck.”

“What?” Buck set another mug down harder than necessary. “People need coffee.”

“Do they?”

“Yes.”

“Or do you need people to need coffee?”

The question landed with enough force that Ethan looked down at the clipboard in his hands.

Buck went still.

For a moment, the only sound was the coffee maker sputtering into the pot.

“That’s not fair,” Buck said.

Eddie did not move. “I know.” That seemed to make Buck angrier than if Eddie had argued.

“Then why say it?”

“Because it’s true.”

Buck laughed once, sharp and humorless. “Great. Very helpful. Thank you.” He grabbed the mugs and started arranging them in a line. One for Chimney. One for Hen. One for Karen. One for Eddie. One for Ethan. One for Ravi. Then another, though Ethan could not tell who it was for. Maybe Athena, though she was not there. Maybe Bobby, though Buck did not seem to notice his hand had reached for it until the mug was already on the counter.

Everyone saw it.

Buck saw them seeing it. The extra mug sat at the end of the line, blue ceramic, chipped near the handle. Ethan recognized it because Bobby had used it often enough that everyone recognized it, even if no one said so.

Buck stared at it.

Eddie’s expression changed, but he did not speak. Buck reached for the mug, stopped, then dropped his hand back to his side. “I didn’t—”

He stopped too.

There was no finishing that sentence in a way that helped. Ethan tightened his grip on the clipboard. The kitchen seemed too bright suddenly, every detail cruelly ordinary. Coffee maker dripping. Muffins drying on the plate. Mugs lined up with one too many spaces. The captain’s office visible beyond the edge of the loft, door still open. Buck turned away from the counter. “I need to check the laundry.” Eddie stepped into his path. Not blocking him aggressively. Just enough.

“Buck.”

“Move.”

“No.”

Buck’s eyes flashed. “Eddie.”

“Five minutes.”

“I don’t need five minutes.”

“You do.”

“You just got here.”

The words came out before Buck could catch them. Ethan saw the second Buck regretted them, saw Eddie absorb them without flinching even though they hit exactly where the day was already bruised.

Because Eddie had just gotten there. Because Christopher was in Texas. Because Buck knew it, and Eddie knew Buck knew it, and grief had a talent for turning true things into weapons before anyone could stop it. Buck’s face changed. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know,” Eddie said.

“No, I didn’t.”

“I know.”

Buck looked away, jaw tight. “I’m sorry.”

“I know that too.”

The repetition should have sounded dismissive. It did not. Eddie’s voice stayed steady, and somehow that made the apology less like something Buck had to earn and more like something Eddie had already accepted before Buck found the words.

For a second, Buck looked younger than he was. Not childlike. Just stripped down, all the movement and competence and frantic caretaking burned away until what remained was a man standing in a firehouse kitchen with Bobby’s mug on the counter and nowhere safe to put his hands.

“I keep doing that,” Buck said.

Eddie softened. “Doing what?”

“Reaching for things like he’s still here.” Buck’s voice cracked around the last word, and he cleared his throat too late to hide it. “Mug. Plate. Chair. I almost told Ravi to ask Bobby where the spare radio batteries were this morning.”

Ethan looked down.

He had almost done the same thing twice since arriving. Not with radio batteries. With decisions. Questions that should have had Bobby at the end of them because the station had trained everyone to expect him there. Eddie stepped closer. “That’s not you doing something wrong.”

“It feels wrong.”

“Yeah.”

Buck looked at him. “That’s it?”

“Sometimes things feel wrong because they are.” Eddie glanced toward Bobby’s mug, then back at Buck. “Doesn’t mean you made them wrong.”

Buck swallowed.

The coffee maker clicked off. The sound made all three of them look toward it, absurdly relieved to have something else in the room demand attention. Buck moved first, because of course he did. He grabbed the pot, started pouring, and nearly overfilled the first mug.

“Careful,” Ethan said.

“I know.”

He did not snap it this time. He sounded tired. Eddie reached past him and took the pot gently from his hand. Buck let him, which might have been the most alarming thing to happen all morning.

“Sit,” Eddie said.

“I’m not a dog.”

“Then consider this a suggestion.”

“Your suggestions sound bossy.”

“Only when people ignore the polite version.”

Buck stared at him for another moment, then sat at the kitchen table with a graceless drop that made the chair scrape against the floor. Eddie poured the rest of the coffee. Ethan watched, still holding the useless clipboard, and had the oddest sense of witnessing a handoff no one had formally agreed to. Buck had been trying to take care of the room. Eddie had stepped in and taken care of the coffee. It should not have mattered.

It did.

Hen and Karen came back into the kitchen before anyone called them, which meant they had either heard enough or developed the same grief-specific radar as everyone else. Hen’s gaze went first to Buck, then to Eddie pouring coffee, then to Bobby’s mug at the end of the line. Her expression softened and tightened all at once.

Karen saw it too. She did not say anything. She only moved to the counter and picked up two mugs, leaving Bobby’s where it was.

“Coffee delivery?” Karen asked.

Eddie handed her another mug. “Apparently.”

“Good. Chimney is about to pretend he doesn’t want any.”

“He wants coffee,” Buck said from the table.

Hen looked at him. “Does he?” Buck opened his mouth, then closed it.

“Or do you want him to want coffee?” Hen asked, gentler than Eddie had but no less direct.

Buck dropped his gaze to the table. “Maybe both.” Hen crossed to him slowly, careful with her side, and set one hand on the back of the chair across from him. “That’s allowed.”

Buck looked up.

“Wanting to help is allowed,” Hen said. “You just don’t get to turn everyone else into a checklist so you don’t have to stop moving.”

Buck’s mouth twisted. “Is everyone getting together to workshop that sentence?”

“No. You are simply very obvious.”

Karen lifted one of the mugs. “Painfully, sometimes.” Eddie leaned against the counter, watching Buck over the rim of his own coffee. “Lovably.” Buck gave him a look. “Don’t soften it.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You were.”

“A little,” Eddie admitted.

That pulled a sound from Buck that almost counted as a laugh. It faded quickly, but it made Hen’s shoulders drop a fraction. Ethan set the clipboard down because he had finally accepted that inventory was no longer fooling anyone. “Maddie said you sounded like you were holding yourself together with dental floss.”

Buck blinked at him.

“Ethan,” Eddie said, not quite a warning.

“What? She did.”

Buck stared for another second, then made a strangled sound. “Dental floss?”

“Her words.”

Hen nodded thoughtfully. “Accurate.”

“Not helpful,” Buck said.

“Accuracy often isn’t.”

Karen pointed toward the stairs with her mug. “I’m taking this to Chimney before he decides coffee violates the end-of-day agreement.” Hen followed her, but not before giving Buck one more look. “Eat something with that coffee.”

“I had a muffin.”

“Half a muffin.”

Buck looked offended. “How do you know?”

“Because the other half is still on the counter.”

Buck glanced over.

The betrayed half-muffin sat exactly where he had left it. Eddie picked it up and set it on a napkin in front of him. “There you go.”

“This feels targeted.”

“It is,” Ethan said.

Buck looked between them. “You two are enjoying this too much.” Eddie sat across from him. “No, we’re really not.” The honesty quieted the room again, but not harshly. Buck looked down at the muffin, then broke off a small piece and ate it. It was the tiniest possible concession. The kind Buck would probably pretend was meaningless if anyone called attention to it.

No one did.

Ethan looked toward Bobby’s mug. It still sat at the end of the counter, empty. Eddie had not poured coffee into it. No one had moved it either. The blue ceramic caught the gray light from the windows, chipped handle turned toward the room as if waiting for the hand that used to reach for it.

Buck followed Ethan’s gaze.

For a second, the room changed pressure again.

“I should put it away,” Buck said.

Eddie’s answer came quietly. “Do you want to?” Buck stared at the mug. “No.”

“Then don’t.”

“It’s weird leaving it there.”

“It’s weird that he’s not here to use it.”

Buck’s face crumpled for half a second before he forced it back into shape. Ethan looked away, not fast enough to miss it but fast enough to give him whatever privacy could exist at a kitchen table.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” Buck said.

“About the mug?” Eddie asked.

“About any of it.”

The words were not loud. They did not need to be. They moved through the kitchen and settled over every unfinished thing: the coffee, the muffin, the open office door, Chimney’s closed notebook downstairs, Hen’s careful breathing, Athena’s waiting, May and Harry’s questions, Christopher’s letter tucked in Eddie’s bag. Eddie leaned forward, forearms on the table. “You don’t have to know today.” Buck laughed without humor. “Everyone keeps saying that.”

“Maybe everyone’s right.”

“Annoying.”

“Often.”

Buck rubbed both hands over his face. “Bobby knew what to do.” Eddie did not answer immediately. Ethan felt the truth of that sentence sit in the room. Bobby knew what to do, or at least had made everyone believe he did until they could believe it too. He knew when to issue orders and when to make dinner. When to push and when to wait. When Buck needed a job and when the job was becoming a hiding place.

“Not always,” Eddie said finally.

Buck looked up, defensive on Bobby’s behalf before Eddie had even finished. Eddie held his gaze. “He didn’t always know. He just stayed steady while he figured it out.”

Buck’s expression shifted.

“That’s not the same thing,” Eddie said.

The distinction landed slowly. Ethan could almost see Buck turning it over. Bobby as steady, not omniscient. Bobby as someone who had chosen calm again and again, not someone who had been magically immune to uncertainty. It did not make the absence smaller, but it made the standard a little less impossible.

“I don’t feel steady,” Buck said.

“I know.”

“I feel like if I stop, I’m going to—” Buck cut himself off, jaw working.

Eddie’s voice stayed low. “Crash?”

Buck looked down.

That was answer enough.

Ethan thought about Maddie’s warning. He’s going to crash, and it’s going to be hard. At the time, it had sounded like something that would happen later, after the funeral maybe, after Bobby came home, after everyone else had been fed and held and checked on. But maybe this was how a crash started. Not with collapse. With coffee grounds on a counter, one mug too many, and the terrifying realization that usefulness could not bring Bobby back.

Eddie reached across the table, not all the way to Buck’s hand, but close enough that Buck could choose the rest. For a moment, Buck only stared at the space between them. Then he moved his hand.

The contact was small. Fingertips first, then Eddie’s hand closing around his. Buck looked at their hands like he had not meant to do it, but he did not pull away. Ethan found the clipboard fascinating again.

Downstairs, Chimney said something to Karen, and Karen answered firmly enough that the words did not carry but the tone did. Hen laughed, then immediately complained about laughing. Ravi dropped something in the supply closet and said, “I’m fine,” which made Hen call down, “Everyone stop using that word.” The station kept moving around the kitchen.

Buck sat still.

For almost a full minute, he sat still. Ethan did not check the clock this time.

“I hate this,” Buck said.

Eddie’s thumb moved once over the back of his hand. “Yeah.”

“I hate waiting.”

“I know.”

“I hate that Chim has to make those calls. I hate that Athena has to wait. I hate that Harry keeps having to ask. I hate that May is probably trying to be stronger than anyone should have to be. I hate that Chris wrote a letter because he can’t be here, and I hate that Bobby isn’t going to read it.”

Eddie’s grip tightened.

Buck swallowed hard. “I hate that I keep making coffee like that does anything.”

“It does something,” Ethan said quietly.

Buck looked at him.

Ethan almost retreated. Then he heard Maddie’s voice in his head. Seeing it matters.

“It doesn’t fix anything,” Ethan said. “But people take the coffee. Or the muffin. Or the water. And then they know you noticed them. That’s something.”

Buck’s eyes reddened. “It’s not enough.”

“No,” Ethan said. “It’s not.”

Eddie looked at him, and there was approval there, quiet but unmistakable. Not because Ethan had fixed it. Because he had not pretended coffee could do more than coffee could do. Buck nodded once, unevenly. “Okay.”

The word sounded like a person accepting a weight without agreeing that it was fair. For a while, they sat like that. Eddie holding Buck’s hand across the table. Ethan standing near the counter because leaving felt wrong and sitting felt too intimate. Bobby’s mug remained where it was, empty and unclaimed. Eventually, Buck looked toward it again.

“Maybe just for today,” he said.

Eddie followed his gaze. “The mug?”

“Leave it.”

“Okay.”

“Not forever.”

“Okay.”

“Just today.”

Eddie nodded. “Just today.”

Buck breathed out slowly, like the decision had cost more than it should have. Maybe it had. Maybe grief was made of decisions that looked small from the outside and impossible from within.

The station tones did not drop. No phone buzzed with news. No one came upstairs to announce that the hold had cleared or the wall had moved. Nothing changed in any official way.

But Buck stayed seated.

He finished the half-muffin. He drank half a cup of coffee while it was still warm. When Chimney eventually appeared at the top of the stairs with Karen behind him and Hen threatening from below that he had better not be coming up there to restart the coffee argument, Buck looked up and asked, “You want some?”

Chimney glanced at the mugs, then at Bobby’s blue one sitting empty at the end of the counter. For one dangerous second, his face went still. Then he looked at Buck. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I’ll take some.”

Buck started to stand.

Eddie’s hand tightened around his. Buck stopped, looked at him, and then looked at Ethan. Ethan set down the clipboard. “I’ve got it.” He poured Chimney’s coffee into a different mug. Not Bobby’s. Not today. He left the blue mug where it was and carried the coffee to Chimney, who accepted it with both hands and a tired nod.

“Thanks,” Chimney said.

“It’s hot,” Ethan warned.

“I understand coffee in theory.”

“Theory’s had a rough day.”

Chimney looked at him, then huffed the smallest laugh into the rim of the mug. Buck heard it from the table and looked down, something like relief moving through his face. Ethan returned to the counter. Bobby’s mug still waited at the end of the line, empty and impossible and, for today, allowed to remain. Buck did not try to move it again.

That was not healing.

It was not acceptance.

It was not enough.

But it was one less task Buck had turned into a hiding place. One small place where the grief could sit openly on the counter, uncleaned and unresolved, without anyone rushing to put it away. For today, that had to count.

The crew came back on shift at seven the next morning. Ethan was there at six-forty, because Buck had asked him to bring the finished inventory sheets and because May had asked him, separately and much more carefully, to tell her how everyone looked. He did not have a good answer ready for either request.

The bay filled the way it always did before a shift change. Boots. Locker doors. Someone’s radio squawking through a check. B-shift trading small complaints with A-shift about the state of the coffee, the state of the glove boxes, the state of the world. From the sidewalk it would have sounded exactly like a firehouse waking up. From inside, Ethan could hear all the places the sound did not reach.

Hen arrived in uniform.

That was the first thing that landed wrong. For a week she had been in the loft in soft clothes with Karen hovering three feet behind her, and now she came through the door in navy with her name stitched over the pocket and her jaw set against anyone who might have an opinion about it. Karen came in behind her carrying a bag Hen had clearly not been permitted to carry.

“Light duty,” Hen said, to no one, before anyone asked.

“A week early,” Karen said, to everyone.

“My doctor is very conservative.”

“Your doctor is very correct.”

Hen kissed her, quickly, and went to find her locker. Karen stood in the middle of the apparatus bay for a moment with the bag still in her hand, wearing the expression of someone who had lost an argument she fully intended to keep having.

Ethan understood the shape of it. Hen was not back because she was ready. She was back because the rest of them were coming back today, and Hen Wilson was not going to let the 118 walk into its first shift without Bobby while she sat at home being sensible about it. Buck arrived next, far too early, which probably meant he had never entirely gone home.

Eddie came in ten minutes after him, not on the roster and not pretending to be, carrying three coffees he handed off to people who had not asked for them. Ravi came in with his gear bag over one shoulder and a haircut nobody commented on. Chimney came in at seven-nineteen.

Ethan noticed because Hen noticed, and Hen noticed because she had been watching the side door since seven-oh-five without appearing to watch anything at all. He came in through the side entrance rather than the bay. His hair was damp. There was a dark line of sweat down the front of his shirt, a duffel in one hand, his uniform folded over his arm, and he moved through the station like a man hoping to arrive without having arrived.

“You ran here,” Hen said.

“I ran somewhere.”

“From where?”

Chimney kept walking. “It’s a big city, Hen.”

“Buck went by your place to pick you up.”

That stopped him. Barely. Half a step. “He did?”

“Maddie answered the door.”

Something moved across Chimney’s face and was gone before Ethan could name it. Not guilt, exactly. Closer to the look of a man checking whether a lie was still standing where he had left it.

“I told her I had something to do before work,” he said.

“You did have something to do before work.” Hen let that sit for exactly as long as it needed to. “You made four phone calls in a parking lot and then ran six miles so you wouldn’t have to say that sentence out loud to Maddie.”

Chimney went into the locker room.

Hen let him.

At seven-thirty, Gerrard came out from the temporary desk with a folded piece of paper he never once looked at, and the whole bay understood what was about to happen before he opened his mouth.

“A-shift. Front of the engine. Two minutes.”

They lined up. Not formally. Not the way they would on Tuesday. But they lined up, and Ethan moved back against the supply shelves and made himself small, because he was not crew and this did not belong to him. Gerrard stood where Bobby used to stand.

Ethan doubted he knew it. It was not a spot marked on the floor. It was only the place a captain ended up if he wanted the whole crew in front of him and the open bay doors at his back, and Bobby had ended up there a thousand times, and now somebody else was standing in it holding a piece of paper.

“I know what you all think of me,” Gerrard said.

Nobody helped him.

“Good. Then we can skip that part.” He turned the paper over once, without reading it. “Captain Nash was a better firefighter than I am. He was a better captain than I am. I’m not here to take his place. I’m here to keep this house running until Chief Simpson can appoint a candidate more worthy.”

It was, Ethan thought, almost decent.

Almost.

“Until then you answer the bell, you follow my orders, and you keep your grief off the fireground.” Gerrard’s eyes moved down the line. “That’s not cruelty. That’s the job. Nash would have told you the same thing.”

That was the part that went wrong. Because he was right, and because he had no right to be the one saying it, and because using Bobby to enforce a rule was the one thing Bobby himself would never have done. Ethan felt the line stiffen. Buck’s shoulders came up. Hen’s chin lifted a fraction. Ravi looked at the floor.

Chimney laughed.

It was short and ugly and it landed in the middle of the bay like a dropped tool. Gerrard turned toward him. “Something funny, Han?”

“No, sir.”

“Then keep it to yourself.”

“It’s just that you’re standing there,” Chimney said, “telling us what Bobby would have said.”

“Han.”

“And you only get to stand there at all because I killed our last one.”

The bay stopped.

Ethan had heard silence in that building before. In Bobby’s office. At the top of the stairs. Around a plate of muffins nobody was hungry enough to finish. This was different. This was the silence of nine people simultaneously deciding not to look at one another.

“Chim,” Hen said.

“So I’d be very careful, if I was you,” Chimney finished, pleasantly.

Gerrard looked at him for a long moment. Whatever he found there, it was not something he wanted to argue with in front of the crew.

“Dismissed,” he said.

Then, already turning away: “Han rides the desk. Occupational health hasn’t cleared him for response. Wilson, light duty, and if I catch you on a hydrant I’ll drive you home myself.”

“Noted,” Hen said.

“And see the department counselor, Han. That is not a suggestion.”

“Already going,” Chimney said. “Twice a week. I sit in a chair for fifty minutes and describe the weather.”

He walked off before anyone could respond to that, which Ethan suspected was the entire point of saying it. At nine-twelve, Chimney’s phone rang. He took it near the supply shelves with his back to the bay. It lasted under a minute. Ethan did not catch a word of it, and afterward Chimney did not write anything down, which was the first time in nine days that had happened.

He put the phone in his pocket. He looked at the open bay doors for a while. He did not tell anyone.

Athena arrived at nine-forty.

Ethan was on the mezzanine with the clipboard when a car came across the apron instead of into a space, which was the first sign, because Athena Grant did not park badly. She came in still wearing her sunglasses. That was the second sign.

“Where is he?”

Buck came off the bench fast. “Athena—”

“Buck. I love you. Where is he?”

Ravi pointed toward the ambulance without appearing to decide to. Chimney was already coming around the front of it, and Ethan watched him understand what was happening in stages. Her car. Her face. The phone still in her hand. Ethan watched the color go out of him. He also watched him not run.

“Athena.”

“I got a call from downtown this morning,” she said. “Was it you?”

Hen appeared at Ethan’s elbow on the mezzanine and said, without any particular urgency, “Upstairs.”

“I—”

“Ethan. Upstairs.”

He went upstairs.

So did Karen. So did Ravi, eventually, and a probationary firefighter from B-shift who had no idea what she had walked into. They stood in the loft in the specific posture of people trying very hard to be somewhere else, and Ethan looked at the inventory clipboard with tremendous focus, and it did not work even slightly. He could not hear the words.

He could hear the shape of them. Athena’s voice, low and level, the way voices got once they had gone past shouting into something more expensive. Chimney’s, shorter. Two syllables. Four. Then nothing for a while. Then one sentence, pitched to carry, because she wanted it to.

“It was not your place.”

Ethan closed his eyes.

He understood, standing up there with a clipboard he was not reading, that he was hearing two true things collide. Chimney had spent nine days on the phone because he could not sit inside his own survival for one more hour. Athena had spent two weeks with the waiting as the only piece of her husband’s death she still had any authority over. Somebody had taken that from her by helping.

Both true.

Ethan was getting very tired of both being true. Whatever came after that did not reach the loft. The next thing that did was the sound of Athena crossing the concrete toward the doors, and then Athena stopping, and then Athena turning around.

“Congratulations,” she said. “It worked.”

A pause with an entire marriage inside it.

“Funeral’s next Tuesday.”

She left.

Outside, the marine layer had burned off and the morning had turned bright and ordinary. Somewhere down the block, a leaf blower started up. Nobody moved for a while.

Tuesday.

Ethan turned the word over and could not make it into anything except a day of the week. That was what he remembered afterward. Not grief. Grief came later, in pieces, over a mug and a list and a phone call to Texas. What arrived first was the flat administrative fact of it. Tuesday. Six days. A date that could be written on a calendar, told to a grandmother, typed into a message to a boy in El Paso.

Bobby was coming home. Somebody had finally signed something. And Athena had walked out of the building furious. Downstairs, Chimney had not moved from beside the ambulance. Buck reached him first, and Ethan expected him to say something, and he didn’t. He only stood next to him with his hands at his sides. Eddie came down and stood on the other side. Hen made it as far as the bottom step and stopped there, one hand on the rail, breathing carefully.

“She’s right,” Chimney said eventually.

“Chim.”

“She is. It wasn’t mine to push.” He was still looking at the ambulance rather than at any of them. “I just couldn’t sit in it anymore.”

“You got him out,” Buck said.

“I got a date on a calendar.”

“That’s the same thing.”

“It really isn’t.” Chimney’s jaw worked once. Then, so quietly that Ethan only caught it because the bay had gone so still: “He didn’t ask anybody either.”

Buck turned his head. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Chim—”

“Nothing.” Chimney put the notebook into Buck’s hands, the way a man hands over something he has carried past the point of usefulness, and walked toward the doors. “I need air.”

Ravi went with him. Nobody sent him. He set down the box he was holding and went, and Ethan thought that might have been the smartest thing anyone did all morning. Buck stood in the middle of the apparatus bay holding a notebook full of other people’s phone numbers.

Then he sat down on the concrete with his back against the ambulance tire, which was not a thing firefighters did in the middle of a shift, and Eddie sat down beside him without a word, and neither of them got up for a long time. Ethan came halfway down the stairs and stopped, because Hen shook her head at him, and because she was right. His phone buzzed in his pocket.

May: did she go there

Ethan looked at it for a second before answering, and understood that May had known before any of them. She had been standing next to her mother when the call came in. Whatever Athena had decided on the drive over, May had been the one who watched her decide it.

Ethan: Yeah. She just left.

Ethan: Is it real? Tuesday?

The reply took long enough that he watched three dots appear and disappear twice.

May: it’s real. tuesday.

May: we were standing in a mausoleum when they called. north remembrance hall. there was a man showing us drawer heights.

May: my mom said no. she said dad wouldn’t want to be inside.

Ethan: So where?

May: she doesn’t know yet.

May: six days and she doesn’t know yet and i can’t ask her again.

Ethan sat down on the stairs.

Ethan: Do you want me to tell Jacob? He’ll tell Chris.

May: yes. i can’t do it twice.

May: and harry doesn’t know yet so don’t put it anywhere he’ll see it

Ethan typed okay, deleted it, and typed I’ve got it instead, because okay had stopped meaning anything inside this building. Below him, the notebook sat closed on the bumper of the ambulance. Buck and Eddie sat on the floor beside the tire. Karen had finally gotten Hen into a chair. Gerrard was at the temporary desk with his back to all of it, doing paperwork loudly enough to establish that he was not listening.

Six days until Tuesday.

Bobby was coming home, and nobody in the building could work out how to be glad about it.

Jacob knew Eddie’s call was going to hurt before the phone rang. That was the problem with waiting once the waiting had a shape. Before, the house had been suspended in a fog of maybe-later and not-yet, everyone moving around the same unanswered question without saying it too loudly. Now, after May’s text and Ethan’s careful confirmation, the question had sharpened into a date.

Next Tuesday.

It sat in Eddie’s kitchen like another person at the table. Chris had not said much since the update came through. He had read May’s first message twice, then Jacob’s explanation, then Eddie’s short text that said he was going to call as soon as he could. After that, Chris had set his phone facedown on the table and stared at it like it might start ringing through force of attention alone. Helena had tried food first.

Of course she had.

There were leftovers from earlier stacked on the counter in containers labeled with masking tape and a Sharpie because apparently grief did not excuse poor kitchen organization. Tamales, rice, beans, enchiladas, roasted vegetables, flan, and something in a foil-covered pan Jacob had been afraid to ask about because Helena looked like she might answer by making him take some home. Chris had eaten three bites of rice and half a tortilla.

Helena had looked personally wounded. Ramon, mercifully, had intervened before she could turn concern into another serving spoon. He had guided her back toward the kitchen under the excuse of checking whether the flan had set properly, leaving Jacob with Chris at the table and a silence neither of them wanted to disturb too quickly.

Now the house was quiet in layers. Ramon and Helena murmuring in the kitchen. The refrigerator humming. The faint rush of air from the vents. Outside, Texas evening pressed warm against the windows, all gold light and long shadows, absurdly beautiful for a day that had no right looking that way.

Chris’s phone rang.

He went still.

Jacob did not move either. Not toward him. Not away. He only sat at the opposite side of the table with his hands wrapped around a glass of water he had not drunk from in ten minutes, giving Chris the chance to decide whether he wanted an audience before the screen forced one on him. Chris looked at the caller ID.

Dad.

The word lit the room more than the screen did. For a second, Chris’s face did something young and scared and painfully familiar. Then he answered, thumb fumbling once before the call connected. Eddie’s face appeared on the screen.

He was outside. Jacob could tell from the gray California light behind him, the edge of the station visible over one shoulder, the traffic noise thin in the background. He looked tired in a way that made Jacob’s chest tighten. Not just travel tired. Not even grief tired. Eddie looked like someone who had spent the day being pulled in half and was still trying to make both halves stand upright.

“Hey, mijo,” Eddie said.

Chris swallowed. “Hey.”

For a moment, neither of them said anything else. Jacob looked down at his glass. He had learned a lot about staying close without inserting himself, but FaceTime made the geometry awkward. If he left, Chris might feel abandoned. If he stayed too visibly, Chris might feel watched. So Jacob remained at the table and made himself boring, eyes on the water, body angled away enough to give privacy without pretending he was not there.

“You at Abuela’s?” Eddie asked.

Chris nodded. “Yeah.”

“Did you eat?”

Chris’s eyes flicked toward Jacob.

Jacob lifted his eyebrows.

“Some,” Chris said.

Eddie’s mouth twitched faintly. “That means no.”

“It means some.”

“Christopher.”

“Dad.”

The exchange was small, automatic, and it almost made the room feel normal. Almost. Then Eddie’s face shifted, and the normal vanished with the reason he had called.

“I talked to May,” Eddie said.

Chris’s hand tightened around the phone. “She told me something changed.”

“Yeah.” Eddie looked down for a second, then back at the screen. “Bobby’s body was released today.”

Chris nodded once.

Too fast.

Like he had already known the words and still needed his father to say them before they became real.

“Okay,” Chris said.

Eddie’s face softened. “It doesn’t feel okay.” Chris’s mouth pressed into a line. “I know.”

“The funeral is next Tuesday.”

There it was.

Jacob watched Chris absorb the date. Not dramatically. Chris did not flinch or cry or drop the phone. He only went very still, the way he did when a feeling got too large and he needed to make his body smaller around it.

“Tuesday,” he repeated.

“Yeah.”

“That’s soon.”

“I know.”

“But it was taking too long.”

Eddie’s eyes closed for half a second. “I know that too.” Chris looked down at the table, phone angled slightly toward the ceiling now. Jacob could see only part of Eddie’s face on the screen, but he heard the way Eddie waited. Not rushing. Not filling the silence. Giving Chris room to make the contradictions fit badly if that was the only way they could fit.

“I hate that,” Chris said finally.

“Yeah.”

“I hate that both things are true.”

“Me too.”

Jacob looked toward the kitchen. Helena had stopped moving. Ramon’s low voice murmured something, and after a second the quiet clink of dishes resumed. They were listening without listening, the whole house tuned toward the dining room because love made eavesdroppers out of everyone eventually. Chris lifted the phone again. “Are you okay?” Eddie huffed a small, broken breath that might have become a laugh on another day. “No.”

Chris’s eyes filled immediately.

Eddie saw it. His own face tightened. “But I’m with Buck. And Ethan’s here. Hen and Karen are here. Chimney…”

He stopped.

Chris wiped at one eye with the heel of his hand. “May said Athena was mad at him.”

“She was.”

“Because he got Bobby released?”

Eddie took a breath. “Because he pushed without asking her. Because she wasn’t ready. Because none of us are ready and the system made her wait until waiting started feeling like the only thing she still had control over.”

Chris stared at him.

Jacob did too, though he tried not to make it obvious. Eddie looked tired enough that the honesty seemed to have slipped out before he could soften it. Then he grimaced slightly. “Sorry. That was a lot.” Chris shook his head. “No. I get it.”

And he probably did. Maybe not all of it. Maybe not the particular shape of Athena’s anger or Chimney’s guilt. But Chris understood being too far away from a choice that changed everything. He understood adults making decisions around grief and then realizing the grief had its own opinion.

“Is Uncle Chimney okay?” Chris asked.

Eddie’s answer took a moment. “Ravi took him for a walk.”

Chris blinked. “Ravi?”

“Yeah.”

“Does Ravi know that?”

A real smile almost appeared on Eddie’s face. “He figured it out.” Chris breathed out something close to a laugh. It was small and wet and gone quickly, but it changed the room. Jacob looked down into his glass and let himself smile where Chris would not have to see it. Then Chris asked, “What about Buck?”

Eddie looked away from the screen, probably toward the station. When he looked back, his face was softer and more guarded at the same time. “Buck’s… Buck.” Chris made a face. “That’s what everyone keeps saying.”

“It keeps being accurate.”

“Is he worse?”

“He’s having a hard day.”

Chris frowned. “That’s not an answer either.”

“No,” Eddie admitted. “It’s not.”

The honesty settled between them. Chris looked like he wanted to push harder, but also like he understood Eddie was rationing what he could say from the middle of the station’s grief.

“Tell him I’m sorry I’m not there,” Chris said.

Eddie’s face changed sharply. “Hey. No.”

“Dad—”

“No.” Eddie’s voice stayed gentle, but there was steel under it. “You do not have to apologize for that.”

Chris looked down.

“You wrote the letter,” Eddie said. “You called. You’re texting May and Harry. You’re doing what you can from where you are.”

“It doesn’t feel like enough.”

“I know.”

“Then why does everyone keep saying it is?”

That one hit. Jacob saw it in Eddie’s face. The question was not really about the letter. It was about every adult who had told Chris he was doing enough because they needed him to believe distance did not diminish love. It was about Chris knowing better and still wanting someone to make it true. Eddie took another breath. “Because enough doesn’t mean it stops hurting.”

Chris went still.

“It means the hurt doesn’t get to decide that what you can give doesn’t matter,” Eddie said.

Jacob looked away.

That was an Eddie sentence. Not polished. Not easy. The kind that came from someone trying to build a bridge while standing on it. Chris’s mouth trembled once. “I want to be there.”

“I know.”

“But I don’t.”

“I know that too.”

“That sounds messed up.”

“It is.”

Chris gave a small, miserable laugh. “You’re not supposed to agree.”

“I’m not going to lie to you.”

“You could soften it.”

“I am softening it.”

That got another almost-laugh out of Chris, which seemed to cost him less than the first one. Eddie saw it and let his own expression ease, but only a little.

“I have the letter,” Eddie said. “It’s safe.”

Chris nodded.

“May said they might not read it right away.”

“That’s okay.”

“I told her it wasn’t homework.”

Eddie’s face warmed for one second, grief and pride layered together. “Good.” Chris looked at the table. “Do you think Bobby would’ve liked it?” Eddie did not answer fast. Jacob appreciated that. Fast answers had their place, but not here. Not with Bobby’s name on one end and Chris’s letter on the other.

“Yeah,” Eddie said finally. “I do.”

Chris swallowed. “Even if it’s not… good?”

“Chris.” Eddie’s voice went soft in a way that made Jacob’s throat tighten. “It’s from you. That’s what makes it good.”

Chris blinked hard.

“And Bobby knew you loved him,” Eddie said.

The words landed differently.

Chris turned his face away from the screen. Jacob looked toward the kitchen again, giving him whatever privacy could exist at a dining table during a FaceTime call. Ramon stood in the doorway now, one hand resting on the frame. He did not move forward. Helena stood behind him, dish towel held tightly between both hands, eyes bright.

Eddie waited.

When Chris looked back, his face was wet but composed in the stubborn way Diaz men seemed to learn too early. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Eddie echoed.

Neither of them ended the call. For a while, they talked around the grief instead of through it. Eddie asked what Helena had made. Chris described the food with enough exaggeration that Helena called from the kitchen, “I heard that,” which made Eddie smile for real and made Chris roll his eyes without much heat. Ramon came into frame long enough to tell Eddie he looked tired, which was apparently a Diaz family love language, and Eddie responded by saying everyone kept mentioning that.

“Because you look tired,” Ramon said.

“Helpful, Dad.”

“I try.”

Helena pushed past him just enough to see the screen. “Have you eaten?” Eddie closed his eyes. “Not this again.”

“Eddie.”

“I had coffee.”

Every person in the Texas kitchen reacted badly. Chris looked offended. “That’s not food.” Jacob pointed at him. “You ate half a tortilla.”

“This isn’t about me.”

“Convenient.”

Eddie watched them, and for one second Jacob saw the cost of the screen. Eddie wanted to be there. Not instead of LA, maybe, but also. He wanted to be in this kitchen with Chris and his parents and too much food. He wanted to be at the station with Buck. He wanted Bobby alive. He wanted a world that had stopped offering impossible choices. Instead, he smiled because Chris was looking at him.

“I’ll eat,” Eddie said.

“When?” Helena asked.

“Soon.”

“That is not a time.”

Jacob looked at Chris. “Runs in the family.”

Chris’s mouth twitched.

On the screen, Eddie glanced over his shoulder. The movement was subtle, but Jacob saw the station pull him back. Someone had said something behind him. Maybe Buck. Maybe Ethan. Maybe no one, just the weight of where he was.

Chris saw it too.

“You have to go,” he said.

Eddie looked back quickly. “I can stay on.”

“Dad.”

There was so much in the single word that the room went quiet again. Chris held the phone with both hands. “Go be with Buck.” Eddie’s expression broke open for a second before he could stop it. Not all the way. Enough.

“You sure?”

“No,” Chris said honestly. “But go anyway.”

Jacob looked down at the table. Eddie nodded slowly. “I’ll call you tonight.”

“You better.”

“I will.”

“And eat something.”

“Yes, sir.”

Chris almost smiled. “Love you.” Eddie’s voice softened. “Love you too, mijo.”

The call ended.

Chris kept holding the phone for a few seconds after the screen went dark.

No one moved.

Then Helena made a small sound and started toward him. Ramon caught her gently by the wrist. She looked at him, ready to protest. He shook his head once. Jacob saw the moment she understood. Chris did not need another immediate hug. Not yet. He needed the room not to collapse onto him all at once. So Helena stopped, though it clearly cost her. Jacob waited another beat. Then he said, “Your dad is going to get bullied into eating by at least four people.”

Chris huffed a laugh that sounded dangerously close to tears. “Good.”

“Buck might forget to eat while making Eddie eat, but Ethan will probably notice.”

“Ethan notices everything.”

“It’s unsettling.”

Chris nodded solemnly. “Very.”

The joke held for about two seconds before his face crumpled. Jacob was moving before he thought about it, but he stopped himself halfway around the table. Close, not crowding. The rule still mattered, even when every instinct wanted to ignore it. Chris looked up at him with wet eyes and a furious expression, like crying had personally betrayed him.

“Can you just…” Chris started, then stopped.

Jacob softened. “Yeah.”

He did not ask what. He only sat in the chair beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched. After a second, Chris leaned into him. Not much at first. Then more. Helena turned away toward the kitchen, wiping at her face with the dish towel. Ramon put one hand on her shoulder and stayed there.

Chris cried quietly.

Jacob let him.

There were no good words for it. Not for Bobby being dead, or Tuesday being real, or Chris being in Texas because going to the funeral would be too much and not going felt terrible in a different direction. There were only the inadequate physical facts of staying: a shoulder, a chair, a warm kitchen, the murmur of grandparents trying not to overwhelm him with love. After a while, Chris wiped his face with both hands and sat up. “I’m okay.” Jacob gave him a look. Chris sighed. “I know. Bad word.”

“Catastrophic, apparently.”

That got a watery laugh. Helena used the opening immediately. “You should eat something.”

Chris groaned. “Abuela.”

“What?”

“I just cried.”

“Then you need food.”

“That’s not how that works.”

Ramon sat across from him. “In this house, it is.” Chris looked at Jacob for help. Jacob lifted both hands. “I’m not fighting them. I’m emotionally attached to survival.”

“Coward.”

“Alive coward.”

The room breathed again.

Not easily. Not normally. But enough. Helena warmed a plate with the kind of care usually reserved for sacred objects. Chris complained about the portion size and then ate more than he had all day, probably because crying had made arguing too much work. Jacob accepted a plate too because Helena looked at him once and he valued his life. During the meal, Chris’s phone buzzed again. He glanced at it, then turned the screen toward Jacob.

May: stress grilled cheese. less impressive than abuela.

There was a picture attached. Three grilled cheese sandwiches on a plate, one visibly burned at the edge. Chris stared at it for a second, then smiled.

“May made food,” he said.

Helena leaned over. “That is very burned.”

“She said less impressive than you.”

“Obviously.”

Chris typed back, thumbs moving faster now.

Chris: probably safer than abuela. she’s escalating to dessert.

Helena looked offended. “Safer?”

“It’s a compliment.”

“It is not.”

Jacob took a bite of rice to avoid being involved. May’s reply came a minute later.

May: tell her I respect the empire.

Chris showed Helena.

Helena considered this, then nodded once. “Better.” The exchange was ridiculous. Tiny. Not important in any official way. It did not change Tuesday. It did not bring Bobby back or make the letter easier or reduce the distance between Texas and Los Angeles. But Chris kept eating while he texted.

Jacob noticed.

So did Ramon.

So did Helena, though she wisely said nothing for once. After dinner, Jacob stepped onto the porch to give Chris a few minutes with his grandparents. The evening air had cooled slightly, though the heat still lingered in the porch boards and the dry soil beyond the yard. He leaned against the railing and checked his phone.

Ethan had texted.

Ethan: He okay?

Jacob looked back through the window. Chris sat at the table with Ramon and Helena, shoulders still heavy but no longer folded inward. His phone rested beside his plate. He was listening to Helena explain something with both hands, probably dessert logistics, while Ramon pretended not to be amused.

Jacob typed:

Jacob: No. But he ate.

Then, after a second:

Jacob: He cried. That probably helped more.

Ethan replied:

Ethan: Buck ate too. Similar miracle category.

Jacob smiled faintly.

Jacob: grief catering: successful enough

Ethan: Barely still counts.

Jacob looked out across the yard, phone warm in his hand. Barely still counts. Maybe that was the best summary of the day anyone was going to get. Chris eating half a plate. May making burned grilled cheese. Chimney walking instead of running. Buck sitting still long enough to call Maddie. Eddie making one impossible phone call and then turning back toward another family that needed him.

Barely still counted because barely was what they had. The front door opened behind him. Chris stepped out with a small container of flan in one hand and two forks in the other.

“Abuela says dessert is mandatory.”

Jacob looked at the container. “For both of us?”

“She said sharing builds character.”

“That does not sound like her.”

“She said it in Spanish, so maybe I translated loosely.”

Jacob accepted one of the forks. “Sounds suspicious.” Chris leaned against the railing beside him, close enough that their elbows almost touched. For a while, they ate the flan straight from the container and watched the evening settle over the property.

“Tuesday,” Chris said eventually.

Jacob swallowed. “Yeah.”

“I don’t think I’m ready.”

“I don’t think anyone is.”

Chris looked at him. “That’s supposed to help?”

“No. It’s just true.”

Chris considered that, then nodded once. “Okay.” They stood there in the Texas quiet, sharing dessert neither of them had wanted and both of them kept eating anyway. Somewhere far away, Eddie was at the 118 with Buck. May and Harry were in a kitchen with burned grilled cheese. Chimney was walking a block with Ravi. Athena was angry and grieving and probably already being pulled toward another problem because Bobby had left pieces of himself everywhere.

And Chris was here.

Not abandoned. Not useless. Not less part of the goodbye because distance had made his grief travel by phone and letter and text.

Here.

Jacob nudged his elbow gently against Chris’s. “Your letter matters.” Chris looked down at the flan. “You don’t know that.”

“I do.”

“How?”

Jacob thought about the question. Then he answered honestly.

“Because everyone keeps trying to send love somewhere it can still reach. Food. Coffee. phone calls. Bad grilled cheese. Walks around the block. Your letter is part of that.”

Chris was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “That was annoyingly good.” Jacob smiled. “I have my moments.”

“Don’t get used to it.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

The corner of Chris’s mouth lifted.

It was not much.

But barely still counted.

The tones dropped at 5:17. Ethan knew because everyone in the apparatus bay had been watching time in one form or another since Athena left. Not openly. Not with clocks and countdowns and dramatic declarations. But the station had become a place full of people measuring the day by what happened after the funeral became real. How long Chimney stayed gone with Ravi. How long Buck sat on the floor beside Eddie. How long Hen allowed Karen to hover before pretending she was annoyed by it.

Then the station tones cut through all of it. The sound landed like a hand on the back of the neck. Sharp. Familiar. Impossible to ignore. The overhead speakers crackled, dispatch information spilling into the bay before Ethan had fully registered that the quiet was over.

Everyone reacted at once.

Not emotionally. Not thoughtfully. Physically.

Habit. Training. Muscle memory.

Buck was on his feet before the first address finished. Eddie rose with him, though he was not on shift, his body answering the sound before his brain caught the boundary. Hen straightened from the bench, one hand going automatically to her side before she stopped herself. Chimney had come back from his walk ten minutes earlier and now turned toward the rig with the same reflexive readiness as everyone else, even though he was supposed to be nowhere near an active response. For one strange second, the 118 looked almost normal.

Almost.

Then the absence opened in the middle of the movement. Bobby should have been there. Not as a thought. Not as a memorial. As a body in motion. A voice cutting through the alert with calm authority. A hand pointing, assigning, organizing. Bobby should have been stepping from the office or crossing the bay or calling orders before anyone needed to ask who was taking what position. Instead, Captain Gerrard’s voice came from near the engine.

“Buckley, Wilson, you’re with me.”

The name hit wrong.

Buckley.

Ethan saw Buck absorb it in the half-second before he moved. No visible flinch. Nothing anyone outside the room would notice. But Eddie noticed. Hen noticed. Chimney noticed. Ethan noticed because the entire day had trained him to read grief in the places people tried to hide it.

Gerrard stood with his turnout coat half-fastened, face set in the grim, uncomfortable focus of a man who knew perfectly well he was not the person anyone wanted giving orders. To his credit, he did not try to make the moment into a speech. He only repeated the dispatch details and pointed toward the engine.

“Two-vehicle collision. Possible entrapment. Let’s move.”

Buck moved.

Hen moved slower, but she moved.

“Hen,” Karen said.

“Light duty,” Hen answered, already reaching for her jacket.

“That is not a magic spell.”

Hen looked at her. “I know.” That was what made Karen stop arguing. Not because she was convinced. Because Hen knew, and the knowledge was sitting plainly on her face. She was not pretending her body had forgotten the lab. She was choosing to answer anyway because the tones had dropped and the station still had a job. Chimney took one step toward the ambulance.

Buck turned immediately. “No.”

Chimney stopped.

For a second, anger crossed his face. Not at Buck, exactly. At the word. At the boundary. At the fact that his body had survived but was not yet trusted with the work that had shaped most of his adult life.

“I wasn’t—”

“You were,” Hen said, not unkindly.

Chimney’s jaw tightened.

Gerrard looked between them. “Han, you’re not cleared.” Chimney’s eyes flashed. “I know that.”

“Then don’t make me say it twice.”

The bay went brittle.

Buck took half a step forward, but Eddie’s hand caught his wrist. Not hard. Enough. Gerrard seemed to realize he had stepped on the wrong nerve. His expression shifted, almost regretful, though he did not apologize. Maybe he did not know how. Maybe apology would have made it worse from him.

“We roll in thirty,” he said instead.

The practical command snapped everyone back into motion. Ethan stepped aside as the crew moved around him. Boots hit concrete. Gear shifted. Buck pulled on his coat with sharp, efficient movements, face sealed into the version of himself that belonged on calls. Hen checked her radio, shoulders controlled, breathing measured. Gerrard climbed into the captain’s seat. That was the part Ethan could not look away from.

The captain’s seat.

Someone else would sit there. Someone else would ride out in that position. Someone else would give the first orders on scene, even if only temporarily, even if no one pretended it meant replacing Bobby. The rig had no patience for grief. It needed a driver, a crew, a captain, a route.

Buck saw it too.

For one second, his gaze locked on the front passenger side of the engine. Then he climbed in behind it. Eddie stood beside Ethan near the edge of the bay, jaw tight, hands empty. Ethan wondered if being still was worse for him than moving. Eddie had spent enough of his life answering emergencies that watching others go without him probably felt like standing behind glass while a door closed. Chimney stood on Ethan’s other side. His phone was in his hand.

Not because he was making a call now. Because it had not left his hand for most of the day, as if he had forgotten how to be unarmed by information. His thumb rested near the dark screen, but he did not unlock it. The engine roared to life.

The ambulance followed.

For a moment, sound filled the whole bay. Diesel rumble. Radio chatter. The mechanical rise of the bay doors. The brief, bright burst of siren as the rigs pulled out into the street.

Then they were gone.

The silence that followed was not the same as before. It never was after a call-out. The station always sounded larger when the rigs left, hollowed by the absence of engines and people. Usually, that emptiness had a temporary quality. Everyone knew the crew would return. The station would refill. The hum would rebuild around boots, voices, equipment, complaints about paperwork, someone asking what was for dinner. Today, the emptiness had too many echoes. Chimney stared at the open bay doors. Eddie glanced at him. “You okay?”

Chimney let out a breath. “If I say yes, Hen will appear out of nowhere and hit me with a clipboard.”

“Probably.”

“Then no.”

Eddie nodded. “Honest answer.”

Chimney looked at him. “It feels like a terrible answer.”

“Still good.”

Ethan’s phone buzzed.

He checked it automatically, pulse kicking because that reflex was probably never going away. It was May.

May: tones?

She must have heard something over the phone from someone, or maybe news travelled through the younger group chat faster than dispatch. Ethan typed back.

Ethan: Call-out. Collision. Buck and Hen went. Chimney stayed.

Her reply came almost immediately.

May: good.

Then:

May: not good about the collision. good that he stayed.

Ethan almost smiled.

Ethan: understood.

Chimney looked over. “May?”

“Yeah.”

“Checking on me?”

“Checking on the general situation.”

“That means me.”

“A little.”

Chimney looked down at his phone, then put it in his pocket with visible effort. “Tell her I stayed.”

“I did.”

“Tell her I didn’t even make it weird.”

Eddie looked at him.

Chimney sighed. “Fine. Tell her I made it medium weird.”

Ethan sent exactly that.

May replied with a single thumbs-up.

He showed Chimney.

Chimney stared at the emoji like it had personally disappointed him. “Harsh.”

“Seems fair,” Eddie said.

For a second, the three of them stood in the aftermath of the call-out and almost resembled people having a normal conversation. Then the bay doors finished lowering, and the station quiet returned around them, reminding everyone that normal had only been passing through.

Karen came down the stairs with two mugs of tea, because apparently she had decided everyone left behind was now her jurisdiction. She handed one to Chimney and one to Eddie, then looked at Ethan.

“There’s another upstairs if you want it.”

“Thanks.”

“That means drink something, not admire the concept.”

Chimney lifted his mug slightly. “Careful. She means it.”

“I always mean it,” Karen said.

They moved upstairs because staying in the emptied bay felt too much like waiting at the mouth of something. Ethan followed last, glancing once more toward the closed doors before climbing the stairs. The loft looked wrong without Buck and Hen in it.

That was not new. The station always changed depending on who was out on a call. But today, every absence carried Bobby’s shape inside it. Buck’s half-finished coffee sat on the table. Hen’s water bottle remained near the chair Karen had bullied her into using. Bobby’s blue mug still sat empty on the counter because no one had moved it after Buck decided it could stay for today.

Ethan took the tea Karen had left for him and wrapped both hands around it. Eddie stood near the railing, looking down into the bay. Chimney sat at the table, not with the notebook, not with his phone, but with both hands around the mug Karen had given him. For once, he looked like he was trying to stay exactly where he had been placed.

“This is weird,” Chimney said.

Eddie looked over. “Being left behind?”

“Being the one who needs to be left behind.”

No one answered right away. Karen took the chair beside him. “You survived something your body is still recovering from.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

Chimney looked at the tea. “On paper.”

“Paper has been losing all week.”

That got the smallest smile from him. Ethan leaned against the counter, letting the warmth from the mug seep into his fingers. He thought about the call-out, about the way everyone had moved before thinking. He had admired that once in a simple way. Firefighters heard tones and responded. Emergency came, they went. Clean cause and effect.

Now he could see the layers under it. The bodies still healing. The grief still sitting in muscles. The empty captain’s seat. The people forced to stay behind because survival had consequences too. Emergency work did not pause grief. It only gave it something to do for a while. Downstairs, the station phone rang once. Everyone looked toward it. It stopped before anyone moved.

Chimney closed his eyes.

Eddie’s phone buzzed next. He checked it, and his expression shifted.

“Chris?” Ethan asked.

Eddie nodded. “He wants to know if Buck’s on the call.”

“Tell him yes,” Ethan said. “And Hen.”

Eddie typed, then paused. “He asked if Gerrard is riding captain.” Chimney grimaced. “Kid knows too much.”

“He grew up here,” Eddie said.

There was no arguing with that. Eddie sent the message and set his phone on the table faceup. He did not sit. He remained near the railing, one hand resting on the metal, eyes drifting repeatedly toward the bay doors as if he could track the rigs by force of will.

“You could go home,” Karen said gently.

Eddie looked at her.

“I’m not saying you should,” she added. “Only that you could.”

His gaze moved toward Bobby’s office. “Not yet.” Karen nodded, accepting the answer without argument.

They waited.

Waiting for calls to end had a different shape than waiting for body release or funeral dates, but it was still waiting. The station taught it to everyone eventually. You waited for rigs to come back. For radios to crackle. For phones to buzz. For someone to walk through the door dirty and tired and alive. Ethan understood suddenly why the empty captain’s seat hurt so much. Because Bobby had been one of the people who made waiting survivable.

He would have known what to do with the time. Not fix it. Not erase the fear. But fill the room with something steady enough to lean against. He would have made tea or coffee or dinner. He would have asked the right question, or given someone a task, or told Chimney to sit down with the kind of authority that made arguing feel like more trouble than obedience.

Without him, everyone was improvising steadiness from memory. The rigs returned fifty-two minutes later. Ethan heard them before he saw them, the familiar rumble echoing faintly through the street outside before the bay doors rose. Eddie straightened at the railing. Chimney stood halfway, caught himself, then stayed on his feet because apparently sitting through a return was a bridge too far. The engine backed in first.

For a few seconds, everything sounded normal again. Bay doors. Diesel. Boots on concrete. Radio chatter. Gerrard saying something clipped near the front of the rig. Hen’s voice answering, tired but steady. Buck stepping down from the engine with soot on one sleeve and his expression sealed into call-face.

Normal.

At least as normal as anything felt lately. Ethan followed Eddie and Chimney downstairs. Karen came too, though she moved toward Hen immediately, eyes scanning for any sign that light duty had become a lie in practice. Hen saw her and lifted one hand before Karen could speak. “I’m okay.” Karen stopped in front of her. Hen sighed. “I’m sore. Not popped-stitches sore. Just sore.”

“That is a more acceptable sentence.”

“Thank you for grading my self-report.”

“Someone has to.”

Hen smiled faintly, then pressed one hand to her side when the expression pulled into a tired breath. Ethan noticed. So did Karen. So did Hen, who looked annoyed at both of them for having eyes. Buck crossed toward Eddie without seeming to decide to. “Hey.” Eddie’s gaze moved over him quickly. “You okay?”

“Yeah.”

Eddie raised an eyebrow.

Buck exhaled. “Physically.”

“Better.”

“It was a collision. Nobody died.” Buck swallowed after saying it, like the phrase had stepped on something sharp. “Two transports, one refusal, one guy very committed to being wrong in public.”

Chimney’s mouth twitched. “Those are the worst kind.” Buck looked at him then, really looked. “You stayed.”

Chimney looked down. “Yeah.”

“Good.”

“May already gave me a thumbs-up. I don’t need your approval too.”

“You’re getting it anyway.”

Chimney rolled his eyes, but the motion had no heat. For a moment, with the rigs back and everyone standing in the bay, the station almost found its old rhythm. Hen complaining about Karen’s assessment. Buck hovering near Eddie. Chimney pretending not to appreciate being noticed for staying behind. Ravi appearing with a report that he had definitely not needed to carry personally. Gerrard issuing a few practical instructions and then retreating toward the office without trying to make anyone listen to another speech. Then Gerrard reached the stairs.

He paused at the bottom and looked up toward Bobby’s office.

The station noticed.

Of course it did.

Gerrard seemed to feel the attention and changed direction, heading instead toward the small desk near the bay. Temporary. Practical. Not Bobby’s office.

No one thanked him.

No one needed to.

Buck’s shoulders lowered by a fraction. Ethan looked around the bay and felt the strange ache of it. The station had answered a call. People had needed help, and the 118 had gone. The world had kept producing emergencies even while Bobby’s funeral date sat fresh in everyone’s chest. That felt cruel, but it also felt like the only thing that had ever been true. Emergencies did not end when the sirens stopped.

They did not end when patients left the scene. They did not end when the news moved on, or when a body was released, or when a funeral date appeared on a calendar. Sometimes the emergency kept going in the people who came home afterward.

Buck wiped soot from his sleeve and looked toward Bobby’s blue mug upstairs through the open line of sight to the loft. Chimney followed his gaze. Hen leaned carefully against the ambulance while Karen pretended not to support half her weight. Eddie stood between the people he loved and the office Bobby no longer occupied, looking like he could feel every direction pulling at once.

The station hum returned.

Damaged.

Changed.

Still there.

Ethan picked up the abandoned inventory clipboard from where he had left it on the supply shelf. The final line still needed checking off. Alcohol prep pads restocked. Three boxes delivered. One small fact in the middle of everything else.

He marked it complete.

It did not matter.

It mattered a little.

Across the bay, the crew began resetting the rigs for the next call. No Bobby giving orders. No steady voice from the captain’s office. No familiar presence making the work feel like part of something whole.

But the work continued.

So did the waiting.

Next Tuesday was coming.

Until then, the station still answered when the bell rang.

The list started because Buck asked for a photo. At least, that was how Ethan understood it later. In the moment, it did not feel like a beginning. It felt like another practical sentence dropped into a day already full of practical sentences that were not practical at all once anyone looked at them directly. Bobby’s body had been released. The funeral was next Tuesday. The station had answered a call. The rigs had come back. The world, apparently, expected them to keep turning grief into tasks until the tasks ran out or they did.

Buck stood in the loft with both hands braced on the back of a chair, looking toward Bobby’s office like the room might supply instructions if he waited long enough. He had washed the soot from his hands after the call, but there was still a faint dark smear near his wrist that he had missed. Eddie noticed it. Ethan noticed Eddie noticing it.

No one said anything.

“We need a photo,” Buck said.

Hen looked up from the table. “For what?”

“The funeral.”

The word landed harder than it should have, considering Athena had already said it in the bay. Maybe repetition was not making it easier. Maybe every use cut a new groove in the room.

Buck swallowed and kept going. “Or the station memorial. Or both. I don’t know. Someone’s going to ask, and we should have options.”

Options.

That was such a Buck word for this. Not because Buck liked options. Because options sounded better than choosing one photograph to stand in for a person who had existed in thousands of gestures no camera had caught. Bobby at the stove. Bobby at the desk. Bobby leaning against the railing with coffee in one hand. Bobby giving orders. Bobby listening. Bobby laughing at something Chimney said and pretending not to. One photo could not do that. Several photos would not do it either.

“Not right this second,” Hen said.

Buck nodded too quickly. “No. Yeah. Not right this second.” Then he looked back at the office. Ethan could see the movement happening behind his eyes anyway. Buck had already started sorting. Photo. Uniform. Badge. Flowers. Who needed to call whom. Who had the best picture. Whether Athena would want the official LAFD portrait or something warmer. Whether Harry and May should choose. Whether choosing would hurt them worse. Eddie stepped beside him, close enough that their shoulders almost touched. “Write it down.”

Buck blinked. “What?”

“The things you’re thinking about.”

“I’m not—”

Eddie gave him a look.

Buck exhaled. “Fine. Maybe.”

“Write them down before they start chasing each other.”

For a moment, Buck looked like he might argue on principle. Then Chimney, still seated at the far end of the table with his untouched tea, pushed his closed notebook across the surface without looking up.

“Use the back.”

Buck stared at it.

Everyone did.

Chimney’s notebook had been the center of the day for hours. County. Public Health. CDC liaison. Funeral home. Names and numbers and walls disguised as instructions. He had held onto it like letting go would mean dropping Bobby somewhere between agencies. Now he slid it toward Buck.

“You sure?” Buck asked.

Chimney shrugged one shoulder. “It’s paper.” It was not just paper. No one said that either. Buck pulled the notebook closer and opened it from the back. The motion was careful, almost reverent. Eddie found a pen near the coffee maker and handed it to him. Buck sat, because Eddie’s hand on his shoulder suggested sitting before Buck could decide standing was necessary.

At the top of the blank page, Buck wrote:

Bobby things.

Then he stopped.

The heading looked absurdly small. Ethan leaned against the counter with his arms folded, watching the page from a distance. Bobby things. As if Bobby could be gathered that way. As if someone could make a list long enough to hold a man.

“Photo,” Buck said.

He wrote it down.

“Badge,” Hen added quietly.

Buck wrote that too.

“Dress uniform?” Eddie asked.

Buck hesitated. “Does Athena have it?”

“Probably,” Hen said. “But LAFD may have protocol.”

Chimney’s mouth twisted. “Of course there’s protocol.”

No one laughed.

Buck wrote dress uniform / protocol? and underlined the question mark too hard. Karen set a glass of water beside Hen and looked at the page. “Flowers.”

“Athena might want to choose those,” Buck said.

“Then write ask Athena,” Karen said.

Buck’s pen hovered.

Ask Athena.

After the way she had left the station, even writing her name felt careful.

“She may not want us asking anything tonight,” Hen said.

“Then not tonight,” Eddie said. “But eventually.”

Buck wrote it down.

Ask Athena.

The list grew slowly after that. Not smoothly. Never smoothly. Every item carried something with it. Photo display. LAFD honor detail. Station flowers. Food for the house. Christopher’s letter. May and Harry. Bobby’s recipes. Who should call Michael. Whether someone had already told David. Whether Athena wanted people at the house before Tuesday or after or not at all. Each practical question opened another emotional room. Christopher’s letter made Eddie go still.

“I have it,” he said before anyone asked.

Buck looked up. “Yeah?”

Eddie nodded. “In my bag. Chris knows May and Harry might not read it right away.” Hen’s expression softened. “That kid.”

“He said it wasn’t homework,” Ethan said.

Eddie glanced at him, surprised. Ethan lifted his phone slightly. “May told me.” That earned the faintest smile from Eddie. “Sounds like him.” Buck wrote Chris letter — Eddie, then stared at the words for a few seconds longer than necessary.

“He shouldn’t have to do that from Texas,” Buck said.

Eddie’s face changed. “No.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I know.”

“I just hate it.”

“Me too.”

The honesty passed between them without either trying to soften it. Ethan was beginning to think that was the only reason it worked. Chimney leaned back in his chair, eyes on the ceiling. “Bobby would say the letter counts.”

“Yeah,” Hen said. “He would.”

“He’d probably say something about love not needing perfect delivery.”

“That sounds too poetic for Bobby,” Buck said.

Chimney looked at him. “He got poetic sometimes.”

“When?”

“When you were too emotional to notice.”

Buck opened his mouth, closed it, then looked back down at the notebook. “Rude.” The almost-banter warmed the room by a degree, then faded. Not gone. Just folded into the list with everything else. Ethan watched Buck write letter counts in smaller letters under Christopher’s name. He wondered if Buck knew he had done it.

Probably not.

The next item came from Karen.

“Food train.”

Hen looked at her. “Food train?”

“For Athena, May, and Harry.”

“They’re going to get buried in casseroles.”

“Then we coordinate so they are not buried in casseroles.”

Chimney lifted one hand. “As someone who has spent the day fighting bureaucracy, I support casserole regulation.”

“Of course you do,” Hen said. “You’ve become radicalized by paperwork.”

“I was vulnerable.”

Buck’s mouth twitched as he wrote food train — Karen? Karen nodded approval. “I’ll handle that.”

“You don’t have to,” Buck said automatically.

Karen looked at him.

He grimaced. “Right. Sorry.”

“Growth,” Eddie said.

“Don’t narrate my growth.”

“Someone should.”

Ethan hid a smile in his tea. It felt strange to smile while making a funeral list. Maybe that was allowed. Maybe the human body had no idea how to grieve in a straight line, so it kept reaching for any available pressure release before the whole system blew.

They added more.

Station coverage for Tuesday. Dress blues. Who would drive whom. Whether Chimney was cleared to attend in uniform or would try to pretend clearance did not matter. Hen’s medical restrictions. Someone to make sure Buck ate before the service. Someone to make sure Eddie did. Someone to make sure Athena was not asked questions by well-meaning people before she had coffee.

“That last one should be in all caps,” Hen said.

Buck wrote it in all caps.

PROTECT ATHENA FROM QUESTIONS.

The room went quiet after that. Because the all-caps version was funny until it wasn’t. Because Athena had come in with her anger sharpened into a blade, and all of them understood now that part of the job on Tuesday would be protecting her from the thousand tiny cuts people did not mean to make.

How are you holding up?

He was such a good man.

At least he died a hero.

He would want you to be strong.

Ethan could imagine all of them. He hated every one.

“People are going to say stupid things,” Chimney said.

Hen sighed. “Yeah.”

“Not because they mean to.”

“Still stupid,” Karen said.

Buck tapped the pen against the page. “Bobby would be good at that.”

“At saying stupid things?” Chimney asked.

“At knowing what to do when people did.”

Chimney looked down.

“Yeah,” he said. “He would.”

Another room opened.

No one walked into it for a moment.

Ethan’s phone buzzed.

He glanced down. May.

May: we made food. badly. still counts.

A photo followed. Three grilled cheese sandwiches on a plate, one visibly burned along the edge. Ethan smiled before he could stop himself.

Eddie noticed. “May?”

Ethan turned the screen so he could see. Eddie’s face softened. “Stress grilled cheese.”

“Apparently.”

Buck leaned over to look. His eyes went red immediately, but he smiled too. “Bobby would have opinions.”

“May said badly,” Ethan said. “I told her barely still counts.”

Hen pointed at him. “That’s good.”

“It was Maddie’s first.”

“Still good.”

Buck looked at the photo again. “Add grilled cheese.”

Eddie looked at him.

Buck shrugged, embarrassed. “To the Bobby things.” Chimney’s expression softened in a way that hurt. “Yeah. Add it.”

So Buck did.

Grilled cheese.

Then, beneath it:

Pancakes?

Hen leaned forward. “Pancakes.”

“Definitely pancakes,” Chimney said.

“That chili he made once that nearly killed all of us,” Buck added.

Eddie’s eyebrows lifted. “Nearly killed?”

“Emotionally.”

“Digestively,” Chimney said.

Hen shook her head. “Weaklings.”

“You cried,” Chimney said.

“From admiration.”

Buck wrote deadly chili and underlined it. For the next few minutes, the list changed. Not away from the funeral. Not exactly. But sideways. Bobby things became less about what Tuesday required and more about what Bobby had left scattered through all of them. Pancakes. Chili. The blue mug. The ugly pen cup. The way he said kid when Buck was doing something reckless. The way he could make Hen stop arguing by looking at her over his glasses. The way he always knew when Chimney was making a joke to avoid saying something true.

“His lasagna,” Karen said.

Hen looked offended on Bobby’s behalf. “That was not a thing. That was an event.”

Buck wrote lasagna event.

“The station Thanksgiving where he banned me from gravy,” Chimney said.

“You know what you did,” Hen said.

“I was innovating.”

“You were unsupervised.”

Buck wrote gravy supervision.

Eddie leaned back in his chair. “The way he said your full name when you were in trouble.” Buck stared at him. “My full name?”

“Evan Buckley.”

Buck pointed the pen at him. “That was usually your fault.”

“Not usually.”

“Often.”

“Sometimes.”

Ethan listened as they argued gently over percentages and thought that this was what people meant when they said someone was still present. Not in a ghost way. Not in a comforting platitude way. In the practical, painful, undeniable fact that Bobby had taught them patterns they were still moving through.

He existed in recipes, in warning looks, in phrases, in the way Buck accepted being called Evan only from certain people and certain kinds of concern. In Chimney’s notebook. In Hen’s refusal to let grief excuse medical stupidity. In Eddie’s steadiness beside Buck. In May’s burned grilled cheese. In Christopher’s letter waiting in Eddie’s bag.

Bobby things.

The heading was still too small. The list was still not enough.

It helped anyway.

Then Buck wrote bell.

The room quieted immediately.

No one had said it out loud yet. Not really. The chapter title had been living around them all day without needing to be named. The funeral would have honors. The last alarm. The bell. Ceremony turning one impossible loss into ritual because ritual was what people used when ordinary language failed. Buck stared at the word.

“I don’t know if I can hear it,” he said.

Eddie’s hand moved to the back of his chair. “You won’t hear it alone.”

Buck closed his eyes.

“None of us will,” Hen said.

Chimney looked at the table. “Athena might want to.”

Everyone looked at him.

He did not lift his head. “Hear it alone, I mean. Not literally. Just… she might not want all of us crowding her before.” That was the first time since the confrontation that Chimney had spoken about Athena without flinching around her name. Karen nodded slowly. “Then we ask May what they need.”

“Not Athena?” Buck asked.

“Eventually Athena,” Karen said. “But May may be able to tell us what not to do before we accidentally do it.”

Ethan looked down at his phone. May had sent another message.

May: Harry ate half a sandwich. Mom burned one. Bobby would’ve eaten the bad one.

Ethan’s throat tightened.

He typed back:

Ethan: We’re making a Bobby things list. Grilled cheese made it on.

May replied after a minute.

May: good. add coffee. not station coffee. his coffee.

Ethan read it aloud.

Buck wrote his coffee, then added in parentheses: not station coffee.

“Accurate,” Hen said.

“Station coffee is a crime,” Eddie agreed.

“Station coffee is a coping mechanism,” Chimney said.

“Those overlap,” Karen said.

The list kept growing.

Some items were objects. Blue mug. Reading glasses. Pen cup. Apron. Bible. Recipe cards. Dress uniform. Helmet. Badge. Some were habits. Checking the stove twice. Leaving the office door open. Making too much food. Giving people tasks when they were spiraling. Knowing exactly when to stop pushing.

Some were people. Athena. May. Harry. Buck. Hen. Chimney. Eddie. Christopher. The 118. The families orbiting it. Everyone Bobby had folded into the shape of home without announcing that was what he was doing. Buck’s handwriting grew messier as the page filled.

At some point, Eddie took the pen from him and continued writing without asking. Buck let him. Hen added things from across the table. Chimney corrected one story about the gravy incident with the seriousness of a man defending the historical record. Karen added practical kindness, then underlined it once. Ethan did not add anything for a while. He wasn’t sure he had the right.

Compared to them, he had known Bobby for such a short time. Long enough to grieve him, yes. Long enough for the empty office to hurt. Long enough to understand the station had lost more than a captain. But not long enough to claim the same kind of history everyone else was writing down in fragments. Then Buck looked at him.

“You got one?”

Ethan blinked. “Me?”

“Yeah.”

The room waited.

Not pressuring. Not exactly. Making space. Ethan looked toward the office. He thought about Bobby asking questions without making him feel interrogated. About the way Bobby had always seemed to know when Ethan needed to be treated like a kid and when he needed to be treated like someone capable. About the welcome party photo on the desk and how proud Bobby had been to show it off afterward.

“He made people feel expected,” Ethan said.

Buck’s expression shifted.

Ethan swallowed, suddenly self-conscious. “Not just welcome. Expected. Like there was already a place for you before you figured out where to stand.” No one spoke for a moment. Then Eddie wrote it down.

Made people feel expected.

Buck looked at the page for a long time.

“Yeah,” he said, voice rough. “He did.”

The list filled two pages by the time they stopped. Not finished. They could have kept going all night and still missed things. That was the point, maybe. The list was not a container. It was proof of overflow. Buck tore the pages carefully from the notebook, then froze with them in his hand.

“What do we do with it?” he asked.

Karen answered first. “Keep it.”

“For Tuesday?”

“For before Tuesday,” Eddie said.

Hen nodded. “For when someone forgets he was more than the ceremony.” Chimney looked at the torn edge of the notebook. “For when we do.”

That hurt.

Because they would, in small ways. Not forget Bobby. Never that. But grief and ceremony and uniforms and protocol would try to narrow him into hero, captain, husband, fallen firefighter. All true. None enough. Bobby things was a defense against enough. Buck folded the pages once and set them beside Bobby’s blue mug. For now, that seemed like the right place.

The loft settled into a quieter silence after that. Not empty. Not healed. But less frantic around the edges. The list existed now. Tuesday existed. Bobby’s absence existed. None of those facts canceled the others. Ethan looked at the mug, the folded pages, the open office door.

Goodbye was coming.

They still were not ready. But now, at least, they had started naming what they were afraid of losing.

By the time the station began to settle for the night, Tuesday had become part of the building. It lived in the loft first, folded beside Bobby’s blue mug in two pages of torn notebook paper. It lived on Buck’s phone in a text thread with Maddie. It lived in Eddie’s pocket, where Christopher’s letter waited with a weight paper should not have had. It lived in Chimney’s silence after the list was finished, in Hen’s careful breathing, in Karen’s hand at the small of Hen’s back whenever she stood too quickly.

It lived in the captain’s office most of all. Ethan could feel it from the kitchen. The office door was still open. No one had closed it. Maybe no one wanted to be the person who decided the room needed privacy from them now. Maybe leaving it open had become the last small way the station could keep Bobby in circulation, as if air moving through the doorway could keep the absence from sealing over.

Outside, Los Angeles had gone blue-gray with evening. The marine layer had never fully burned off, and now the fading light pressed itself against the windows in a dull, coastal haze. The station lights made everything inside look warmer than it felt. Coffee mugs. Tabletop. Metal railing. The folded list. Bobby’s empty mug. Buck had not moved the mug. No one had asked him to.

Ethan stood at the counter with his phone in his hand, reading May’s last message again even though he had already memorized it.

May: Barely still counts.

She had sent it after the grilled cheese photo, after Ethan told her about the list, after Harry ate half a sandwich and Athena burned one and Bobby’s absence filled their kitchen the way it filled the firehouse. Three words, borrowed and sent back changed by the day.

Barely still counts.

It had started as comfort. Or maybe as a joke. It did not feel like either anymore. It felt like the only math grief allowed. Chimney walking instead of running. Buck sitting instead of making another pot of coffee. Chris eating because Helena kept placing food in front of him. May leaning into her mother instead of turning herself into a bridge. Ethan noticing and not always knowing what to do with the noticing. Barely did not feel like much. Tonight, barely was what they had.

“You heading out?” Eddie asked.

Ethan looked up.

Eddie stood near the table with his jacket half-zipped, one hand resting over the pocket where Christopher’s letter was tucked. He looked exhausted enough that Ethan almost asked if he should be driving, then remembered Eddie had survived war zones, earthquakes, shootings, panic attacks, grief, and Los Angeles traffic. A tired drive home was probably not the thing that would take him out. Still, the question must have shown on his face because Eddie’s eyebrows lifted.

“Don’t start.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were pre-saying it.”

Ethan huffed a small laugh. “Hen’s terminology is spreading.”

“Unfortunately.”

The joke landed softly and stayed there without trying to become more than it was. Eddie glanced toward Buck, who sat at the table with both hands wrapped around a mug of tea Karen had forced on him after declaring the entire station dangerously caffeinated. Buck’s eyes were on the folded list beside Bobby’s mug. He had been staring at it for a while, not reading exactly, more like keeping watch.

Chimney sat across from him, quieter than Ethan had ever seen him. The notebook lay closed near his elbow. His phone sat facedown beside it. Every so often, his hand twitched toward one or the other, then stopped. Maddie had called again after dinner. Ethan had not heard the conversation, only Chimney’s side of it from the edge of the bay: low voice, long pauses, one strained laugh, then an apology that seemed to go on longer than the words themselves. Afterward, Chimney had not run. He had come upstairs and sat down.

That counted too.

Hen had fallen asleep in one of the chairs near the far side of the loft, though she would deny it if anyone said so. Karen sat beside her, scrolling quietly on her phone, one shoulder angled so Hen could lean without admitting she was leaning. Ravi had gone home twenty minutes ago after asking three separate times whether anyone needed anything and then apologizing for asking three separate times. The station was not peaceful.

But it was tired.

Sometimes tired was the closest grief came to peace. Ethan slipped his phone into his pocket. “I can stay.” Eddie gave him a look.

“What?”

“That wasn’t the question.”

“It could be the answer.”

“Go home, Ethan.”

Buck looked up at that. “You don’t have to.” Which meant Buck wanted him to and did not want to ask, or did not want him to and did not want to be selfish, or some complicated combination Buck would never explain while sober and grieving in a firehouse kitchen. Ethan leaned back against the counter. “I’m not tired.” Karen did not look up from her phone. “That is almost never true when someone says it in this building.” Hen, apparently not asleep, murmured, “Medically suspicious.”

“You were asleep,” Chimney said.

Hen opened one eye. “I was monitoring.”

“With your eyes closed?”

“Advanced technique.”

The room warmed by one degree. Buck’s mouth twitched. Chimney’s did too. Eddie looked down, hiding whatever expression crossed his face. It was not enough to be laughter. Not really. But the shape of the old station lived briefly inside it, and for once, the memory did not cut as sharply as Ethan expected.

Then the quiet returned.

Buck looked back at the mug.

“I keep thinking we should bring it,” he said.

Eddie followed his gaze. “The mug?”

“To the funeral.” Buck’s fingers tightened around his own cup. “Not for the service. That would be weird. But… I don’t know. It feels wrong leaving it here.”

Chimney looked at the blue mug. “It might also feel wrong taking it.”

“Yeah.”

“Then maybe don’t decide tonight.”

Buck looked at him, surprised. Chimney shrugged. “Apparently that’s advice now. Not deciding things tonight.” Karen lifted one finger without looking up. “Excellent advice.”

“See?” Chimney said. “I’m growing.”

Hen’s eye opened again. “Don’t overdo it.” Buck let out a breath that came close to a laugh. It faded into something shakier, but Eddie was already there, one hand on the back of his chair, not touching Buck yet. Waiting for Buck to choose. Buck leaned back until Eddie’s fingers brushed his shoulder.

Choice made.

Ethan looked away toward the office. The light inside was still on. That bothered him suddenly. Not because the light mattered. Because someone would eventually have to turn it off. Maybe tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe Tuesday after the funeral. Every ordinary action around Bobby had become a question of timing, and every timing felt wrong. He pushed away from the counter before he could talk himself out of it.

“I’m going to…”

Everyone looked at him.

Ethan gestured vaguely toward the office. “The light.”

No one stopped him.

That might have been permission. It might have been exhaustion. Either way, he walked across the loft with the strange awareness that every step was audible. The office doorway felt less intrusive this time, though not easier. Maybe because he had already crossed it once. Maybe because the room had been looked at, named, touched lightly enough to survive it.

Inside, nothing had moved.

Bobby’s desk remained exactly as before. The photographs. The ugly pen cup. The stack of forms. The sticky note that said Follow up Monday. The chair behind the desk sat pushed in, waiting with an obedience that made Ethan’s chest hurt. He did not touch anything.

Not this time.

He only stood there and let himself look. The family photo caught the light from the desk lamp. Athena, May, Harry, Bobby. All smiling. The picture had not changed, but Ethan saw it differently now. North Remembrance Hall lived behind May’s eyes somewhere. Harry asking why released did not mean home. Athena saying she was angry at Bobby and loved him too much to know what to do with it. Bobby in the photo, unaware of every future sentence his family would have to survive without him.

The 118 photo sat beside it. Buck. Hen. Chimney. Eddie. Ravi. Bobby in the center, not because he had demanded it, but because the room had known where to put him. Ethan thought about the list on the table. Bobby things. Too small. Necessary anyway. He reached for the lamp switch.

Then stopped.

Turning off the light felt like closing something. Leaving it on felt like waiting for someone who was not coming back. There was no right answer. Maybe that was why everyone kept avoiding the office. The room was full of decisions like that. Mug. Light. Desk. Door. Chair. Photo. Every object asking whether today was the day it became memory instead of use.

“You don’t have to.”

Ethan turned.

Buck stood in the doorway. Eddie was not behind him this time. Not immediately. He stood a few feet back near the kitchen, close enough to come if needed, far enough that Buck had clearly chosen to cross the threshold himself.

That mattered.

“The light?” Ethan asked.

Buck nodded.

Ethan dropped his hand. “I wasn’t sure.”

“Yeah.” Buck looked around the office. “Me neither.”

For a moment, they stood together in Bobby’s office without speaking. Buck’s gaze moved over the desk, the photographs, the pen cup. He looked wrecked, but quieter than before. Not less sad. Sadness was not the thing that had changed. The frantic edge had dulled, leaving him exposed in a different way.

“Tuesday,” Buck said.

Ethan nodded.

“I thought having a date would help.”

“Does it?”

Buck’s mouth twisted. “No.”

Then, after a beat, “Maybe.”

That sounded more honest.

“It makes it real,” Buck said. “But it was already real. So I don’t know why this feels different.”

Ethan looked at the sticky note on the desk. “Because now there’s a when.” Buck followed his gaze. “Yeah.” The when sat between them.

Tuesday.

Before, Bobby’s death had been a fact trapped in suspension. After the explosion. After the lab. After the waiting. After the body release. Now the goodbye had a place on the calendar, a hard edge everyone was moving toward whether they wanted to or not. Buck stepped fully into the office. Only one step at first, like before. Then another. He stopped beside the desk and looked at the photos.

“He would hate how much we’re all standing around,” Buck said.

Ethan’s mouth lifted faintly. “Probably.”

“He’d make us eat.”

“Everyone has been trying.”

“He’d do it better.”

“Probably.”

Buck gave him a look. Ethan shrugged. “I’m not going to lie.” That got something like a real smile from Buck, small and broken but there. It disappeared as he reached toward the desk. His hand hovered over the sticky note.

“Monday,” Buck said.

Ethan did not answer.

Buck touched the edge of the note with one finger, not peeling it off, not moving it. Just touching the proof of a day Bobby had expected to have.

“Tuesday is after Monday,” Buck said.

The sentence should not have hurt as much as it did.

Ethan swallowed.

Buck breathed out. “Stupid thing to say.”

“No.”

“It is.”

“Still true.”

Buck looked at him, then nodded once. Behind them, Eddie’s voice came softly from the doorway. “You okay?” Buck did not look back. “No.” Eddie nodded like he had expected that. “That’s fair.”

“Everyone keeps saying that when the answer is terrible.”

“Because terrible and true is better than fine.”

From the loft, Hen called, “Correct.” Buck huffed. “How are you still hearing everything?”

“Advanced monitoring.”

Chimney added, “She’s been training for years.” The sound that moved through the loft this time was closer to laughter than anything had been in hours. It did not last. It did not need to. Buck finally looked back at Eddie. “Do you think we should turn it off?”

Eddie looked at the lamp. He did not answer quickly. That was one of the things Ethan appreciated about him. Eddie did not treat hard questions like speed would make them less hard.

“Not if you’re asking because you think you’re supposed to,” Eddie said.

Buck looked at the light again.

“I don’t know why I’m asking.”

“Then leave it.”

Buck nodded slowly. “Just tonight.”

“Just tonight,” Eddie agreed.

There it was again. The day’s only survivable unit of time.

Not forever.

Not Tuesday.

Tonight.

They left the office light on. Buck stepped out first, then Eddie, then Ethan. No one closed the door. In the loft, Chimney had pulled the folded Bobby list closer and was adding something to the bottom in small letters. Hen pretended not to watch. Karen watched openly. When Chimney finished, he set the pen down and pushed the paper back toward the mug. Buck looked at it. “What did you add?”

Chimney leaned back. “Nothing.”

Hen reached for the page.

“Hen.”

“I’m injured, not blind.”

She turned the folded edge just enough to read, then her face softened.

“What?” Buck asked.

Hen looked at Chimney.

He looked away.

Karen read over Hen’s shoulder. “He wrote, He came back for us.”

The room went quiet.

Chimney stared at the table. “It’s true.”

No one argued.

Bobby had come back for them. Into fire, into illness, into the lab, into the last choice that had taken him away from everyone else. The sentence was too much and not enough, like everything on the list.

Buck sat down heavily.

Eddie sat beside him.

Ethan looked at Chimney and saw the guilt there, still raw, still refusing comfort. But the sentence on the page was not only guilt. It was love too. Gratitude. Horror. A fact Chimney could not escape and maybe did not want to if escaping meant making Bobby’s choice smaller. Karen folded the list carefully and set it back beside the mug.

“We should make copies,” she said.

Chimney made a face. “Of the emotional evidence?”

“Of the list.”

“That sounds like emotional evidence.”

“Then yes.”

Hen nodded. “Copies are good.” Buck rubbed at his eyes. “Tomorrow.”

Everyone accepted that.

Tomorrow was allowed to hold some things. They stayed in the loft until the sky outside went fully dark. People moved eventually, but slowly. Karen took Hen home with the kind of firmness that did not allow medical debate. Chimney left after promising Maddie on speakerphone that he was coming home and not taking the long route, and Ravi, summoned by text, appeared at the bottom of the stairs to make sure he did exactly that. Buck walked them to the bay doors and watched until Chimney got into the car.

Eddie stayed.

Ethan stayed too, because his ride was technically Eddie and because no one had told him to leave again. When the station finally quieted, it was only Buck, Eddie, and Ethan in the loft.

Gerrard had retreated to the temporary desk downstairs after another awkward attempt to ask whether anyone needed anything. Buck had said no too fast. Eddie had said thank you anyway. Ethan had watched Gerrard accept both answers with a grim nod and disappear before making the moment worse. Buck stood by the railing, looking down at the bay.

“He shouldn’t have to use the desk downstairs,” Buck said.

Eddie’s expression was careful. “Gerrard?”

“Yeah.”

Ethan had not expected that. Buck’s jaw worked. “He’s trying. In his Gerrard way, which is terrible, but he is. And Bobby’s office is the captain’s office.”

Eddie waited.

“But I don’t want him in there,” Buck said.

“Yeah.”

“That’s not fair.”

“No.”

Buck looked at him.

Eddie shrugged slightly. “Doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” Buck let out a tired breath. “Both things again.”

“Both things again.”

Ethan leaned against the counter and looked at the office light still glowing through the open door. The station felt held between before and after. Before the funeral. After the release. Before the bell. After the waiting had become a date. It was a narrow, awful place to stand, but the whole chapter had been about narrow, awful places. Airport curbs. Texas kitchens. Funeral halls. Apparatus bays. Office thresholds. The spaces where people paused because moving forward meant leaving something behind and standing still hurt too.

“I should text May,” Ethan said.

Buck glanced over. “Yeah?”

“Just to check.”

“Tell her…” Buck stopped.

Ethan waited.

Buck looked at Bobby’s mug. “Tell her the mug stayed.”

Ethan nodded.

He typed:

Ethan: Office light stayed on. Mug stayed. List stayed beside it.

May replied a few minutes later.

May: Good.

Then:

May: Dad’s jacket stayed by the door too.

Ethan read the message aloud.

Buck closed his eyes.

Eddie bowed his head.

No one said anything for a while. The jacket. The mug. The light. The list. All the things staying where they were because no one was ready to move them and maybe readiness was not the point yet.

Eventually, Buck said, “Tuesday.”

Not a question this time. Eddie stood beside him at the railing. “Tuesday.” Ethan looked toward the dark bay below, the rigs reset and waiting for the next call. Somewhere in the building, a clock ticked too quietly to hear. Somewhere outside, the city kept moving. Somewhere in Los Angeles, Athena, May, and Harry sat in a house with Bobby’s jacket by the door. Somewhere in Texas, Christopher’s letter waited in Eddie’s bag, already having traveled farther than Chris could. The bell had not rung yet. But now they could all hear it coming.

Buck turned off the kitchen light when they finally left the loft. He did not turn off Bobby’s office light.

No one did.

They walked downstairs together, quiet and worn through, leaving the open door behind them. The office glowed softly above the empty bay, not a vigil exactly, not a denial either. Just one more thing allowed to remain for tonight. Tomorrow would ask for more. Tuesday would ask for everything. But tonight, before the bell, they let the light stay on.