Things You Save in a Fire(98)

“Definitely.”

On the drive down, the guys acted like things were totally normal—like I’d never been under suspicion, never been shunned or doubted. In fact, things were better than normal. Something about the whole ordeal seemed to have broken some final, unseen barrier that I hadn’t even realized was there. The guys joked around, and teased me, and thanked me, and apologized, and called themselves idiots over and over.

They mostly teased me about the rookie.

Yeah, no way was I getting out of that one unteased.

“We need to combine your names,” Six-Pack said.

“‘Cassie’ plus ‘rookie,’” Case said. “‘Cookie.’”

“I called it from the beginning,” Six-Pack said.

“You never saw it coming,” Case said, reaching around me to punch him.

“Shut your yaps,” Tiny said. “It was an epic secret love. Nobody called it.”

“Mentally,” Case said. “To myself. I said, ‘Those two will be in the sack before you know it.’”

“Nobody’s in the sack,” I said, my ears getting a little hot.

“Not at the moment, anyway,” Six-Pack said.

“Not for a couple of weeks,” the captain advised from the front seat. “Give the poor guy a little time to recover.”

“Poor Loverboy,” the guys all chimed in.

“Oh God. Please tell me you’re not going to start calling him Loverboy.”

“Too late,” the guys said, and roughed each other up some more.



* * *



OWEN’S SMALL HOSPITAL room was so full—his parents, his sisters, their husbands, at least a few cousins, and a handful of retired firefighters—it was like stepping into a crowded elevator.

Captain Murphy and the guys hustled me in. “We brought you a present,” the captain said, as the guys from my crew cheered, and the crowd parted, and I found myself standing beside Owen’s bed.

He was alive. He was awake. He was okay.

He was the most beautiful sight in the world.

I caught my breath, and then I held it.

He looked up and met my eyes.

“Hey, rookie,” I said.

“Hey, Cassie.”

His voice was hoarse from the tube. His face was still burned, a little red in places, but not bad. His hair was adorably mussed.

He reached out his hand over the bedrail, and I took it.

But then I heard Colleen. “What’s she doing here? I told you I don’t want that girl in here.”

I looked up and saw her face, and I knew the captain had been right. She had not been coping well. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her hair was limp. She clearly hadn’t slept in a week.

“It’s okay,” the captain said. “We brought her.”

Colleen glared at him. “Why would you do that?”

“We were wrong, Colleen,” the captain said. “DeStasio filed a false report. She’s not the reason your son got hurt. She’s actually the reason he survived.”

Colleen looked me over, suspicious.

“You remember when DeStasio hurt his back in that roof collapse?” the captain asked.

Nods and murmurs all around.

“Looks like he got hooked on some of the painkillers they gave him. Then, after Tony died, it got worse. And then Annette left him, and it got even worse. Bad enough that his judgment was off. Bad enough that he started lying. Bad enough that he hallucinated the boy in the fire. He dragged the rookie into that structure, and she”—the captain gestured at me—“dragged him back out. She recognized the cyanide poisoning. She put her own life at risk to find the rookie—unconscious, with his PASS device sounding—under the rubble. She administered the antidote, and she tubed him on scene when he was unconscious and unresponsive with no air and no pulse.”

He made me sound pretty great.

“I’m telling you, Colleen,” the captain went on, “if this girl hadn’t been watching out for him, we wouldn’t be at a hospital right now, we’d be at a funeral.”

Colleen stared at me for a second.

Then she made her way around the end of the rookie’s bed, pushing through the crowd. When she got to me, her face was covered with tears. She pulled me into a full-body hug and didn’t let go. I could feel her trembling. She held on and whispered, “Thank you,” in my ear.

I hugged her back with one arm, but I kept hold of the rookie’s hand with the other.

“Wait a second,” one of the rookie’s sisters said, watching the scene. “Isn’t that Christabel?”

Colleen let me go to get a look.

The captain shook his head. “She’s Cassie.”

“She’s both,” the rookie said, his voice raspy, and everybody turned to stare at him. “She is both the best firefighter on our shift”—he met the captain’s eyes, and then looked over at his folks—“and my date to the anniversary party.”

“It wasn’t a date,” I said to him, giving him an eyes-only smile.

“It didn’t start out as a date,” he said, a little flirty, “but it sure wound up that way in the end.”

The guys on the crew started whooping and cheering.

I looked down.