DeStasio had blamed me for everything he did—and everyone who mattered believed him.
I was suspended from my job. And I was going to need a lawyer.
My mother was dying. My dad was three thousand miles away.
And Owen, my Owen, the one guy who was always on my side, was on a ventilator. In a medically induced coma. With a fifty-fifty shot at survival.
“I just need to see him,” I said in a voice that I didn’t even recognize. “Please.”
“Hanwell, you’re exhausted,” the captain said. “We’re all exhausted. Go home and get some rest.”
“I need your help,” I said to the captain.
But he was already shaking his head. “I can’t help you. There’ll be an investigation, and whatever happens will happen.”
“Not with that,” I said. “I need to see the rookie.”
“No can do,” he said in a voice like,We’ve been over this.
I wasn’t getting anywhere.
Time to do something really brave.
I took a deep breath. “I love him,” I told the captain.
He frowned at me. “Who?”
“The rookie!”
“Everybody loves the rookie,” he said.
“No,” I stared at him, like,I. Love. Him.
But the captain wasn’t having it. “Come on, Hanwell. Keep it together. Now’s not the time to develop a crush on the rookie.”
I stood up straighter. “It’s not a crush,” I said. And then, knowing exactly how ridiculous these words would sound to the captain and every single other person in the room, including the guys on our crew, and even myself, I said, as steadily as I could, “When I say I love him, I mean I am in love with him.”
The crowd burst out with gasps and whispers and cries of, “What?”
A mixed reaction, but I’d say the general consensus was that I’d just made myself the butt of every joke forever.
I could read the captain’s response in his face.We never should have hired a girl.
No way out but through. “That,” I said, gesturing at Amy, “is not his girlfriend. I am his girlfriend. It’s not a crush. And I’m not the one who started it, either.”
The captain frowned. “Are you telling me that you and the rookie fell in love with each other on C-shift? In my firehouse?”
Knowing that I was pretty much ending my run in the Lillian FD by confessing this—no matter what happened with DeStasio’s report—I nodded.
He shook his head. “What the hell were you thinking?”
But I had to call him on that. “Are you really going to stand there—you, marriedthirty-six years,a guy who’d do anything for his wife and his four kids—and tell me that love doesn’t matter?”
That got his attention.
“When I say I’m in love with him,” I went on, my voice shaking, “I mean that he’s the person I want to marry and spend my life with. He’s the person who makes everything else matter. But I never told him that. I was afraid of losing my job. Or of losing the guys’ respect. I know what you all think, that love is weakness—because I thought it, too, and I never questioned it. But I’ll tell you something, as of today I know for sure that it’s the opposite. I would have lifted that entire building off the ground to get the rookie out of there today, and I will do the same to get into that ICU right now.”
The captain closed his eyes and shook his head.
