“You see this?” I asked.
Meatball leaned closer. “Door gave you trouble?”
“Has been,” I said. “Caught before.” My jaw tightened. “She might’ve tried to leave, and it jammed on her.”
His expression shifted, the corners of his mouth flattening. “Damn.”
“Yeah.”
The word didn’t come close to touching the spike of cold fury that went through me. I’d known it was a hazard. I’d told her. And then we’d gone to the barn, we’d flirted around the edges of something that might’ve been truce, and she’d laughed once, and I’d let myself be distracted.
If we’d been five minutes slower tonight…
I straightened fast enough to make my back protest. Cap was talking to one of the cops near the front of the truck, gesturing at the scorched vent. A few lingering townspeople loitered at a distance, phones out, their faces lit by a mix of flashing lights and morbid curiosity.
Moose fell into step beside me as I walked back toward the engine. He studied my face for a beat. “You okay?”
“Fine,” I said automatically.
He gave me the same look he always gave me when the word fine was an obvious lie. “You got real quiet after she left.”
“I pulled a woman out of a burning metal box,” I said. “I’m allowed to be quiet.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Sure. And if that woman had been literally anyone else, I might believe you.”
I clenched my jaw, staring at the ruined truck. “You wanna go wring out your drama somewhere else, or…?”
He ignored that. “She was leaning on you like you were the last solid thing on the planet, man.”
Heat pricked the back of my neck. “She could barely stand. I was convenient.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Convenient like gravity.” He nudged my arm with his elbow. “You looked scared.”
“I was,” I said before I could stop myself.
The honesty surprised both of us. Moose’s expression softened in a way that made me want to punch something.
“I don’t like pulling anybody out of a fire,” I added roughly.
“Yeah, but this is the first time I’ve seen you look like the world might actually end if we didn’t find her.”
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. The image of her crumpled on that floor kept flashing in my mind, overlaid with a dozen other possibilities that hadn’t happened because we’d been fast, because she’d held out, because the latch had finally given.
Fear sat under my breastbone like a knot of wire.
Moose hooked his thumbs in his suspenders, glancing over at the truck. “How bad do you think it is?”
“Bad,” I said.
“Bad like ‘call an insurance adjuster and a good mechanic,’ or bad like ‘roll this thing straight into the scrap yard and pour one out for her’?”
I took in the warped metal, the black streaks running from the roof vent all the way down the side, the way the interior still glowed faintly with heat despite the gallons of water we’d dumped into it. The wheels were somehow miraculously intact. The frame looked more or less straight. But inside… there wasn’t much that didn’t appear ruined.
“Depends on how sentimental you are,” I said. “Shell might be salvageable if someone with a lot of time and a lot of skills gets stubborn about it. But if you’re asking what’s easier? New truck.”
“Can she afford new?” Moose asked.
The question landed like a punch.
