Page 41 of Ashes of Us
My hands stilled on the brush, and I stared down at the soot-black water pooling at my feet.
"How long?" Carter asked, quieter now.
"How long what?"
"How long have you not been sleeping? How long have you been running yourself into the ground?"
I didn't answer.
He waited. He was good at that, the tactical silence that made you fill it just to make it stop.
"A while," I said finally.
"How long's a while?"
"I don't know. Couple months. Maybe more." I set down the brush and rubbed my face with my hands, felt the grit of ash against my palms. "I'm handling it."
"You're not handling shit. You're barely holding it together." He stood up, grabbed a towel from the rack and tossed it at me. "This about your ex?"
My head snapped up. "How do you?—"
“Captain Morrison called me when you transferred. Gave me the full story. Said you'd cheated on your fiancée, she called off the wedding, and you needed a fresh start." His expression didn't change. "Said you were a good firefighter but your head wasn't right. Asked me to keep an eye on you."
Great. Exactly what I needed. My old captain telling my new captain I was a fuck-up.
Carter rubbed the back of his neck. "When you first got here, you were intense. Focused. Took every shift you could, hit the gym hard, kept to yourself. I figured that's just who you were… one of those guys who works through shit by working harder. So I let it be."
He looked at me then, really looked at me.
"But these past few weeks? This is different. You're not focused anymore. You're scattered. Distracted. Something's eating at you, and today… it could’ve gotten you killed." He paused. "So I'm asking again. What's going on?"
I stared down at my hands. They were still shaking slightly, even though the adrenaline should have worn off by now.
"I saw her bakery," I said finally, the words coming out rough. "A few weeks ago. Someone brought in cupcakes from it for Miller's birthday. Didn't even know she'd opened one."
Carter waited.
"I drove to Riverside a few days ago, and… sat outside her place for like twenty minutes. Didn't go in. Just... looked." I rubbed my face. "Then I drove back here and tried to pretend I hadn't done that."
"But you can't stop thinking about it."
"No." My voice cracked. "I can't stop thinking about her. About what I did. About the fact that I’m not longer a part of her life, and that I can't just walk in and apologize because I don't have the right to do that to her."
“You're stuck."
"Yeah." I looked up at him. "I'm stuck."
Carter was quiet for a long moment. Then he sighed and sat back down on the bench.
“O’Brien said you were staring at something in that kid's room. A photo on the nightstand." He looked at me. "What was it?"
I didn't want to answer. Didn't want to say it out loud.
"Wedding photo," I said finally. "The kid was the ring bearer. The bride looked like—" I stopped. "It doesn't matter."
"It does matter. Because you checked out in the middle of a fire. With a kid's life on the line."
"I got him out in?—”
