“Sometimes I forget, myself.”

“Okay. We’ll try your plan B. The promotion’s out, though. You’ll have to start all over. Stay there a few years at least. Work your way back up.”

Starting over, I could handle. Terminated? Not so much. I closed my eyes. “Thank you.”

The captain opened my file back up to make some notes. “Where does she live? I know of some openings in Boston.”

“She lives in Rockport—about an hour north, on Cape Ann.”

“Maybe there’s something closer, then. I’ll ask around.”

She was going to ask around.

I wasn’t terminated.

For a second, I felt relief—then, right on its heels, a thickness in my throat that I realized, with horror, was the feeling you get before your eyes fill up with tears. I coughed to clear it, and then coughed again. I had not cried in years, and I sure as hell wasn’t about to start now. But these guys—this shift at this station—they were my family. The idea that I had to leave them all behind created a kind of weather system inside my rib cage.

A wet one.

Not good. I wasn’t really a fan of being overcome by emotion. In fact, I’d structured my life around lack of emotion. I’d built it around routine, and safety, and order. Feelings were a lot of trouble. I avoided them as much as possible.

I swallowed. I held very still. I ordered myself to be tough. I wanted to bolt for the door, but I was afraid that if I moved, I might lose it.

Was I seriously about to cry—in front of the captain—on top of everything else?

It wasn’t looking good.

Suddenly, all deus ex machina, the tones went off for a jackknifed eighteen-wheeler on Highway 71.

Work always saved me. I stood up, felt all those unruly emotions drain away, and shifted into all-business work mode.

“Hanwell?” the captain said, as I reached the door.

I turned back to her, my hand on the knob.

She looked at me over the top of her reading glasses. “You would’ve made a goddamned great lieutenant.”

Five

WITHIN A WEEK, the captain was able to find me a position in a small city called Lillian, about twenty minutes from my mom’s place in Rockport. A shift at Station Two had two positions open because a pair of brothers who’d worked together thirty years were retiring together—moving south to Florida to fish and drink beer for the rest of their lives. They’d found a rookie for one of the spots, but they wanted somebody with experience for the other.

Captain Harris called me in after a conference call with the battalion chief and the station captain, a guy named Murphy.

“I let them know that you’re a big deal,” Captain Harris said. “I talked you up for a long time. I told them about your test scores, and how much we don’t want to lose you. I gave them some of your best saves: the double cardiac arrest at that rib joint; the infant you pulled from that car fire when no one else heard the cries; what you did to those frat boys who set that swimming pool on fire. I told them about your being the youngest person ever to receive our valor award—though I conveniently left out how you clobbered the hell out of the presenter on the stage.”

“Thank you.”

“All to say, I made sure he was totally sold on you before I broke the bad news.”

“The bad news?”

I guessed that she was referring to my alarming capability for random violence, but instead she shrugged, like, Duh. “That you’re a female.”

“Oh.” I nodded. That. “What did he say?”

“Honestly,” she said, “that guy Murphy’s accent is so thick, I didn’t catch everything. But I’m pretty sure he told me that women are the worst, and they have no place in the fire service, and that in the hundred and twenty years of the Lillian FD, they’d never hired ‘a lady’ before. Then he added, ‘Not to fight fires, anyway.’”

“Did he really say, ‘Women are the worst’?”

She squinted. “He doesn’t seem to have much of a filter.”

“Did he realize that he was talking to a woman?”

“If he did, he didn’t care.”

“Did he realize he can’t discriminate?”

“If he did, he didn’t care.”

I took all that in. Then I let out a long sigh. My brain flipped through my options. I could sue the Lillian FD for discrimination, I supposed, but that wasn’t going to help me get to Rockport any faster. Plus, I’d never sued anybody in my life—and I was really rooting for fewer lawsuits these days, not more.

I didn’t want to fight for justice. I just wanted to fight fires.

I let out a breath. “Maybe I can look in Boston,” I said next, trying to stay productive. “An hour commute isn’t impossible.”

The captain looked up. “Oh, no. They want you in Lillian.”

I frowned. “They do?”

“Yes. Captain Murphy ended his lecture on how women in the fire service will be the downfall of human civilization by admitting that they actually do really need somebody, and beggars couldn’t be choosers, and at this point, they’d take, quote: ‘Anybody with experience and a pulse—even a lady.’”

I kind of hated that word, “lady.” Made me sound like I had ringlets and a petticoat.

“And the chief agreed,” she added. “So you’re in.”

“So,” I said, summing up, “they don’t want me, but they’re so desperate, they’ll take me anyway.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

I thought for a second. “Well, I’m desperate, too. So I guess we’re a good match.”

“You’re a terrible match,” the captain said. “But your only other option is Boston. And I can’t imagine they want a lady either.”

I nodded.

“So you’ll take the position?”

I nodded again. What choice did I have?

“And what will you do?” she asked.

I wasn’t sure what she meant. I frowned. “I’ll get a map of the city and learn the territory before I get there. I’ll show up on time ready to work, and I’ll work hard—”

The captain cut me off. “That’s not what I mean.” She leaned across her desk to hand me a blank piece of paper.

I took it.

Then she found a pen in a drawer and flung it at me.

I caught it.

“How did you wind up here?” she asked then.

“I was recruited straight out of the academy.”

“Having graduated at the top of your class,” she added, “easily passing both the written and physical tests—and then I handpicked you to come here. And you’ve been a valued asset, a tireless worker, and a rising superstar ever since.”

She waited for me to see her point.

I didn’t, though.

She leaned closer to spell it out. “You have no idea what it’s like to work in a place where you’re not wanted. You’ve been recruited—welcomed—into every job you’ve ever had.”

She wasn’t wrong.

“But all that’s over now,” she said. “The day you walk out of here, all that’s gone.”