And so, even though my dad was sure the “fireman thing” was “a phase,” four years later, here I was, still at Station Eleven in Austin, still the only girl on B-shift—except for our badass female captain—and still loving every impossible minute.

 

* * *

 

THAT’S WHY THE night I got the valor award should have been just another easy, inevitable step in my unblemished, pure-hearted firefighting career.

But I have to confess something. I didn’t just hit Heath Thompson, city councilman, with that wooden plaque when he squeezed my butt.

I beat the crap out of him.

I pummeled him. I mauled him. Even after I’d cracked his head with the plaque itself, I landed a punch to the face, a knuckle strike to the windpipe, and at least one jab to the solar plexus before adding a few good kicks to the ribs with my pumps after he hit the floor. Nobody saw it coming, not even me, so his reaction time was a little slow—which worked to my advantage.

I cut my hand on his teeth, but it was worth it.

I don’t remember this part, but according to Hernandez, the whole time, I was shouting, “Touch me again, douchebag! Touch me again and see how long you live!”

He did not touch me again.

Lucky they didn’t book me for assault. I could have—should have—spent the night in jail. It’s no small thing to pummel a city official into a bloody, quivering pulp on a stage in front of three hundred of the city’s bravest public servants. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen every day. Or ever.

Of course, it’s no small thing to grab a firefighter’s ass, either.

They whisked us both off the stage and bandaged his face and my hand while the emcee tried to get everybody to sit back down and finish their desserts. The police came, but Heath Thompson refused to press charges. “It’s fine, it’s fine,” he kept saying through his swollen lips. “Just let her go.”

I bet he wanted them to let me go. There were news cameras out in the lobby. And a thousand bucks says I wasn’t the only thing he had to hide.

In the end, they snuck us both out the back door. I don’t know what kind of strings he pulled, but nothing about it showed up in the papers. I’m not sure, ultimately, if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

Later that night, after I was home, and had showered and bandaged up my hand in my quiet apartment, Hernandez showed up at my door.

I saw him through the peephole—holding my cell phone in one hand and my plaque in the other. In all the commotion, I’d left them behind.

It took me a minute to undo all the dead bolts. When I swung the door open, he held out the plaque—tied in a plastic bag.

“It’s pretty bloody,” he said.

I nodded as I took it. Then I reached for my phone, but he held it back, out of my reach.

“What just happened?” he asked, not crossing the threshold.

I looked at my phone held hostage in his hand. I shrugged.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Do you want me to stay for a bit?”

I shook my head.

“You knew that guy in high school?”

I nodded again.

Hernandez assessed me for what felt like a long time. Then he said, “Am I guessing right that he has something to do with why you never date anybody?”

I held his gaze until he had his answer.

Then he nodded, like, Okay. He let out a definitive sigh. “Nice work, by the way. They took him to the hospital.”

I gave a tiny little smile. “I try.”

“My offer still stands, you know,” Hernandez said.

“Offer for what?”

He gave a little shrug. “For company. Actual company.”

I knew he meant well. But I shook my head. “I’m better always on my own.”

Next, still holding my phone, he opened his arms to offer a hug. “Come on. Bring it in. If anybody ever needed a hug, it’s you.”

I would have said no to that, too. But just then, my phone rang.

That was it. The moment was over. He held out the phone to me, I took it—and then I used it to salute a farewell before I re-dead-bolted the door and answered it.

Three

IT WAS MY mother. On the phone.

“Thank you for answering,” she said.

I closed my eyes. “It was an accident.”

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

“I figured,” I said.

She’d been after me for weeks, and I’d been avoiding her—insisting to myself that I was legitimately too busy to talk.

Her first call came in while I was at work, during one of the busiest shifts I’d had in weeks. We’d run nonstop calls for a suicide attempt in a high school bathroom (failed), a structure fire in an abandoned warehouse (arson), a sushi chef with a severed fingertip (reattached in the ER), and a cow wandering loose in a residential neighborhood (adorable).

By the time I went off shift at seven the next morning, I had not even looked at my phone, much less listened to the messages from my semi-estranged mother.

I had too much else to do.

Plus, I didn’t want to talk to her.

If she really needs to talk to me, I decided, she’ll call back.

Which she did.

She called back the next day while I was folding laundry, but I let it go to voicemail.

She called again while I was out on a run. Then again while I was at the grocery store.

Honestly, at some point, it got a little stalkerish.

“What do you need?” I asked, when she finally had me.

She took a breath. “I need to ask a really, really big favor of you.”

I braced myself for the question. Whatever it was, the answer was no.

“It’s going to sound very abrupt,” she went on, “but that’s partly because it’s hard to get ahold of you and I’m afraid you’re going to hang up any second.”

She was right. I might hang up any second.

She took a breath. Then, in a burst: “I need you to come to Massachusetts and live with me.”

I blinked.

“Just for a while,” she added. “Not forever! A year at the most.”

“A year?”

“At the most.”

I was stunned by the question. Stunned that she had even asked it—or thought to ask it. We were not estranged, exactly, but we sure as hell weren’t close. It was such a ridiculous, never-gonna-happen thing to propose, I couldn’t believe she’d even said the words. “I’m not moving to Massachusetts, Diana. That’s bananas.”

I hadn’t called her “Mom” in years. Ten years, to be exact. Not since the day she’d walked out on me and my dad. The same day I’d started calling my father “Ted.”

At first, it was just to annoy them, to say that if they wanted to be treated like parents, they’d have to act like parents and stay miserably together. But the longer they stayed apart, the more it became a way of turning them into adults of no special significance that I just happened to know.

By this point, they were just Diana and Ted to me. I could barely imagine that they’d ever been anyone else.

“I’m serious,” Diana said.

“You can’t be.”

“Don’t give me your answer right away,” she said. “Take some—”