Things You Save in a Fire - Katherine Center Page 0,111

in the world.

I caught my breath, and then I held it.

He looked up and met my eyes.

“Hey, rookie,” I said.

“Hey, Cassie.”

His voice was hoarse from the tube. His face was still burned, a little red in places, but not bad. His hair was adorably mussed.

He reached out his hand over the bedrail, and I took it.

But then I heard Colleen. “What’s she doing here? I told you I don’t want that girl in here.”

I looked up and saw her face, and I knew the captain had been right. She had not been coping well. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her hair was limp. She clearly hadn’t slept in a week.

“It’s okay,” the captain said. “We brought her.”

Colleen glared at him. “Why would you do that?”

“We were wrong, Colleen,” the captain said. “DeStasio filed a false report. She’s not the reason your son got hurt. She’s actually the reason he survived.”

Colleen looked me over, suspicious.

“You remember when DeStasio hurt his back in that roof collapse?” the captain asked.

Nods and murmurs all around.

“Looks like he got hooked on some of the painkillers they gave him. Then, after Tony died, it got worse. And then Annette left him, and it got even worse. Bad enough that his judgment was off. Bad enough that he started lying. Bad enough that he hallucinated the boy in the fire. He dragged the rookie into that structure, and she”—the captain gestured at me—“dragged him back out. She recognized the cyanide poisoning. She put her own life at risk to find the rookie—unconscious, with his PASS device sounding—under the rubble. She administered the antidote, and she tubed him on scene when he was unconscious and unresponsive with no air and no pulse.”

He made me sound pretty great.

“I’m telling you, Colleen,” the captain went on, “if this girl hadn’t been watching out for him, we wouldn’t be at a hospital right now, we’d be at a funeral.”

Colleen stared at me for a second.

Then she made her way around the end of the rookie’s bed, pushing through the crowd. When she got to me, her face was covered with tears. She pulled me into a full-body hug and didn’t let go. I could feel her trembling. She held on and whispered, “Thank you,” in my ear.

I hugged her back with one arm, but I kept hold of the rookie’s hand with the other.

“Wait a second,” one of the rookie’s sisters said, watching the scene. “Isn’t that Christabel?”

Colleen let me go to get a look.

The captain shook his head. “She’s Cassie.”

“She’s both,” the rookie said, his voice raspy, and everybody turned to stare at him. “She is both the best firefighter on our shift”—he met the captain’s eyes, and then looked over at his folks—“and my date to the anniversary party.”

“It wasn’t a date,” I said to him, giving him an eyes-only smile.

“It didn’t start out as a date,” he said, a little flirty, “but it sure wound up that way in the end.”

The guys on the crew started whooping and cheering.

I looked down.

“We thought the coast was clear,” the rookie said to the room, “but then the captain showed up.”

The captain stared at me. “Hanwell was the drunk girl?”

Owen nodded. “Yep. Except not drunk. Just pretending so you wouldn’t recognize her.”

“It worked,” the captain said, impressed.

“We gave her a false name so word wouldn’t get back to the station.”

Everybody in the room got that. Every single person there knew what a scandal that would have been. Firefighters didn’t date.

“But why would you even have brought her, son? Why take the risk?”

The rookie looked around at everybody, like, Duh. And if it embarrassed him to say this, to admit it out loud for everybody to hear, he sure didn’t show it: “Because I’m crazy in love with her,” he said with a shrug. “I have been since the first day.”

The room went quiet.

Then everybody at once seemed to look down at us holding hands.

Then the guys all burst out cheering, slapping each other on the back like we’d all just won the lottery.

“It was all those blood draws,” Six-Pack called out.

“It was when we duct-taped them to the pole!”

“Or when we trapped ’em on the roof.”

Here’s what surprised me: how cheerful the guys were about it. They seemed so pleased at the idea of Owen and me—and so eager to take the credit. All this time, I’d expected to be reprimanded, at the minimum, and probably more like shunned, if we were found out. But the guys were all for it.