Echoes in the Ashes

Chapter4

Chapter Four: Eleven Minutes

"Moss." Brett's voice was flat, the voice he used when there was no time to soften anything. "You seeing the news?"

"I'm seeing it."

"Los Vangees jumped two ridgelines in the last hour. It's in the resorts now, it's in the residential streets. State's activated mutual aid across four counties, and we're on the list." A pause, the sound of something shuffling on Brett's end — a duffel bag, a jacket. "All available personnel roll out oh-two-hundred. That's ninety minutes, Derek."

"I'll be there."

"I mean it when I say this might be the worst one we've ever seen." Brett's voice dropped, softer now, almost careful. "I've got guys calling their kids right now who haven't spoken to them in months. Say your goodbyes properly tonight, Derek. However that looks for you."

"Understood."

"You good?"

Derek looked down at his split knuckles, at the blood drying along the seam of his own thumb. "I'm good, Brett."

"Ninety minutes." The line went dead.

Derek stood in the hallway with the phone still against his ear, the dial tone humming into nothing, and thought about what saying goodbye properly was supposed to look like for a marriage that had died an hour ago in a kitchen that smelled like garlic and wagyu. It was a strange thing, to be told to make peace with someone on the same night you'd finally stopped wanting to.

He thought he owed her that much anyway. Three years deserved some kind of ending, even a bad one. He had, after everything, still been raised to believe that you didn't just disappear on people — that whatever else was broken, you said the thing out loud before you left the room.

He walked back toward the kitchen doorway. Erin was laughing at something Mike said, her hip against the counter, utterly at ease, as if the last twenty minutes had happened to someone else.

She caught sight of him in the doorway and her smile flattened into irritation.

"You're still here?"

That was it. That was the whole goodbye.

Derek turned and walked to the bedroom without a word.

He gave himself eleven minutes.

He didn't need more than that. A duffel bag from the closet — his, not the one they'd bought together in Santorini, the ours had died somewhere between the wine glasses and the wagyu — his boots, his father's old watch that had somehow survived three years of Erin quietly suggesting he "upgrade to something that photographs better," two changes of clothes, his birth certificate and passport from the lockbox, the thin folder of fire academy commendations he kept because his mother had once told him, before she was gone too, that she was proud of them.

He paused at the dresser, hand hovering over a framed photograph — the two of them on a beach somewhere, years ago, both of them laughing at something neither of them could probably remember anymore. He almost left it. Some old, stubborn part of him wanted to bring it, the way you'd bring a scar you'd earned honestly. Then he thought of the apron, the wristband, the word exchange landing in that kitchen like a verdict, and he set the frame face-down on the dresser and walked away from it.

Everything else in the room — the furniture, the art, the curated shelf of books neither of them had actually read — belonged to a life that had never truly been his. He stood in the doorway for a moment with the bag over his shoulder and did the math without meaning to: eleven minutes to pack three years.

That told him everything he needed to know about how much of it had ever really been him.

He stood there a moment longer than he needed to, half expecting footsteps behind him, half expecting her to appear in the hallway and say something — anything, even something cruel — that might have made the leaving harder, or easier, he genuinely couldn't have said which. No footsteps came. The laughter from the kitchen had settled into low conversation, the two of them talking over dinner like a couple who had nowhere else to be, as if a man wasn't quietly dismantling three years of his life twenty feet away.

He found that, more than anything else that night, unbearable.

On his way out, he stopped at the small dish by the front door where the house keys lived. He worked his key off the ring — the metal was cold, and it took longer than it should have, his hands still not quite steady — and set it down without a sound.

He didn't look back at the kitchen. He didn't need to hear the laughter to know it hadn't stopped.

Derek arrived at the station forty minutes before the deploy time, duffel bag over one shoulder, a bruise already blooming along his jaw where he'd caught the doorframe stumbling in earlier that night.

Brett took one look at him and stopped checking gear.

"What happened to your face?"

"Door disagreed with me."

"Derek."

"I'm fine, Brett." He dropped the bag by his locker and started pulling gear off the rack with hands that moved faster than they needed to. "If I don't make it back from this one, at least Erin won't have to bother clearing out my stuff. I already did it for her."

Brett didn't laugh. He studied Derek for a long moment — the set of his jaw, the split lip, the eyes that wouldn't quite land on anything — and clearly understood that something had broken tonight that had nothing to do with the hotel fire.

"That's not a door," Brett said quietly. "That's a person's knuckles I'm looking at."

"Wasn't a person. Was a door. Ask the door."

Brett exhaled slowly through his nose, the closest he came to a laugh when he didn't actually find something funny. Twenty years on the job had taught him the difference between a joke a man wanted you to push on and a joke a man was using to hold himself together, and this was clearly the second kind.

He didn't push. Not yet. Not with ninety people about to load into engines bound for the worst fire any of them had ever seen, and not thirty seconds before Christian Browning's shoes started clicking across the bay floor toward them.

"Get your gear checked," Brett said instead, quiet. "We roll in forty. Whatever this is — it waits."

Derek nodded and kept moving, grateful — more grateful than he could have said out loud — for a man who knew exactly when not to ask.