Bruce didn’t remember half of the streets between Jac’s place and Stanley’s subdivision. He sat there for a long moment, hands locked around the steering wheel, feeling the tremor in his fingers finally catch up with him. The car ticked and creaked as it cooled. Somewhere in the distance—beyond the squat shapes of apartment buildings, beyond the low skyline of Billings—ambulance lights still flashed lavender and red against the underside of a smudged night sky. The fire at MentaTech wasn’t keeping him from going home. He was.

  Bruce exhaled, slow and deliberate, and told himself the truth. If you’d died tonight, she would’ve gone to bed thinking you hated her. The thought landed with more weight than the blast wave had. He put the Caprice into drive and pulled away from the curb.

  Billings at night had its own kind of quiet. Not the kind he’d grown up with out on the plains—where the wind had room to run and the stars did all the talking—but a tighter, thin-blooded quiet. The streets emptied, the shops shuttered, but there was always some distant noise: a train on the edge of town, a drunk argument outside a bar, an engine idling in front of a house where it shouldn’t be idling.

  Tonight, the wind had teeth and the sky still glowed faintly to the west, a rusty orange halo above the tree line. From certain angles, the lingering smoke made the whole city look like someone had put a glass dome over it and started slowly filling it with ghosts.

  Bruce turned onto his block and killed the radio. He hadn’t realized it was on in the first place, just a low murmur he’d tuned out hours ago. The sudden absence of noise made everything sharper: the crunch of his tires over thin frost, the soft whine of the power steering, the tap-tap of a neighbor’s loose gutter strap in the wind.

  The house was there, where he’d left it. Brown siding, too small front porch, one sagging evergreen in the yard that never looked right in any season. The front room lamp was on. Not the porch light. That told him enough.

  He sat in the car with the engine idling, fingers still locked on the wheel, and tried to picture another life. One where he’d come down this street in a different car, with less mileage and fewer stains on the upholstery. One where he’d pull into this driveway and a kid would be asleep on the couch with the TV still on, and Karen would wave from the kitchen, and none of the things he’d seen would be lodged behind his eyes like shrapnel.

  That was the dumb thing about tonight. For a second, when the shockwave hit, he’d thought: maybe this is easier. Maybe this is the out.

  It hadn’t felt easier now. He turned off the engine. The silence landed like a verdict.

  “Go inside,” he muttered, just to prove his throat still worked. “Don’t be a coward.”

  He grabbed his coat from the passenger seat, hauled himself out into the cold, and walked up to the door.

  Karen was in the kitchen. He knew before he saw her. He knew by the light: not bright enough to be the overhead, just the small lamp that lived on the far counter, and the faint blue line under the hallway where the TV reflected on the wall. He stepped inside and shut the door behind him, the lock sliding home with a soft metallic snick that sounded a little too final.

  The smell hit him next. Coffee, old and strong. The pot must have been on for a while.

  “Bruce?”

  Her voice came from the kitchen doorway, tentative, as if she didn’t quite trust the house to deliver him.

  He shrugged out of his coat and hung it on the hook, suddenly aware of the soot stains on the cuffs, the small tear at the shoulder where debris had caught him. His ribs ached. His left knee still felt unreliable. He rolled his shoulders back and turned toward her.

  Karen stood in the kitchen doorway in sweatpants and one of his old college T-shirts, sleeves shoved up to her elbows. Her hair was pulled back into a messy knot, strands loose around her face. She looked tired in the way that never translated to television: red-rimmed eyes, a sheen of worry that clung to her skin, like the whole day had been sweating through her.

  She held a mug in both hands, fingers wrapped white around the ceramic. For a heartbeat, they just stood there, looking at each other across the gulf of the living room.

  Then she let out a breath that sounded like it had been held since the sirens started. “I saw it,” she said quietly. “On the news. And… out there.”

  She tipped her head toward the window. Bruce looked past her shoulder and saw it: that low orange smear on the horizon, still there, still faintly pulsing as engines came and went.

  “They said MentaTech,” she went on. “They said ‘possible gas leak’ and ‘no fatalities reported yet.’ And then they said ‘ongoing investigation’ and I knew you were there. Or near it. Or…” She swallowed. Her fingers tightened on the mug. “I didn’t know if you were coming back at all.”

  Bruce stared at the floor for a moment, then nodded.

  “I was there,” he said. “Got out. Jac too.”

  The words felt small, but they were all he had.

  Karen’s shoulders sagged just a fraction. She set the mug on the side table by the couch, not taking her eyes off him.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Bruised.” He forced a shrug. “Dirtier than I like to be. Nothing that’ll keep me off my feet.”

  “One of these days,” she said, her voice thinning, “something is going to keep you off your feet.”

  He didn’t have an answer for that. He had seen too many bodies that thought otherwise.

  He took a step toward her, then another. Close enough to see the small tremor at the corner of her mouth, the way her eyes tracked the marks on his shirt, as if cataloguing the distance between him and a disaster.

  “I almost went back to the station,” he said. “Thought about it. The couch is warm enough. The files stack up nicely. No one yells when you turn the light on at two in the morning.”

  A ghost of a smile tugged at her lips. “You’ve never seen yourself turn on a light at two in the morning.”

  Bruce huffed a laugh that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Maybe not.” He rubbed a thumb along a grime streak on his palm and looked up, forcing himself to meet her eyes.

  “Tonight I thought…” He started, then stopped. The words were heavier than they ought to be. “I thought, if I ate it in that lab, this is what you’d be stuck with. The last thing between us, that shouting match about Franklin and how I don’t live here anymore. You’d get a flag and a folded-up regret.”

  Something in Karen’s face crumpled, a small, sharp motion like a collapse on a fault line.

  “That’s not—” She broke off, closing her eyes briefly as she steadied herself. When she opened them again, they shone more sharply. “Bruce, I need to say this before I lose my nerve. About… what I said. About ‘being with Franklin.’”

  He braced without meaning to.

  She saw it, and shook her head. “No. Just—let me say it. I wanted to hurt you. And I knew that would.” She swallowed, her throat working. “I wasn’t sleeping with Franklin. I’m not. There was no motel key, no secret lipstick, no… anything. I see him at work. I talk to him. Sometimes too much. Sometimes about you. That’s it, Bruce. Words. Not… hands.”

  His chest loosened a fraction. Not all the way. But something in him unclenched.

  “So you weren’t lying,” he said slowly, “about… cheating.”

  She grimaced, glancing away. “Not in the way I made it sound. I… I didn’t lie. But I made it sound worse. Maybe because it feels worse in my head. Maybe because it’s easier to pretend the rule is simple. You don’t want to be alone, so you talk to someone who listens. And that feels like stepping over something, even if you never leave the room.”

  She looked back at him, and her eyes were wet now, but steady. “You were gone, Bruce. Not just on swing shift. Not just on call. You were somewhere else even when you were sitting on that couch. Do you know how many times I stopped myself from calling the station, just to see if you’d pick up? How many times I watched the door and told myself you were probably stuck on paperwork again, when you were just… choosing not to come home?”

  He did know. He’d known in that quiet, ugly way where you stack up the excuses in your head and pray no one walks around the side and looks at them from another angle.

  “I know,” he said, because there wasn’t anything else honest.

  Silence stretched between them. The house ticked faintly as the furnace cycled. Somewhere on the street, a car drove past, its headlights stroking the wall, then disappearing.

  Karen took a breath. “I’m not proud of talking to someone else,” she said. “I’m not proud of liking it when someone asked how my day was and actually waited for the answer. But I didn’t… cross that line. I just leaned on it. Hard.”

  Bruce looked at his hands. The knuckles were raw, scraped white. He thought about the line she was talking about, and all the ones he’d leaned on himself.

  “You wanted someone to see you,” he said quietly. “I made it easy not to.”

  She blinked. The admission seemed to hit her physically. She brushed a tear off her cheek with the heel of her hand, half-annoyed at it for existing.

  “You’re not the only one the job chewed on,” she muttered.

  “No,” he agreed. “I just let it keep chewing without saying anything.”

  He stepped closer, until they were almost within arm’s reach. His ribs protested; he ignored them. “Karen,” he said, and the name came out rough. “I don’t… I can’t keep doing this. Not like this. Tonight, in that lab, with the ceiling coming down and the kid screaming and the whole place trying to cook us alive, I realized something I should’ve realized a long time ago.”

  She waited, mouth pressed into a tight line, shoulders tense.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “I don’t want to die with a badge on,” he said. “Not like the ones I’ve zipped up bags around. I don’t want that to be my last uniform. I don’t want your last memory of me to be a news conference and a guy in a suit saying ‘he served.’” He swallowed, the words thick.

  “I’ve been telling myself for years that this job is the only thing holding me together. That if I let it go, there won’t be anything left worth living with. Tonight, I realized… maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe this is what’s been hollowing me out.”

  Karen’s eyes widened slightly. She lifted a hand, then let it fall, like she wasn’t sure she was allowed to touch him yet.

  “What are you saying?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “I’m saying,” he said, taking a breath that felt like stepping off a ledge, “after this case, I’m done. I’ll finish it—I owe that to the people who’ve already gone to the ground. But when it’s done, I’m hanging it up. No more homicide. No more overnight calls. No more couch at the station. I want a life that isn’t made of crime scene photos and coffee that tastes like burnt ash.”

  He held her gaze, made himself stand there and not look away when she searched his face.

  “I want a life with you,” he added. “If… you’ll still have me.”

  Karen blinked once, twice. A laugh slipped out of her, strangled and wet.

  “You can’t… you can’t drop that on me like it’s nothing, Bruce.”

  “It’s not nothing.”

  “I know,” she said quickly, a hand flying up as if to catch the words. “I know. I’ve waited ten years to hear you say anything remotely like that and somehow I still didn’t believe you ever would.”

  Her eyes overflowed now, tears slipping down without fanfare. She wiped them away impatiently.

  “I was so angry,” she went on. “About the way we lost…” She trailed off, and this time Bruce finished the thought for her.

  “Suzy,” he said.

  The name was a stone between them. For years they’d walked around it, never quite willing to pick it up.

  Karen nodded, lips pressed together. “Doctors say it wasn’t anybody’s fault,” she said. “Sometimes things happen. And I know that. I do. But there was a part of me that felt like if you hadn’t been at work that night, if you’d been there to drive me, to hold my hand, to… I don’t know. I turned that into something ugly. I let it fester. And then you buried yourself in the job and I… I buried myself in anything that made it hurt less for five minutes.”

  Bruce remembered the phone call, the way the world had dropped away under his feet while he was still standing at his desk. He remembered the drive to the hospital feeling longer than any mile he’d ever logged. He remembered the way Karen had looked at him then: not with blame, but with something raw and empty that scared him more than any suspect ever had.

  “I was angry too,” he admitted. “At the world. At you. At myself. At the badge. It was easier to be mad at a pile of paper than to sit here and listen to this house be quiet.”

  Karen let out a breath that bordered on a sob and laughed instead.

  “We’re idiots.”

  “Certified,” he said.

  For a moment they just looked at each other, all the wrong turns and quiet nights and slammed doors hanging in the air between them like smoke.

  “Do you really mean it?” she asked finally. “About quitting?”

  He nodded. “As much as I’ve meant anything. I can’t just walk away with what’s out there right now. But once this is done—once we know who did this, or as close as we can get—I’m out. I’m tired, Karen. Tired in places that don’t sleep it off. If I stay, I’m going to turn into one of those guys who sits in the bullpen and scares rookies without meaning to.”

  “He already does,” she said softly.

  He huffed. “Then maybe I’m ahead of schedule.”

  She reached for him, finally closing the space between them, and set her hand lightly against his chest, fingers brushing the scorch mark near his collarbone.

  “You scared me tonight,” she said. “The news trucks, the flames, the way that anchor said ‘no casualties reported so far’ like it was a prayer instead of a fact. I don’t want to get good at hearing that tone in people’s voices. I don’t want to become the kind of widow who can tell how bad a crime scene is by how long it takes you to call.”

  He laid his hand over hers, gentle, as if she were something he hadn’t earned. “I don’t want you to, either,” he said.

  For a moment, neither of them moved. Then she stepped in closer, closing the last inches of distance, until he could feel the warmth of her through the thin cotton of her shirt. She smelled like old coffee and laundry detergent and the faintest trace of the perfume she used to wear more often.

  She tipped her face up. “So what now?”

  He swallowed. “Now?” he said. “Now I take a shower, because I can’t feel my own skin under this layer of ash. And… if you still want me in the house by the time the hot water runs out, I get in that bed next to you. Like I should’ve been doing a long time ago.”

  Her lips twitched. “You think saying all the right things suddenly makes you charming, don’t you?” she asked.

  “I’m out of practice,” he said. “Used to interrogating people, not apologizing to them.”

  “That shows,” she said, but there was a softness around her eyes that hadn’t been there for a long time.

  She lifted her free hand and brushed the back of her fingers along his jaw. The touch was light, testing, as if she wasn’t sure whether he’d flinch. He didn’t.

  “I’m still angry,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “But I’m also glad you’re not dead.”

  “Me too,” he said. “More than I thought I’d be.”

  She let out another shaky half-laugh, then leaned in and kissed him.

  It wasn’t the kind of kiss the movies would’ve made out of it. It was slow, a little clumsy, full of hesitations they both had to push through. But there was something in it that felt like… memory. Like picking up a book they’d dropped half a chapter in and realizing the story was still there, waiting.

  When she pulled back, her eyes were wet again.

  “Go,” she said softly. “Shower. You smell like you’ve been rolling in a chimney.”

  “Part of the charm,” he muttered.

  She gave him a look that said: not tonight.

  He nodded, squeezed her hand once, and headed down the hallway.

  In the bathroom, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and almost didn’t recognize the man staring back. Soot streaked one side of his face; there was a cut along his hairline he didn’t even remember getting. His eyes looked older than he felt, but not in the way they usually did after a long shift. There was something clear behind them tonight. Or maybe he was imagining that.

  He turned on the shower and waited for the water to warm, flexing his sore fingers under the tap. The hot spray stung as it hit his shoulders, his ribs, the places where debris had knocked him around. He stepped under anyway, letting the water run black for a while as it sluiced the ash and grit down the drain.

  The noise of the water filled the room, leaving no space for sirens or screams or the brittle pop of collapsing ceiling tiles. He closed his eyes and let himself feel, just for a minute, how close he’d come to not standing here. How easily Jac could’ve gone through that floor instead of scraping by with singed hair and a bruise that would flower across her shoulder tomorrow. How easily Karen could’ve been sitting in this house alone right now, listening to the phone ring with bad news.

  He thought of Jac on that lab floor, coughing and cursing and scrambling for the door. Thought of her sitting in his passenger seat afterward, hands shaking, pretending not to notice that his were too. Thought of the way she’d looked at him when he told her to call her mother, that small flicker of something vulnerable that had nothing to do with crime scenes and everything to do with being twenty-something and realizing her world was wider and more dangerous than she’d imagined.

  She’s just a kid, he thought, pressing his palms to the tile. A good one. The job will eat her alive if she lets it. The same way it almost finished with him.

  “Not this time,” he said to the empty shower. He wasn’t sure whether he meant her or himself.

  After a while, when his skin felt mostly like skin again and the water ran clear, he shut it off and stepped out, wrapping a towel around his waist. Steam fogged the mirror completely now. He wiped a streak down the middle with his hand and saw enough of his face to know he could still pass for functional.

  He turned off the bathroom light and stepped into the dim hallway.

  The bedroom door was half-open, letting a stripe of warm light cut across the hall carpet. His chest tightened at the sight of it.

  There had been nights, years ago, when that crack of light meant something entirely different. Late homework help; bills spread out on the bed; Karen reading a paperback, waiting for him to join her. Somewhere along the way, it had become the door he eased open softly so he wouldn’t wake her when he came home too late to pretend he lived there.

  He nudged it open with his shoulder. Karen was on the bed. She’d changed while he was in the shower. The sweatpants and T-shirt were gone, replaced by something softer, simple but undeniably deliberate—a slip he barely remembered her owning, let alone wearing. The lamp on the bedside table was on, casting her in a warm, forgiving light that glossed over the tired lines at the corners of her mouth and made her look, for a moment, like the woman in their wedding pictures.

  She was lying on her side, propped up on one elbow. When he entered, she shifted, pushing herself up just enough to sit back against the headboard. Her eyes flicked over him once, taking in the bruises, the towel, the sting of the evening still clinging to his posture.

  For a second, neither of them spoke. The house felt very small and very quiet.

  “Hey,” she said at last, and her voice was softer than it had been in a long time. “You clean up alright, Detective.”

  He snorted. “Don’t tell the brass, or they’ll start expecting it.”

  She smiled, just a little. It reached her eyes this time.

  He hovered in the doorway, suddenly unsure what to do with his hands, with his weight, with himself. It was ridiculous; he’d known this woman for decades, known every version of her from giddy twenty-something to exhausted middle-of-the-night to hollowed-out grief. But there was a layer here that felt new again. Or maybe just unfamiliar from disuse.

  “You still…” He cleared his throat. “You still want me in here?”

  She tilted her head, as if considering. “I watched smoke on the horizon for an hour tonight, thinking you might already be dead,” she said. “I listened to the TV try to talk around it. I stared at that couch in the living room and imagined someone else sitting on it, telling me you’d gone down in a building I’d never set foot in. And then you walked in my front door, grumpy as ever, covered in soot and making jokes about the couch at the station.” She held his gaze, steady and unflinching.

  “So yes, Bruce,” she said quietly. “I want you in here. For as long as you’re willing to keep choosing this room over that couch.” Something eased in his chest, a knot he hadn’t consciously noticed until it started to loosen. He stepped fully into the room and closed the door behind him. The click sounded softer than the one at the front of the house.

  He crossed the room, the carpet soft under his bare feet, and sat down on the edge of the bed. For a moment he just sat there, feeling the familiar give of the mattress, the warmth radiating from her body, the quiet thump of his own heart where it sat bruised behind his ribs.

  Then he eased down beside her. She turned onto her side, facing him, and reached out, fingers brushing his chest just over the worst of the bruising. He hissed softly at the touch, then relaxed when the pain settled back into its usual dull throb.

  “Sorry,” she murmured.

  “Price of admission,” he said.

  She made a face. “Terrible line.”

  “Like I said. Out of practice.”

  Her hand slid up, fingers resting lightly against the side of his neck, thumb just beneath his jaw. He could feel the slight tremor in her touch, the way her body was still catching up with the news that he was, in fact, still alive.

  She leaned in and kissed him again. This one was deeper. Not rushed, not frantic, but layered with all the things they hadn’t said aloud until an hour ago. He kissed her back carefully, one hand lifting to rest against her hip, thumb drawing a small, unconscious circle there like he was reassuring himself she wasn’t going to vanish if he let go.

  The kiss broke slowly, breath mingling in the narrow space between them. Karen rested her forehead against his, eyes closed.

  “We can’t fix ten years in one night,” she murmured.

  “I know,” he said. “But we can start with this one.”

  Her mouth quirked into a tired smile.

  “That’s the first sane thing I’ve heard you say in weeks.”

  He smiled back, small and lopsided, the kind of smile that had nothing to do with being clever and everything to do with relief.

  Her hand slipped down to rest over his heart. He covered it with his own.

  They lay there like that for a while, close enough to feel each other breathe, the weight of the day finally beginning to slide off his shoulders. The sounds of the city outside faded to a dull hush. The glow on the horizon might as well have been on another planet.

  For the first time in too long, Bruce let himself simply exist in the same space as his wife without running mental notes on what had to be done next, which reports needed signatures, which suspects needed pressing. There would be time enough for all that tomorrow. Time enough for alleyways and bodies and the gnawing unease that someone out there was killing people in ways that made seasoned cops go quiet in the hallways.

  Tonight, he was here. In this room. In this bed. With her. He shifted just enough to slip an arm around her, drawing her closer. She came willingly, tucking herself against his chest, one hand fisted lightly in the towel at his waist as if anchoring herself.

  She was warm. She smelled like soap and coffee and the faint, remembered traces of something floral. His ribs ached where her shoulder pressed, but he didn’t move.

  “Bruce?” she said softly, into the hollow of his throat.

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t… take this back tomorrow.”

  He tightened his arm around her.

  “I won’t,” he said. “I can’t promise a lot. But I can promise that.”

  She let out a small breath, the last of the tension leaving her body as she relaxed fully against him.

  The lamp on the nightstand cast a soft, amber circle over them, pushing the shadows back just enough. After a while, she reached carefully across him and turned it off.

  The room went dim, but not empty. In the darkness, with Karen’s heartbeat thudding steadily against his chest and the distant echo of sirens finally receding into memory, Bruce closed his eyes and let sleep come.

  For the first time in days, he didn’t dream about crime scenes. He dreamed of nothing at all.