Ridiculous.

Then again, this whole situation was ridiculous.

“I was thinking,” I said, sounding more annoyed than I expected to. “You’ve heard of that?”

“Sure,” he said, frowning at me. “Huge fan of thinking.”

“What are you even doing awake?”

“Wakeful,” he said, shrugging, like, The usual. “I might go bake some chocolate chip cookies.”

I stared at him.

“Want some?” he asked. “If I do?”

Even the idea of him baking something as comforting and delightful as cookies felt annoying. “Nope,” I said.

“Really?” he said, like I was acting odd.

Later, I’d try to figure out why I felt so mad at him in this moment. I didn’t really think this whole situation was his fault. I knew he was just trying to be a friend. But that was it, right there. That was the problem. Did I want a cookie? Of course! Did I want to be able to tell him what was going on and hash it all out with a pal? Of course. But the rookie, despite being the one person I wanted to talk to, was the last person I could talk to.

Off-the-charts frustrating.

What can I say? It came out as anger.

“You’ve been acting weird all day,” he said then.

“So?” I demanded.

“So … are you okay?”

“No. Okay? I’m not okay. And no, I don’t want to talk about it, or rap it out, or have a feeling circle. Just leave me alone. Just go.”

The rookie held his hands up, like, Easy. “Hey. Okay. No problem. I’m gone.”

“And no cookies!” I called after him.

Then he actually was gone. He left the room, just like that—which I’d just asked him to do—but it still surprised me.

Alone again. I was exactly as glad that he’d left as I was disappointed.

I tried cleaning the Sharpie marks off with alcohol, but it didn’t work. Finally, after trying Windex, then WD-40, and scrubbing with steel wool and Comet, I hung the beefcake calendar from my old Austin station over the word with duct tape and called it a day.

It was a pretty good solution, covering the graffiti with Hernandez’s shirtless, bulging form. But it also made me homesick.

After that night, I struggled for weeks to hold on to my equilibrium—on runs and workouts and parkour jaunts. I struggled with it every minute of every shift. I struggled with it as I fully, solidly ignored the rookie with such vigor that it was like he didn’t even exist. And I struggled with it as we went out on call after call, helping an elderly man with chest pains, a mother who had driven her car into a ravine, a teenager who gave birth without ever having realized she was pregnant.

I couldn’t make sense of anything anymore.

It violated everything I knew about firefighters to think that one of them would stoop to such a thing.

Here’s the most essential truth about firefighting: It’s a helping profession. People get into it because they want to help others. Yes, okay, maybe they also want to wear the bunker gear, or bust things up with axes, or drive a big red truck with a siren.

But firefighters are basically good guys at heart. I’m not saying they don’t get into trouble, or have difficulty processing their feelings, or harbor a little unexamined sexism—or other isms. They’re human. They’re messy and imperfect and mistaken. At their cores, though, they’re basically good people.

This was the crux of it.

If firefighters weren’t the good guys, then maybe there just weren’t any left.

* * *

IN PRACTICE, THE weeks at work that followed were not all that different from the weeks before. I still got to work on time and did all my chores and duties with care. I still ran calls and took care of patients and brought my A-game. I still took a six-mile run every day. I still practiced parkour and studied the course whenever no one was looking. Maybe I ignored the rookie a little harder than I had before, but it wasn’t like I’d ever actively sought out his company. For various reasons.

On the surface, things probably looked about the same.

But nothing was the same.

That night with the rookie had opened me up in the most profound way. It’s like I was a flower bud on a time-lapse camera and I just exploded into petals and tenderness and color.

I keep thinking that if I’d walked into that locker room the next morning as my usual, armored self, seeing that graffiti would have smarted, yes. But it wouldn’t have shredded me like it did.

What choice did I have but to retreat after that? What choice was there but to armor back up? It was self-preservation.

But now I knew what I was missing. Now I remembered what it felt like not to be alone.

And now that I knew, it was unbearable.

But I bore it anyway. That’s what we do, isn’t it? That’s the thing I always love best about the human race: how we pick ourselves back up over and over and just keep on going.

Still, the loneliness after I turned away from the rookie was so excruciating, so physical, that I actually felt like I might wither and die.

And so, the next best thing: crochet club.

Maybe, I thought, if I soothed the loneliness elsewhere, I could find a way to be okay.

Josie and Diana were always delighted for me to join them, and they gave me a giant basket of yarn balls to wind. And even as I marveled at how low I’d sunk—winding yarn balls!—I had to admit that the softness and the rhythm of the motion were pretty soothing, after all. Especially the chenille.

To be truthful, it wasn’t just crochet club. I looked for every opportunity to be around either of them. I started showing up at the kitchen table for coffee. I helped prepare dinner. I volunteered to help Josie in her shop. When Diana invited me to go to the movies, I said yes. When she asked me to help in the garden, I did that, too. And when she hugged me, as crazy as it sounds, I hugged her right back.

It was like I was starving for human connection—and had been, all along—but I’d only now just figured that out.

My plan was to feast on friendship at home so that I’d be satiated when I got to the station.

It kind of worked.

Except that I never seemed to get satiated. The more connection I got, the more I wanted. You know, like when you take a nap, but when you wake up you’re somehow sleepier than you were before? That was me, all the time—with humanity.

To everyone’s astonishment, after Diana and Josie had failed to even coax me out of my room for so long, now they couldn’t get rid of me. To my relief, they were delighted. And they were also hell-bent on solving the Case of the Slutty Locker.

They treated it like a Nancy Drew moment, and they questioned me about each guy on the crew, trying to nail down our suspects.

“It could have been any one of them,” Diana announced one night.

“I say it was the captain,” Josie said. “He’s the one who saw her at the party giving the rookie a blowjob.”

“Can I just reiterate that I did not give the rookie a blowjob?”

“Not yet,” Josie said.

“The captain does make a good suspect,” Diana said, totally unflummoxed by the topic.

“Well,” I said, “he doesn’t think women should join the fire department.”

“That’s suspicious right there,” Josie said.