I didn’t respond to that, just leaned back against the seat, trying not to let my mind drift back to the last time I’d been in the rookie’s truck with him.

“Let’s talk about something else,” I said, when the silence had gone on too long.

“Like what?”

“Anything. Anything distracting.”

“There is actually something I need to share with you.”

“Share?” I asked. That would be distracting. Firemen didn’t share.

“It’s relevant to our positions here.”

“Our positions?” I didn’t look back. “You mean me, the desperately overqualified and yet somehow underrated newcomer—and you, the rookie who wants my job?”

“Yes.”

I looked out the window. “Bring it on, pal.”

“First of all,” he went on, “I want you to know that I know that you are a better firefighter than I am.”

That caught my attention.

“I know it,” he went on. “Everybody knows it. If it were up to me, I’d just back out of this whole situation and let you have your rightful place.”

“Great,” I said.

“But I can’t.”

“It’s not up to you?” I asked.

“Not entirely.”

“Who’s it up to?”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

“Okay,” I said. “Talk.”

But he hesitated. “I’m about to tell you something I’ve never told anybody.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” I said.

“I think I want to. Have wanted to for a while, actually,” he said.

“You’ve been wanting to tell me your biggest secret for a while?”

“Someone, at least. But when I started thinking about who I could trust—you were at the top of the list. Actually, you were the list. Just the whole list.”

The whole list? I squinted at him. “Parents?”

“Not for this.”

“Sisters?”

“Nope.”

“Friends?”

“You’re my friend, aren’t you?”

“Friend-slash-enemy.”

“Fair enough.”

He was stalling. “Out with it, then.”

“Okay,” he said. He adjusted his hands on the wheel. “When I was a kid, I used to hang out with these two boys from my neighborhood. I was the youngest of a bunch of kids, and all our parents worked, and these kids and I just kind of ran around all summer pretty much unsupervised. We didn’t misbehave, we just did kid stuff. Looked for bottle caps. Collected sticks. Set up toy soldiers. But our favorite thing to do was set little fires and put them out—and it was especially my favorite thing to do because my dad was a firefighter and so the other boys, even though they were older, totally deferred to my expertise.”

“Okay,” I said, wondering what any of this might have to do with me.

“Anyway, there was a warehouse district just past our neighborhood with lots of abandoned buildings. We weren’t supposed to go there. Our moms had drawn a line at Battle Street that we were never, ever supposed to cross. So of course we crossed it all the time.”

“Of course.”

“And one day, one of us—and I’m not even sure, honestly, who it was—decided we should set a matchbox on fire and toss it through the window of one of the empty warehouses.”

I felt a tightness in my chest. This was not going to end well.

“I was eight,” Owen went on. “My details are really fuzzy, but we slid open the drawer of a matchbox, and then we tilted the matches up out of it and closed it again just enough to hold the matchsticks out, in a spray. And then we lit them. And then one of us tossed the whole thing through a broken window, and we took off running.”

This was starting to ring some bells for me. This story sounded familiar.

“What were we thinking? What were we expecting? What were our goals? I think we hoped the building would shoot up like a Fourth of July firework.

“We’d played in that warehouse before, lots of times,” he went on. “The ground floor was empty, for the most part. I’ve thought about it so often, and I can’t imagine how the matches didn’t just burn themselves out on the concrete floor.”

“But they didn’t.”

He shook his head. “They didn’t. Turns out, it was an old paper factory.”

I turned to look at him.

Oh God. I knew that fire. Everybody knew that fire.

I turned to him and met his eyes. As soon as I did, he knew I knew.

I lowered my voice—for no reason. “We’re talking about the Boston Paper Company fire?”

He nodded.

“You started the Boston Paper Company fire?” I asked.

He nodded again, then went on. “Walking home at sunset, we saw it. There was fire coming out of every window, black smoke everywhere, and a funnel-shaped tornado of fire rising from the roof. Every company in the city was called to that fire. The streets were closed off. They had to turn off the electricity to ten city blocks. It was unstoppable. The upper stories were all filled with reams of paper—dry, brittle paper. We watched it burn. We could feel the heat. It sounded like a freight train—so loud, I could feel the roar on my skin.”

“I remember. It was too hot for water. It had to burn itself out.”

He nodded. “And when the walls finally collapsed, they took the surrounding buildings down with them.”

“A firefighter was killed by one of the falling walls.”

The rookie nodded. “But not just any firefighter,” he said. “My uncle.”

A long sigh seeped out of me. Not just any firefighter. His uncle.

He ran a hand through his hair. “An eyewitness said she’d seen two boys running from the warehouse—not three, two. The other boys were brothers, and their mother watched them staring endlessly at the coverage and somehow, in that way moms have, she just knew. She got them to confess, but they never ratted me out. Nobody looked for a third kid. The official story was ‘two boys.’ The media circus was so insane, they wound up moving away—down to Florida, I think.”

“And you never told anybody you’d been there.”

He shook his head.

“That’s why it took you so long to join up. Even with your dad pushing.”

He tapped on the steering wheel. “It was like that day sealed me into an impossible fate. To spend the rest of my life avoiding everything about fires—and to be duty-bound to join the fire service.”

“Why are you duty-bound to join?”

A little shrug. “My dad wants me to.”

“It’s your apology,” I said.

“It’s the shittiest apology ever, but it’s all I’ve got.”

I studied him a second. “You just want to bake cookies.”

“Pretty much.”

“But you can’t. Or you think you can’t.”

“I brought my dad indescribable grief.”

“Are you atoning for the fire?”

He gave the tiniest shrug. “He’s still grieving, in a way, my dad. Even now. If there’s anything I can do, I have to do it.”