At first you barely feel it. Adrenaline distracts you.

Then it hits.

Despite it all, after we got off shift, all the guys were heading to Boston to check on Owen. The chief and the captain were already there—had gone straight from the scene. I headed toward my truck a few steps ahead of the guys, but Tiny and Six-Pack followed me and climbed in the passenger side without even asking.

We drove in silence. The sky drizzled rain the whole way, and I remember thinking how strangely loud the wipers sounded. I’d never noticed how loud they were before.

The captain had sent group texts to our entire shift several times with updates, but they were vague: The rookie’s heart rate and breathing had stabilized, but he had a collapsed lung. They were keeping him in a medically induced coma for the foreseeable future. They were going to treat him in the hyperbaric chamber and then take him to the ICU.

My brain jolted around from thought to thought. I’d see the rookie, sleeping safe and alive in my bed, and then the channel would skip to his melted mask and his smoking gear. I’d feel the memory of his mouth on mine, and then I’d flip to the moment when I tubed him. When panic threatened to freeze my chest, I’d focus on the good signs. “We’ve got air,” the medic had said.

We had air. We had a pulse.

As far as I knew, that was still true. Now I just needed to get to Boston.

I held Owen in the front of my mind, as if that might help him somehow.

But somewhere in the back of my mind, other questions waited to be answered.

Why had we gone into that building at all? What could DeStasio have been thinking? What the hell just happened?

There was no “little boy” in the fire. I’d dreaded finding a body all day, but there was never any sign of a child. Had DeStasio hallucinated it? Had he panicked? He’d fought way too many fires to be fooled by a shadow, and it left me with a question I couldn’t answer.

What, exactly, had DeStasio seen in that window?

* * *

BY THE TIME we stepped off the elevator at Mass General in Boston, the waiting room was packed standing room only with Owen’s extended family, the entire guest list from his parents’ party—from sisters to cousins to friends called “uncle”—plus about fifty retired firefighters right out of Central Casting in their FD shirts and dad jeans.

Friends of Big Robby’s, I supposed.

I remember it now as a blur of navy-blue station shirts, overgrown mustaches, Dunkin’ Donuts cups, and cigarettes.

Could you smoke in the hospital waiting room?

No.

Did those ornery old firefighters give a shit?

Hell, no.

The wives were all on one side of the room, sitting in chairs, leaning toward each other, talking and gabbing and worrying. The guys were all crammed in the hallway, standing close, faces somber.

I was the last one off the elevator, and after the guys had melded themselves into the group, I looked up to see the whole crowd fall quiet to stare at me.

Like, no talking, no coughing, no moving. Except the one person who half-whispered, “There she is.”

She? Only one “she” had just stepped into the room.

At first, I wondered if maybe they recognized me as the drunk girl from the party, and now my identity as a firefighter was being revealed.

But then I remembered I was a smoke-stained mess.

I hadn’t showered or changed. My skin was smeared gray with soot, and my shirt was stained and blotchy with salt. My hair was matted. I reeked of smoke and sweat and muck. My uniform was damp in some places and soaked in others from sweat and hose water.

I looked nothing—at all—like the girl who had showed up with Owen that night.

I felt nothing at all like her, either.

My next thought, looking at all those stricken faces, was that Owen must have died.

I held my breath.

But then the captain pushed through the crowd, came up to me, clamped his arm around my shoulders, and steered me off in the other direction down the hall.

“Let’s talk,” he said.

“Is he okay?”

The captain sensed my anxiety. “He’s fine,” he said, and I closed my eyes, and my whole body felt like it was full of water. “Well,” the captain corrected, “not fine. They’ve had him down in the hyperbaric chamber since he got here, but they just brought him up for the night. We’ll see how he does for a while. He’s got edema of the upper trachea and second-degree burns on the face, a couple of broken ribs, and a collapsed lung.”

“So,” I said, “the opposite of fine.” More like fighting for his life in the ICU.

“He’s a strong kid,” the captain said. “He’s got everything to live for.”

I had a sinking feeling. “What’s the prognosis?”

The captain let out a long sigh. “Maybe fifty-fifty. He needs to make it through the night.”

I took a minute to concentrate on breathing. How did it work again? In, then out—or the other way around?

The captain gave my shoulders a final, awkward squeeze and then released me. “Good thing DeStasio caught that cyanide situation, huh?”

I looked up. “DeStasio?”

“If he hadn’t caught it,” the captain went on, clearly trying to stay positive, “we’d be facing a whole different deal right now.”

“DeStasio didn’t catch it,” I said. “I caught it.”

The captain frowned at me, like I’d taken leave of my senses. “Hanwell,” the captain said, like I needed to stop playing around, “DeStasio already filed his report.”

Was that supposed to explain anything? “Okay,” I said.

“He emailed it to me from his hospital room. I read it on my phone.”

“Why did DeStasio even fill out the report?” I asked. “He wasn’t the ranking medic on scene.”

“He was the senior firefighter,” the captain said, as if that mattered.

“What did his report say?”

The captain studied my face. “It says that he identified symptoms of cyanide poisoning while still inside the structure, and he instructed you to administer the antidote as soon as possible.”

I actually shook my head to try to clear it. “That’s not true. I’m the one who recognized the cyanide poisoning.”

“That’s not what the report says.”

“Then it’s incorrect.”

“Are you saying DeStasio filed a false report?”

That would’ve been a hell of an accusation. “I’d have to see it,” I said. “Maybe he was disoriented from his injury.”

“He seemed pretty coherent to me,” the captain said.

“Can I see the report?”

The captain shook his head. Then he gave a quick glance down the hall at all the people milling around the waiting room.

“That’s what I want to give you a heads-up about, Hanwell,” he said then. He took a step closer and lowered his voice. “It’s pretty damning.”

I frowned. “Damning?”

“You made a lot of mistakes today—rookie mistakes, really. I’m surprised at you. And though I’m sure you never meant to—”

I broke in. “What mistakes? I didn’t make any mistakes!”