“You want to go check on the guy who stalked you, lied about you, and ended your career?” she said.

“I’d been planning to go over there anyway,” I said, nodding at the turn of events. “But the plan was to yell at him.”

“Maybe you could bring him some soup instead.”

Safe to say, I had a lot of mixed emotions toward DeStasio at that moment. But I knew him too well to just decide he was evil and leave it at that. It was unequivocally not okay that he was taking it all out on me, but I could know that and also know that he was in pain. Both could be true at the same time.

I wasn’t sure if he deserved my compassion, but I did know I wanted to be the kind of person who would offer it. It’s not the easy moments that define who we are. It’s the hard ones.

DeStasio was clearly at the end of his rope. The addiction, the losses. There was nothing left of his life but smoldering rubble. I tried to imagine being him—being in that situation—and then having somebody like me show up at the department to break apart the last bricks in the foundation.

In his shoes, I might have made some bad choices, too.

Though probably not that bad.

“I think,” I said carefully, “that I’ve got a workable plan. First I’ll go over and punch him in the jaw. Then I’ll force him to stand face-to-face with his cruel, stupid behavior and hold him accountable. Then I’ll give him some homemade soup. Just to cover all the bases.”

“You’re forgetting something,” Diana said.

I glanced over and shook my head.

“What are you going to do after you yell at him—before you give him the soup?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I think you do know,” Diana said, setting her little bird on the dashboard. Then she reached over, put a hand on mine, and said, “You’re going to forgive him.”

I shook my head. “I’m still bad at forgiveness,” I said.

“Well, then,” she said. “This is a great chance to practice.”

Twenty-eight

DESTASIO DID NOT answer his door.

I stood on his porch with a massive thermos of beef-and-vegetable soup on my hip, and I knocked and knocked.

Something didn’t feel right. His sedan was parked carefully in the driveway.

I set the soup down on the steps and went to the window to peer in.

The inside was dark. The place was a mess—papers everywhere, trash, several meals’ worth of old plates of food on the dining table. Suspicions about DeStasio’s quality of life confirmed: He was not doing well.

That’s when I spotted him at the far end of the living room, laying back in a recliner.

He wasn’t just ignoring me. He was unconscious. The skin around his lips was blue.

When you’ve seen it enough times, you just know.

He’d OD’d.

I ran to grab the trauma kit in my car, and then, before I broke out the window, I went ahead and tried the front door. It was unlocked. Something a firefighter would do—make it easy for the medics when they discovered the body.

I got to him in seconds, and he was bluer up close than he had seemed from the window. There was a note on the table next to him with two words on it: I’m sorry.

I started an IV push of Narcan, which is an antidote to opiates. It’s amazing stuff, really. Seconds after you give it, the patient wakes up—a little groggy, but completely fine. If you give it in time.

That’s what happened with DeStasio.

He opened his eyes. Blinked a second. Took a few deep breaths.

It was that easy.

Then he looked at me. “What are you doing here?”

“Saving your life,” I said. “Apparently.”

I picked up his note and showed it to him. If I’d had my mother’s origami skills, I might have made it into a bird.

“That’s private,” DeStasio said.

Underneath the note was a sealed envelope addressed to Captain Jerry Murphy. I stared at it for a second as I took note of his handwriting: The T in “Captain” looked like an X.

It was one thing to have guessed it, but quite another to know for sure. I felt a spark of anger burn through me. It had been him. All along.

I held it up. “Is this private, too?”

He studied my face. He could tell I knew. “Get out of my house,” DeStasio said.

“I just saved you. Do you have any idea how lucky you are that I showed up when I did? Another hour and there’d have been no bringing you back.”

“I didn’t want to be saved.”

“Too fucking bad.”

DeStasio looked over at the wall and kept his eyes there.

“You don’t want to be saved? You think you can just take a pass on all your consequences? You almost killed us all. The rookie’s still in the ICU—in a coma.”

“I’ve seen the texts.”

“And then you lied about it. You lied about me, and everybody believed you. The guys believed you. The rookie’s parents believed you, and now I can’t even get into the hospital to see how he’s doing. The captain believed you, and now I’m suspended, and my career’s probably over, and they’ve told me to get a lawyer. But we both know the truth, don’t we?”

“Get out of my house, or I’m calling the cops. You want an arrest on your record, too?”

“Call the cops! I’ve got nothing to lose! What’ll you tell them? ‘A mean lady just saved my useless life’?”

DeStasio closed his eyes.

I waved the envelope for the captain at him. “Is this your confession?”

“You wish.”

“But that’s not all. It wasn’t just one bad day. You’ve been stalking me for weeks. Messing with my locker. Slashing my tires.” I pointed at the T on the envelope. “This is terrible stalking. Your handwriting’s totally obvious. I could have done a better job of stalking me than you did. This is Stalking 101! Cut the letters out of newspaper headlines!” I said it like, Duh.

DeStasio wouldn’t look at me.

I leaned closer. “You stood outside my dying mother’s house and threw a brick through her window.”

“I didn’t know she was dying.”

“What is wrong with you, man?” I shook my head. “Firefighters are supposed to be the good guys.”

DeStasio was quiet for so long, I was starting to think he was about to share something honest about what he’d been going through the past years. Instead, he went with anger and blame. “The department is the only thing I have,” he said. “And you took it from me.”

“I wasn’t trying to take it from you,” I said.

“But you did.”

So he wanted to make it all my fault. “Why couldn’t we share it?”

“Just by coming here, you changed things. The station I loved disappeared.”

I gave him a look. “That’s a bit extreme, don’t you think?”

“You walked in, all ladylike—”

Now I was offended. “I am hardly ladylike.”

“And you changed everything.”

“Um,” I said, counting off on my fingers, “the building was still there, the people were still there. Even the porn was still there.”