“Leave Mom out of it. And this is not about you being a woman—”

“You sure about that? Oh, and as for Mom, I will bring her into anything I want. I am not going to be like her. No goddamn way I am going to get stuck living her life of reflected glory for someone who didn’t deserve the hype.”

Tom went quiet. “I do not understand you.”

“It’s more like you don’t understand our parents.”

“Yeah, well, excuse me if I’m not in a big hurry to buy into your perspective. For one, you’re in a fucking hospital bed because you did the wrong thing in a situation where your life and the lives of others depended on you following orders. And two, thanks for taking a shit all over the two people who raised us and worked their asses off so we could end up here, arguing in this hospital. Clearly, you’re a great judge of character.”

“Whatever, Tom.” Unaware she’d sat up, she let herself fall back again on the thin pillows. “You’ve never wanted me to be your equal. Tack whatever vocabulary you want on it, that’s what’s really going on here.”

“The hell it is. You never will be like me and not because you’re a woman. It’s because you’ve got a chip on your shoulder that makes you impossible to reason with or trust on the job. But like I said, that’s over now. You’re out, Anne. Good work.”

She stared down at the bandage and felt sick about so much. “You know what’s funny? I can set my watch on you. You just have to kick me in the nuts, especially when I’m down—and don’t bother pointing out that I don’t have any. You’ve spent the last two and a half decades showing and telling me that over and over again. Your position is very clear on the subject.”

“Maybe you don’t like hearing the truth.”

“Try telling it to me, just once, and I’ll let you know what it’s like.”

There was another long, long pause. “You need to call Mom. She’s worried sick about you.”

“I don’t have the energy to help her with that.”

“Right. Because you’re having too much fun being a burden.”

“Does it look like I’m enjoying myself?”

“Call Mom.”

Once again, a standoff. And as the two of them glared across the stark room at each other, she was reminded of pretty much every single interaction they had had since she’d entered the fire academy.

With that, she and her brother had become enemies.

“Leave,” she told him. “Just get out of here. I’m tired, I hurt all over, and I’m sick of the sight of you.”

“Call Mom. That’s all I care about.”

As Tom pushed his way through the door, all of Anne’s energy funneled out of her body and she was left with a skeleton that ached covered by a bag of skin that had ants all over it. Closing her eyes, she was aware of her stomach rolling.

In the background, that alarm began beeping like it was having a seizure.

Or maybe she was having one?

Medical staff ran in, a swarm of blue and white. But as Anne thought about Danny, her brother, her job, her family, she was content to fade away and let them save her . . . or not.

She didn’t really care one way or another.

Chapter 8

And they did.

Save her, that was.

When Anne woke up the next morning, she turned her head to the window and looked out on a gray November day. It was impossible not to view the hospital room as a prison, with the wires and tubes going in and out of her as the shackles to keep her in place.

She had to pee. At least, she thought she did. Maybe it was the catheter irritating her?

Peeking under the sheets, she saw that the thing had been removed. Good to know—oh, that’s right. She’d threatened to take it out herself sometime before dawn, and when the staff had challenged her to try, she’d done it with a yank.

Lifting her left arm, she stared at the bandage and heard her brother’s voice in her head. Fear, an old, toxic friend, sidled up and started whispering all kinds of things in her ear, but even that din was drowned out by the abiding sense that she might well prefer to be dead right now.

When surrounded by flames, and no alternative, self-mutilation had seemed reasonable. Now, in this hospital room, with nothing but the postnasal drip of smoke down the back of her throat and an unseasonal first-degree “tan” on her arms, that imperative seemed a distortion of reality.

Which had condemned her to a life she couldn’t even contemplate . . . an acute nightmare of imminent death traded for a chronic one mired in lack of purpose.

Except come on, she told herself. She was used to proving them all wrong. She would come back from this. She would return to the stationhouse and her crew and her job. Her life. There were prostheses, right? There were accommodations that could be made.

There were Paralympic athletes who were every bit as strong and powerful as the so-called able-bodied. Attitude to get to the altitude, she told herself. And that shit needed to start right now because she had a long road ahead of her.

On that note, she sat up and reached for the landline phone on the bedside table. Palming the receiver, she went to—

As she brought up the stump, she felt her head spin as she realized she had no fingers to push “0” with. Freezing in place, with that receiver off the old-fashioned cradle, she couldn’t breathe . . . but then purpose brought her back to life, and wasn’t that always the case. Hitting the number with her right forefinger, she waited for an answer.

“Yes, ah—” She had to clear her throat. “What room is Danny—I mean, Daniel Maguire—in?”

When she got her answer, she hung up and sagged with relief. They didn’t give hospital rooms to corpses, so he must have lived through his surgery.

After a moment of rest, she took off all the monitoring sensors on her chest and debated removing the IV. In the end, she kept that in, considering it was the source of her morphine and on a pole that had wheels. Both were going to make ambulation easier—

The nurse who burst into the room was going so fast, her crepe-souled shoes squeaked on the linoleum as she pulled up short. “What are you doing?”

Anne gave her a talk-to-the-hand—the only hand she had left. “I’m going to the bathroom. And then I’ll be back.”

As she shifted her legs off the side of the bed and lowered her weight onto her feet, the nurse seemed confused. “Back?”

“Yeah.” She started for the bathroom. “Like as in leave and return.”

Man, her voice was hoarse, her breathing more asthmatic going up the stairs than twenty-five-year-old athlete shuffling across the floor.

“Ms. Ashburn, if you do not get back into bed, I’m going to call the attending—”

“G’head. Knock yourself out. But I’m just going to tell her the same damn thing.”

Put like that, it was clear that her and her brother shared DNA. And like Tom, she was used to ignoring people, so she limped her way across the floor. From out of the corner of her eye, she was aware of the nurse hopping up and down and talking all kinds of whatever, but who the hell cared.

She shut the bathroom door on the noise.

Over on the left, mounted over a stainless steel sink, the mirror on the wall was like a crystal ball with bad news about the future, at once utterly avoidable and completely inexorable.

Good God, she looked like an anime version of herself, assuming her character had gone through a coal mine shaft while being chased by a demon throwing compression bombs at her. Her blue eyes were too wide, and there was soot and ash still in her matted hair and all over her face and neck. The hospital johnny she had on was a mismatch to the fire’s temporary tattooing job, the cheerful pink bouquets on their white background making her seem like a trespasser in some grandmother’s wardrobe.

The initial burst of I-can-triumph-over-this collapsed, a house of cards hit by the cold, hard gust of her reflection.

And what do you know, that all got worse as she turned away and hobbled over to the toilet. Her new way of life became immediately apparent when she tried to lift up the johnny. One hand. Only. Which meant sloppy, flappy, ends of the hem everywhere, and then she couldn’t hold the thing up and move the IV pole closer to the seat and settle her weight properly.