Archive of Our Own ^beta

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Maddie comes home for Christmas break her sophomore year expecting a fight.

She’s been doing what her parents want in Harrisburg, mostly, going to classes, working on her degree. They don’t like that it’s a nursing degree, maybe, but she’s known a lot of nurses between the cancer ward and the ER, and she wants to be one. They’re still paying for the degree, even if they don’t like it.

They’re also paying for housing, though, and she doesn’t want that anymore. She and Doug are moving a little fast, maybe, for college students, but his roommate just graduated a semester late, and he says he can afford to cover Maddie’s half of the rent. He says it might be good practice, seeing if they want to stay together when he goes to med school. He tells her he wants to be with her all the time. But Mom and Dad don’t like him, and Doug can cover the apartment but he can’t cover her tuition, so they have to keep paying for that unless she wants to get a job that will keep her away from Doug.

So she comes and prepares to be conciliatory, to bring it up after Christmas, not that they do much about Christmas these days. Evan even told her last year that he doesn’t believe in Santa anymore, so there’s not a lot of magic left even if she still loves the holiday. It always makes her think about the best things about where she is and who she is. She shows up prepared to be all sunshine and light. She makes Mom make cookies with her, makes Dad go with her to get a tree, takes Evan to get presents for whoever he wants presents for and pays for them.

Evan is the flaw in the plan. His moods are always so big, and for the first couple days, he’s so happy to see her, so full of questions about her classes, that she can let herself be carried along by it. She can laugh on the phone with Doug late at night and make plans about apartment decorations and promise that even if she can’t move in with him she’ll be there all the time.

But the novelty wears off and Evan gets less happy. He trails her around, desperate to help with anything she’s doing. He’s all skinned knees and skinned elbows, always has been, and he’s a sturdy kid, not like—he’s a sturdy kid, but there’s something so fragile about him, about the way he hunches in on himself when Dad tells him to go shovel the front walk or Mom says he and Maddie can’t watch The Santa Clause until he’s finished with his homework.

“It’s pre-teen angst,” Doug says on the phone, laughing at her worry a little.

“He’s ten! He shouldn’t have that!”

“Christmas will cheer him up. You got him that LEGO set he wanted, right?”

She can’t afford quite the one he wants, but at least it’s something. What he wants is a skateboard, but she doesn’t want to fight with their parents, so she backed off, even knowing they won’t give it to him. “Yeah,” she sighs, “I guess I did.”

“Then it’s all going to be fine, and you can stop worrying about him. Kids are just sad sometimes.”

God, doesn’t Maddie know it. She doesn’t want that for Evan. She wants him happy like the kids on TV, like nothing is complicated. Nothing should be complicated. If her parents want to pretend like everything is normal for them all, they should act like things are normal. “I miss you.”

“Miss you too, baby,” he says, voice low and hot in the way that means she should shut her door and shut up about Evan for a while.

Evan climbs into bed with her on Christmas Eve sometime well after he should be in bed. They all had dinner, and they all watched It’s A Wonderful Life, which Evan hates because it’s slow and sad and black and white, and Maddie watched from the corner of her eye while he found a tiny hole in the cuff of his sweatshirt and destroyed the whole thing so he wouldn’t squirm around and get yelled at.

His eyes are so big and blue in the light from her bedside lamp. “Are you almost done with college?” he whispers.

“Not even halfway,” she says, and doesn’t think about all the places Doug applied to med schools, all the places that aren’t Pennsylvania.

“Okay.” He fidgets with that hole in his sweatshirt. She’ll have to mend it. Are kids still shitty when people show up in mended clothing? Probably, but their parents aren’t going to buy him a new one if they think it’s his fault he ruined this one. “I miss you.”

Maddie looks at him, really looks at him. His birthmark is hiding a scrape on his temple too. What did he take a spill on this time, that their parents didn’t tell her about, that he didn’t update her on last time she called home? Did they not tell her so she wouldn’t worry? Because they thought she wouldn’t care? Because it happens so much it doesn’t seem unusual enough to mention? He looks so tired, so small, and her heart skips in her chest.

Once, in the hospital, they came to visit Daniel right when the art therapist was leaving the ward. Her mom, an anxious hand on her swollen belly, frowned at Daniel’s picture. He’d drawn a boy, and then he’d scribbled him over messily in black crayon. “Did you not like what you drew?” Mom asked, already reaching for the pad of paper and the pencil. “We can try again, sweetheart, I’ll help you make the shapes a little better.”

Daniel shook his head, impatient with her misunderstanding. “Miss Anna told me to draw the pain,” he’d explained, and Mom had stopped reaching for the sketchbook and told him that maybe they should get him some coloring books, and Daniel hadn’t talked about Miss Anna again after that.

Evan looks scribbled over now, she thinks, nonsensically, and she clutches him to her side. It’s not the same. Evan’s always got bruises too but it’s not the same.

It’s not the same, but her baby brother is still in pain. “What can I do?” Maddie asks. She can now. She’s ten years older and she’s almost halfway to being a nurse and if he’s in pain maybe she can fix it.

Evan shakes his head and burrows into her side. “It’s okay. You’re here now.”

He falls asleep in her bed, snuffling a little, drooling into her pajama top, and Maddie stays up a long, long time.

Maddie watches all three of them, on Christmas. Maybe it’s not fair, expecting much of her parents on Christmas, but it’s been almost ten years, and Evan’s a kid. They should be able to put on a show for him. But Mom makes eggs and snaps at Evan to sit still when he whines about waiting for presents and Dad still reads the whole paper. Evan has four gifts under the tree, and aside from the LEGOs, it’s a new bike helmet he does seem to want and then just clothes to replace what he’s outgrowing. And it’s fine, but Maddie gets money for her next semester’s worth of textbooks and a new pair of headphones and a gift card and a trinket box Evan carefully decorated at school with a way-too-big friendship bracelet already inside.

After the presents, it’s just a day. Evan goes out and plays in the snow and makes a bad snowman and their parents don’t go out to look when he asks them to. Maddie does, even though it’s cold and the snowman’s head falls off and Evan starts talking about the French Revolution, which is gross. Their parents call the few members of the extended family they still talk to and they hand Maddie the phone and everyone asks Maddie about Evan in the same pitying voice they used to use for Daniel but they don’t ask to speak to him and he doesn’t hover by the phone like he expects them to.

Evan trips on the stairs and Mom fusses over him for fifteen minutes and Evan perks up when she gives him cocoa and then ducks his head and stops talking when Maddie asks him what he tripped on.

Don’t make me do this, Maddie thinks, over and over again. This isn’t my job, don’t make me do it.

Evan says he’s too old for bedtime stories but she can tell him about her classes if she likes. Maddie does, until she hears creaking floorboards out in the hall. They both wait for Mom or Dad, whichever one it is, to come in, say goodnight, wish Evan merry Christmas one more time. Did they do it in the morning? They must have. Maddie can’t believe that they wouldn’t.

But they don’t now. Maddie does it for them. Maddie’s been doing it for them for almost ten years.

Don’t make me do this, she thinks, but she knows she has to.

This isn’t the argument she wants to have with her parents today. Shit, she doesn’t even know what Doug is going to say, but she has to do this. She has to at least try. Evan is outside riding his bike even though it’s definitely too icy to do it safely, so he won’t hear if she fails and lets herself get talked down. She won’t get his hopes up.

If it were the Doug argument, she’d be starting with Dad. He indulges her a little more, still calls her “princess” sometimes. If it were an argument about school, she’d be starting with Mom, who told Dad to lay off her when she almost failed geometry in high school and taught her how to study. She wants to get them on her side one at a time, but this is too important.

“I want to ask you for something. Another gift, I guess,” says Maddie, her hands cupped around a mug of tea because it seems more adult than hot chocolate or coffee with the amount of milk and sugar she has to put in it so she doesn’t choke on it. “And I want you to hear me out before you say no.”

Mom sighs. “Maddie, we asked you for a Christmas list a month ago, you can’t just expect—”

“I want Evan,” she says, and watches the confusion hit. “I want to take him back to Harrisburg with me. Doug and I were already talking about getting an apartment, but if he doesn’t want a kid I’ll find one myself. If you want, you can pay for the apartment, or send a stipend, or I guess I’ll get a job or go down to part-time classes, to support us, but I want him. I miss him, and he misses me.”

They stare at her, and then Mom reaches out, so gentle, to put her hand over Maddie’s. “You’re very sweet, Maddie, but Evan shouldn’t be asking this of you. Siblings miss each other sometimes.”

“You deserve to be a kid, sweetheart,” says Dad. “Enjoy college—though we’ll be talking about you moving out of the dorms—and let us worry about your brother.”

“You’re too young to be a mother, especially to such a difficult child,” says Mom.

If it weren’t for those last few words, Maddie would let herself be convinced. She would swallow down her worries, swallow down how hurt Evan looks all the time except in the few minutes after he actually gets hurt. “Evan’s not difficult,” she says, too loud. “He’s just a kid! Kids get into trouble. Especially active boys.”

“Daniel never—”

“Daniel was sick, Mom,” Maddie says, and the only reason she doesn’t scream it is that she wants to win this argument. “If you don’t want him and I do, what’s the problem here? At least five girls from my graduating class already have kids. People my age raise their siblings or cousins or whatever all the time. You’d still see us on breaks, and in the summers. But God, can you even tell me that you want him?”

“He’s our son, of course we want him,” says Dad.

“Can you tell me his friends’ names? His favorite subject at school? Do you know what he named that stupid stuffed duck he used to carry around everywhere? You got him a black shirt! He doesn’t like wearing black!”

Dad crosses his arms. “We put a roof over his head, just like we do yours. We feed him, we take him to the doctor when he’s hurt or sick, we sign his permission slips. That’s more important than favorite colors.”

“It didn’t used to be,” Maddie whispers, and keeps going. “And he really wants to be friends with Sean and with Isaac B and with Hannah L, but mostly he hangs out with Hannah H and Kyle C. If you make him pick a subject that isn’t gym, he’ll say science, because he likes the facts. The duck’s name was Snoopy because he got Snoopy and Woodstock mixed up.” She swallows. “If you sign some papers, I’ll figure out which ones, I can get him enrolled in school in Harrisburg as soon as I find an apartment. Like I said, you can pay for him or not. I don’t care about the money. He’s just so unhappy, and I can fix it, so I have to.”

“Maddie—”

“I have to, Mom. We’re going to be okay together.”

“What would people say?” Mom asks, and that’s when Maddie knows she’s going to win. “What could we possibly tell them?”

“Say you’re sending him to boarding school,” says Maddie. “They’ll believe you. But I don’t really care, as long as he comes with me.”

“I’m not ready to be a father, and that’s what you’re asking me to do,” Doug says in minute ten of their argument. “Why is this necessary in the first place? Your parents are doing fine, they can keep him, and you and I can be together, and you can maybe have him for a weekend sometime when he’s on school break. We’ll do a museum or something.”

“They can’t …” Take care of him, you’re supposed to be able to say in this situation. The kind of situation that gets CPS called, that gets too-young older siblings getting custody. They can, though. They’re capable. They’ve done it twice before. Love him would maybe be more honest, but something curdles in her stomach whenever she thinks it. Of course they love Evan. They have to love Evan. They just know that Maddie loves him more and that’s why they’re letting her do this even if they’re refusing to do any of the work of finding paperwork and schools and now, she guesses, apartments. They’ll pay, but they won’t help. “They can’t,” she finally repeats, helpless.

“Look, I hate to be the ultimatum guy, Maddie, but it really is him or me, and you know what the smart play here is.” His voice softens. “Evan gets to stay with his parents, who will raise him just fine, like they raised you, and you get to come live with your handsome future doctor boyfriend and go on an adventure next year, assuming your credits transfer. Come on, baby. It’s a sweet thought but you and I both know it’s not realistic.”

Maddie wants to be the person who gives in, which is something that’s probably going to haunt her at night for the rest of her life. It would be so easy. It’s what everyone wants. It’s even what she wants, a little. But she wants Evan to be happy more than she wants to have a few more responsibility-free years. “If you’re making me choose,” she says, voice shaking, “I’m so sorry, Doug, but it’s him. Every time it’s him.”

It’s awful. It’s awful, and Doug acts like she’s a kid, like she’s Evan’s age, and tells her they can meet for coffee so he can give back the things she’s left at his place unless she changes her mind. It’s awful, and Mom says “Well, I don’t know what you expected” in that voice like she’s on the edge of tears when Maddie tells her that she’s going to start looking for apartments. It’s awful, and the lawyer she calls and pays for with her textbook check asks if she’s okay and if he should call CPS about her brother. It’s awful, and Dad hands her a budget spreadsheet and tells her exactly what they’re willing to pay, which is just enough that Maddie can get by with one part-time job and still graduate on time if nothing goes wrong.

It’s awful, and then Evan says “Maddie, really? Really? Can I start packing right now? You aren’t going to change your mind, are you? I’ll be so good, I promise, I’ll be quiet when you’re studying and I’ll never crash my bike again. I promise, Maddie” and somehow it’s not awful anymore.

Being poor, as it turns out, feels a lot like being young.

She hardly remembers the time before Daniel got sick, but her parents were teachers then, and their house was always falling apart. They had a lot of soup. Maddie could never get all the things at the store that she wanted. And then when Daniel got sick, Dad went to work at the bank and swore he’d go back to teaching when they didn’t need the money, and Mom quit because parenting a sick kid and arranging to have another one to fix him was a full-time job, and when she tried to go back, after Daniel, she came home and cried every day and now she works doing something boring for a marketing firm and they have money. Maddie doesn’t think her family is rich, but she’s used to having money.

That first semester that it’s just her and Evan, she learns how to not have it again. She stops going out with her friends, stops buying fun coffee drinks at the campus shop. She gets a job at the Target and when Evan wears out his shoes, she gets extra hours because shoes that won’t make his classmates make fun of him cost a lot of hours of work, it turns out.

Evan understands way better than she wants him to, and uses his little doe eyes to first make money shoveling off the cars of everyone in their apartment building and then when spring comes to do any and every odd job it’s safe enough for a ten-year-old to do. She tells him to save his money or spend it on himself, and sometimes he comes home with a video game or a t-shirt with a cartoon character she doesn’t recognize on it, and sometimes he comes home with bags of rice from the corner store and doesn’t let her return them.

She hears, sometime around spring break, which she spends working as many hours as Target will give her to get ahead, that Doug is going to Boston for med school, and she emails him to congratulate him but she never hears back.

Every day when she gets home, after picking Evan up from the after school care program she has to have him in so she has enough time to work and attend class, Maddie makes him a snack and asks him about his day. Every day he ducks his head, so shy, and then starts talking so fast, tripping over his words like he has to get them all out before she stops him. She never stops him. He asks about her day too, and that’s nice, as it turns out.

“Are we going back to Hershey for the summer?” he asks when her semester finishes a month before his is going to.

There’s an email from Dad asking if they should sublet the apartment for the summer. He and Mom call once a week, and talk to Evan for ten minutes before they talk to her, sometimes for two minutes, sometimes for half an hour. Evan’s still an active kid, still gets bruises and scrapes and sometimes sprains at recess or just moving around the city, but never as bad as he would get in Hershey. Maddie feels a little sick whenever she thinks about that.

“Maybe for a couple weeks,” she says. “Why, do you want to? You could stay the whole summer if you want.”

Evan shakes his head so fast his face blurs. “I want to stay with you.”

She emails Dad the next day. He doesn’t seem surprised.

The rest of college runs together.

It’s never easy. Something in Maddie is always aware that things could be easier, but she knows that doesn’t mean better, so she doesn’t let herself live in that. She gets her phlebotomy certification over that first summer so she can work part-time at a lab instead of Target, and it doesn’t pay a lot better but it’s going to look good on her resume so maybe she can get a day shift hospital job when she graduates. She and Evan do their homework at the kitchen table every night, quizzing each other on flash cards, so she gets a review on the early steps of algebra and he dresses up as a skeleton for Halloween and proudly labels every bone correctly in Sharpie.

As soon as he hits middle school, he insists on leaving the after school program. She tries to tempt him with sports teams and he counters with Saturdays at the skate park and asks if he can come to campus with her some afternoons to use the gym, since she can get him a membership for cheap. He has a cooking-as-chemistry unit in science and asks to start making dinner once a week, which mostly means generic boxed mac ‘n’ cheese with some weird topping or another on it. She likes the week where they crumble up Doritos on top and doesn’t mind the hot sauce, but draws the line at relish.

“You’re a kid,” she tries to tell him over and over again. “Don’t grow up too fast, okay? I’m taking care of you, that’s what I’m supposed to do.”

Mostly, Evan ducks his head and ducks away. One night, over spaghetti that he has for some reason upended a can of olives into, he sets his chin, mulish, and says “You were younger than me when you started taking care of me.”

“You’re not nineteen—”

“You were nine. I don’t … I don’t know. Maybe they were nice to me before I remember it. But I’m not a baby. I know who took care of me.”

Maddie only changed a few of his diapers. When he was really little, a newborn, and she’d just graduated from baby dolls, she’d wanted to do everything, feed him bottles and hold him and rock him, and Mom was busy with Daniel and Dad was busy with the bank, so they let her do all of that, and they changed his diapers. She didn’t make him dinner, but she read him bedtime stories. She taught him to read. The first thing he said was “Ma,” and he never meant Mom.

“I’m really sorry it’s me,” she whispers. “I’m really sorry you’ve had to grow up so fast.”

He’s getting old enough now that he doesn’t cuddle into her side like he used to, but he comes around the table and hugs her and holds on a really long time. He’s as tall as she is these days, too. “I’m really sorry you had to grow up fast too, Maddie.”

When graduation comes, Maddie thinks about a lot of things. She thinks about all the emergency rooms in Harrisburg that could use a nurse, how much she wants to be like the people who helped Evan out when he was younger. She thinks about how all those job listings say “nights and weekends required,” and how Evan might be just barely a teenager but he definitely can’t spend the night alone yet and even on a better salary she can’t afford to hire someone to stay with him overnight. Her parents are going to stop paying for the apartment in July, even if they’re still going to pay a stipend for Evan’s groceries and clothes that doesn’t actually cover how much a teen boy eats.

They don’t know how much a teen boy eats. Maddie tries not to think about that.

The obvious answer is to move back to Hershey. There are E.R.s there too, and Evan could stay with their parents overnight while she works. Maybe three years is enough time for them to realize that Evan deserves parents.

But Evan has friends, at school and at the skate park. She’s pretty sure he’s got an adorable kid crush on Felipe who teaches the boxing classes at the university rec center. Harrisburg is his home, and Hershey isn’t anymore. He never asks to go back. She always has to ask him first.

Maddie applies in doctors’ offices and day surgeries and quiet wards with regular schedules, and she tells everyone she interviews with that she has a kid and can’t do overnights for at least two or three years.

Her first offer is from long-stay pediatrics and she feels sick at the thought of accepting. It’s a relief when a day surgery calls her back and she can accept them instead.

“You were going to work in the E.R.,” Evan says, too loud, almost desperate, when she surprises him with takeout and a grocery store cake. “You always said that’s what you want.”

Maddie, in the middle of trying to celebrate, stops and stares. “Are you seriously mad at me for changing plans?”

“No.” His chin trembles, and then he’s slamming into his bedroom, and of course he’s not mad at her. He almost never is. Evan’s smart enough to know the reason behind her change of plans, and that means he’s mad at himself.

She knocks on his door every fifteen minutes until it’s past his bedtime and he finally comes out, face tear-tracked and stomach growling. “Chinese food is better cold anyway,” she says, and puts her hands on his shoulders, has to reach up a little to do it. “Hey. Listen to me. I love you, and I take care of you, and sometimes that means waiting to do something I want. In a few years, I’m still going to be able to be an E.R. nurse, and you can stay home alone. Pinky promise, okay?”

He makes her do the motions, even, which he hasn’t done in a few years, but they eat the Chinese food and stay up way too late so he’ll be yawning at school in the morning, and it’s going to be okay. Maddie is going to make it be okay for him.

When Evan is fourteen, signs go up in the lobby of their apartment building. The McKennas, who live in 2B, have a son, just nine. Evan has babysat him and his little sister a time or two, just the last few weeks. He’s surprisingly gentle with the little kids, surprisingly good with them. He keeps telling Maddie he wants to design flyers so he can babysit more kids, make a little more money, and she’s hesitating, trying to get him to sign up for more activities instead. It’s probably a losing battle. Evan is stubborn.

Evan is stubborn, and Evan is white-faced and holding a printed off sign that’s begging people to sign up for the National Bone Marrow Registry, because Chase McKenna has leukemia and nobody in their family is a match.

Maddie drops a plate and it shatters on the floor.

“We have to sign up,” Evan is saying, like he doesn’t even notice the shards everywhere, and Maddie is barefoot and that’s going to hurt like a bitch, but no, she can’t do this. “We have to try, right? What if it’s us? What if it’s me? I have to help Chase.”

Maddie is going to break a promise. She has to. “Evan,” she says, and her voice is so shaky and high and she’s not strong enough to do this. “Evan, I have to tell you something.”

Evan, who interrupts like he breathes, stays quiet except for the sobs while she talks, face contorted with the force of keeping them quiet. She wants to pull him into her and pet his hair, but he won’t even look at her. Just at the scratched wood of the kitchen table she bought at Goodwill. When she finishes, there’s silence. She can’t fix this. God, she wants to fix this. She wants Daniel here to fix it with her.

“So they did want me for a while,” he says eventually, wet and wrecked, voice cracking. “I always kind of thought I was an accident and they never wanted me. I think this is worse.”

Maddie wonders if this is the kind of thing you’re supposed to forgive. She always has, because she remembers Daniel, but should Evan? Evan doesn’t remember Mom calling him her miracle baby, doesn’t remember Dad making up stories for Daniel about Daniel and Evan being superheroes together, super strength and super healing, the perfect team. All that stopped when the graft failed.

“I want you,” she says. It doesn’t fix it. It never will. She’ll say it anyway. “I’ve always wanted you. I promise.”

She offers her arms, and he finally collapses into them. Still just a kid. She feels that way too, small and not-enough, the way she felt when her parents said Daniel needed help and she couldn’t give it.

“We’ll talk about the registry for Chase,” she promises.

Evan is quiet around the apartment for days, and refuses to speak to their parents on their weekly check-ins for a solid month and then refuses to go home for any portion of any break, possibly ever again. Maddie backs him up, too little too late, and wonders if she hates her parents for not pushing too hard except about Christmas.

The registry won’t sign him up until he’s eighteen, though he can pre-register, and Maddie wishes she had friends she could rage to about it, the way he could try to give to his brother when he was still tiny and barely-formed and unknowing. Instead, she declines a call or two from their parents and signs up for the registry herself, though she doesn’t turn out to be a match for Chase. One of the teachers from his school does it, and she watches Chase get better and tries not to hate him too.

Sometimes Evan grits his teeth and says “Tell me something about him,” and it’s been so long since Maddie could talk about Daniel, so she does. Sometimes Evan smiles, and sometimes he looks away. Sometimes Maddie smiles, and sometimes she cries. She hopes it helps. It’s so hard to be sure.

Sometimes she wants to call her parents and ask if parenting always makes you feel young, or like the smallest thing you do could ruin a growing human, hurt them for life. She’s not sure what answer would be worse, and anyway, they don’t talk about that kind of thing, so it doesn’t matter.

When Evan gets to high school, life seems to speed up until Maddie can barely track the days passing by. She works a lot, picks up extra shifts when she can, because she doesn’t trust her parents to have kept Evan’s college fund intact and doesn’t want to ask them. Evan seems to babysit for everyone in the building, and Maddie would beg him to stop except that he seems to genuinely love it. He changes diapers and steps on LEGOs and can remember the storylines of the elaborate games of pretend the kids on the third floor all play together and inexplicably gets every kid in the building addicted to Jeopardy.

He also sneaks twenties into her purse whenever he thinks she won’t notice. Mostly so she won’t wound his pride, she deposits them in his college fund instead of sneaking them back.

They both go on dates, which is a little embarrassing to schedule sometimes. Maddie gets a lot of interested doctors and orderlies and patients, and she’s choosy with who she goes out with, but most of them kiss her on the cheek and say goodbye when she tells them about Evan. Evan always seems to have one girl or another giggling in the backseat with him, but it always seems to last for a few weeks and then he mopes around the apartment for a week and then there’s someone else.

They mostly don’t ask each other about the dates, because they’re already protective enough of each other, and adding one more way to make that worse seems like a disaster. She makes sure Evan has sex ed and condoms and tells him if he ever pressures or hurts a girl she’ll make him sit down for a talk with her friend Sylvie from college who teaches women’s self-defense on the weekends and leaves it alone.

School is a problem. The guidance counselor calls her in for a meeting in the middle of Evan’s sophomore year.

“Evan hasn’t done anything wrong,” the counselor tells her in the kind of trained-to-be-soothing tones Maddie uses at work all the time. “All his teachers say it seems like he has a great support network at home even if your life is unconventional. He’s friendly and helpful to his peers and teachers.”

Maddie clenches her fists in her lap. “But?”

“He has difficulties with sustained attention, which I’m sure you know. He’s very bright, that’s clear, but his classes rarely hold his interest, and it’s going to start impacting his grades soon. The interest profiles he’s filled out in homeroom show that he’s interested in active careers and, surprisingly, childcare. We have a partnership with the vocational school, which has many options he’s interested in, though they would ask him to pick one, and I gather decisiveness isn’t his strong suit either. Do you think the trades might be a good direction for him?”

Buckleys go to college. They educate themselves. When they used to study together, Evan used to talk about being a nurse like her, so they could work in an E.R. together someday. It’s been a while since he talked about that.

“I’d have to ask him,” she says, horribly embarrassed. She’s supposed to know what he wants to do with his life. That’s what guardians are for.

The counselor keeps being soothing. Maddie maybe hates her. “Of course, it’s important that he has a say. But I do think it could be a good channel for his energy.”

Maybe it would be. Will be. Maybe Evan does want to be a mechanic or a welder or whatever else they train in vocational courses, and she wants what he wants. She just doesn’t like the way the counselor talks about it, like it’s somewhere to shunt him off to because he’ll make trouble in regular classes. She puts on her most pleasant expression, the one she saves for difficult patients. “I’ll ask him.”

“If he stays on the college prep track,” the counselor says brightly, maybe figuring out that Maddie is really unimpressed right now, “it might be worth having him assessed, if he hasn’t been already.”

Another weight on Maddie’s shoulders. Evan is still on their parents’ insurance, so getting him medical care is a headache. Maybe it’s time to switch him over. “Thank you for your concern,” she says mechanically. “We’ll talk about it. We’ll talk about all of this. Evan deserves a say in his future, so I’d rather have meetings with him, if you want more of them.”

Maybe a mother would decide his future in this room without him there, but Maddie’s not his mother, hard as that is to remember some days.

The guidance counselor looks pitying, like she knows Maddie’s a sham too, but she lets Maddie leave.

Evan gets quiet again, when she asks about the future.

“I don’t know,” he says when she presses. “I like a lot of things, but I think about doing the same thing every day forever and I hate it. If I thought I was smart enough to do the E.R. nurse thing—”

“Hey, you’re smart enough to do anything you want to do.”

He gives her a miserable look. “I think college would make me crazy. I want to—I know Mom and Dad will be weird about it, and maybe they’ll blame you, but all the classes and the reading and the homework and I just want to do things—”

“Mom and Dad aren’t raising you,” she says, way louder than she means to. Evan’s talking to them again, but not every week. Only when they ask to speak to him. The last time was three weeks ago. “We’ll figure it out, okay? And whatever you train for, you don’t have to do that forever, you know? Mom and Dad, they were teachers before—before Daniel.”

Evan frowns. “That doesn’t sound like them.”

She misses her parents. She hasn’t had them the way she misses them since she was nine. “I think they were too sad to be around kids after he died.”

He ducks his head. “Even us.”

“We’ve got each other,” she says firmly. “And you don’t have to plan out your whole life, okay? Just decide what you want to sign up for next year, and we’ll figure it out from there.”

“You aren’t mad that I don’t want to go to college?”

“I’m not mad,” she assures him, and whatever battles she has to fight with their parents about it are going to be well out of his hearing. “I just want you to be happy, Evan. That’s all. If you need to find something where you do something new every day, that’s what we’ll find for you.”

He smiles, shy and sweet, and starts talking about how surprised his biology teacher was that he knows so much about human anatomy, and maybe Maddie should be more parental and insist on him making a few more decisions, but him being happy still feels like a novelty, so she lets him talk instead.

Evan, after waffling between every vocational program the school can connect him to, ends up taking mechanic courses his junior year, though according to his exasperated instructors he wanders in and out of any and every class he walks by. Some days he comes home complaining about not getting to do anything interesting, and others he comes home full of information about why carburetors are designed the way they are, or if he’s been wandering into other classrooms, about how to use a plumber’s snake, what kind of equipment you need to protect yourself when welding, or what Montessori schooling is.

Their parents don’t know what to do with it, him planning on doing anything but college. Mom tries to convince him, sometimes. Dad’s encouragements are the weird “Good for you, champ” kind of thing that sounds like he thinks Evan can’t do any better, but Maddie decides she can live with that. It means he’ll probably let Evan have the college fund for whatever he does next.

God, probably he’s going to make Evan have a business plan for opening a mechanic shop or something before he releases it. Maddie will work on that.

Halfway through the year, she finally takes a job in an E.R. Evan has his license, even if she can’t afford a second car for him, and he insists he can feed himself and get himself to school when she works overnights, and Maddie wants to. She wants Evan, has always wanted Evan, but she wants the life she could have had too.

It’s exhausting, and Maddie loves it. She teases Evan sometimes, for always needing everything to be exciting and new, for liking to solve problems and puzzles even when they don’t really need solving. Apparently it’s a family trait, because Maddie gets a reputation among her fellow nurses for asking the right questions, for pointing doctors in the right direction, for finding context other people miss.

“One of the CNAs called me Dr. House today,” she tells Evan over dinner one night, maybe preening a little. She hasn’t had time to watch the show, but she knows what it’s about, anyway.

“I’m really glad you’re happy, Maddie,” he blurts.

“I’m always happy with you,” she reminds him, and then grins. “But I’m really glad I get two things that make me happy now.”

Maddie isn’t sure if she’s excited for Evan’s graduation or if she wants to stop time before it gets there. Work keeps her busy, even if she never works as much overtime as she’s offered, and Evan is in and out with girls, or babysitting, or working other odd jobs. His life is different every day, just like he likes it, even if that means he’s no closer to picking something to do with his life. He goes back to voc tech for his senior year, switching programs against advice, this time for the CNA program.

“Then I have two options for when I graduate,” he tells her when she asks him about it, prompted by another gentle and annoying meeting with the guidance counselor. “It means I’m more flexible, and I can go more places!”

He talks like that, now, about the going places. It started when senior year did, and she can’t pin down which of his friends or girlfriends got it started, but he’s always talking about going one place or another, seeing the world. Maddie tries to keep out of it, because he’s almost an adult and he should do what’s going to make him happy, but she misses him in advance, like a limb. She doesn’t know who she is without Evan anymore.

“I can’t believe I’m not cool enough for you anymore,” she says, too light.

Evan’s face immediately crinkles up with distress in that way he does that makes her feel like a monster. The same face his whole life. “Of course you’re cool enough for me! I’ll call you all the time, you’ll get so sick of me. But like … Mads. You’ve been looking after me my whole life. Wouldn’t you be a little excited to finally be on your own?”

Maddie swallows. “If you want to go explore, please do that. There’s a lot of world outside of Pennsylvania and maybe I can finally use some vacation time and come visit you sometimes. But I need you to do that for you, not for me, okay? Can you promise me that?”

“I want to travel.”

“That’s not a promise.” She holds up her pinky, insistent. They haven’t done this in at least two years, but it’s always going to mean something to them. “If you leave, it’s for you, not me. Promise me.”

Evan stares at her hand for so long she thinks he won’t do it, and Maddie’s stomach roils. Finally, he does it, locks his pinky in with hers. “If I leave, it’s for me,” he says, and promise or no promise, she’s still not sure she believes him.

They don’t fight. They argue, sometimes, or poke at each other when they’re tired or sad or when Evan has left a dish crusted with food out on the counter again, but they don’t fight, until two weeks before spring break Evan’s senior year, when she catches him hiding an army pamphlet under his English binder. She snatches it back out, to hell with his privacy.

“Evan, what is this?”

He looks away, already pulling in, already sullen. “You can read. You know what it is.”

“This isn’t an option we’ve talked about. You’re not doing it.”

That startles him into looking up at her. “You can’t tell me what I’m doing or not doing! The recruiter and the guidance counselor both think it would be good for me. You get a lot of variety, and if I’m a CNA the recruiter thinks I could make medic pretty easy, so it wouldn’t even be that dangerous. And then I’d have money for college if I want to without Mom and Dad holding it hostage and you—”

“And I’d be up all night, every night, wondering if you’re dead or not! No, Evan. If you’re worried about money, we’ll figure it out, but not like this, okay? I see veterans in the E.R. all the time, do you know what it’s like for them? I don’t want that for my—”

“I just want to help people—”

“So you work in a hospital, you fix their cars, you babysit their kids, that’s you, Evan, not whatever the fuck you think this is going to do for you. What happened to traveling?”

He tries to snatch the pamphlet back. She doesn’t let him. “This is traveling too,” he insists, but she knows him well enough to know he doesn’t mean it, not really. “I don’t—I know this is a serious choice, and I could get hurt, I know, but I don’t know what else to do. I want to travel, I’m so sick of the snow and Pennsylvania and feeling like I’m ruining your life, but I don’t want to be alone. The army gives you people to be with, watch your back.”

“I watch your back.” Maddie is crying. She kind of hates that she cries when she’s mad, or overwhelmed, or frustrated. It means people don’t take her seriously, and it reminds her too much of Mom. “Could you kill someone? They would want you to. They would want you to be someone you aren’t, and nothing is worth that. Evan, please. I can’t lose another brother.”

“I’m going to be living in his shadow for the rest of my life,” Evan shouts, sullenness turning to anger in half a second. “This is what I’m supposed to do, Maddie! I was made to save him and I can’t, and I couldn’t help Chase—”

“None of that is your job! Nobody should ask that of you! You just have to be Evan, you don’t have to save anybody, especially not like this!” She shakes the pamphlet. “This isn’t you, and I’m so mad that you want it to be.”

“I don’t know what I want to be! Nothing’s right, nowhere’s got a place for me, the only place I’m ever right is here with you and I—I can’t make you be my mom forever, Maddie.” He takes a deep, shuddering breath, and he’s so tall now, but she wants to cradle him like she did the first time he crashed Daniel’s bike, kiss his birthmark and promise him it’s all going to be okay. “I’m so scared that nothing is ever going to be right.”

She drops the pamphlet on the ground and throws her arms around him. “We’re going to figure it out,” she says. “Somewhere both of us fit. If it’s not Pennsylvania, for you, you just tell me. There are E.R.s everywhere, and if you settle down, I’ll come to you.”

Evan cries, and she’s not sure he believes her, but he doesn’t mention the army again. She picks up the pamphlet and rips it up and throws it away, and Evan starts talking about other things, about just getting in a car and going, about taking a CNA contract somewhere there’s been a disaster lately, about anything but the pamphlet and that future, like it’s a peace offering.

Maddie tries to let herself be excited to have a place to herself, to get to date people without explaining her family history, to take all the overtime she wants so she can afford vacations to wherever he’s living. Sometimes she succeeds. Sometimes she thinks about his big bright future and how fast he’s outgrowing being her kid brother and wants to cry and call her parents and ask how they let either of them go.

Mom and Dad come for Evan’s graduation, and it’s only when they arrive at the apartment for dinner that Maddie realizes they haven’t been to Harrisburg since they dropped her off in her dorm room for her sophomore year. It’s always Maddie and Evan going to Hershey instead, and they all treat it like a huge road trip when it’s not even an hour when traffic is good. Their parents look around the apartment like it’s not good enough, like it’s not one Dad helped Maddie pick out eight years ago. She could probably afford better now, but moving seems like a hassle, so she hasn’t bothered. Maybe she should. Especially if Evan is leaving, like he still insists he is.

The ceremony is boring, like most ceremonies are. Evan’s not getting any real academic honors, though his GPA was respectable enough that if he wanted to go to college he could. Maddie cheers as loud as she can when they call his name to get his diploma, and ignores her parents and their polite clapping.

Afterwards, Maddie watches him with his friends. He doesn’t have any best friends like she had, even if she doesn’t talk to any of her Hershey friends anymore and hardly had time to make good friends in college, first with Doug and then taking care of Evan. Just a lot of people he’s friendly with, promising to stay in touch in a way that already sounds insincere to Maddie’s overprotective ears. Evan can hear it too, she thinks. He droops a little, and she’s glad she has a whole packet of hand-drawn cards from pretty much every kid in the apartment building, all of whom wanted to congratulate him.

Their parents take them out for dinner, because it’s the kind of thing you’re supposed to do, and the Buckleys always do what you’re supposed to do, or at least pretend they do. It’s a fancy restaurant, the kind Maddie doesn’t even go to on dates. Evan sits with his shoulders hunched up and his shirt collar buttoned tight in a way that looks like it’s choking him. He’s grown again, and she should have thought to get him new clothes for graduation.

“Let’s have a cup of tea just us girls, Maddie, it’s been so long,” says Mom when they get back to the apartment.

Dad claps Evan on the shoulder, clearly a planned move. “Evan and I will take a walk before we have to get on the road.”

Maddie has no reason to keep their parents away from Evan, and Evan doesn’t object even when she catches his eye to see if he minds. She sits down and makes tea and ignores Mom’s gentle judgment of the mismatched novelty mugs that Evan gives Maddie as gifts sometimes. They talk about work instead, Mom dancing around wishing Maddie were still at the day surgery, Maddie asking polite questions about Mom’s marketing accounts.

It takes Evan and Dad almost an hour to get back, and Evan is still buttoned into his collared shirt, still hunched and miserable. Maybe even worse now. She wants to demand to know what Dad was telling him, but she figures she knows. A lecture about responsibility, about how if he doesn’t want to go to college he has to grow up and be a man and stand on his own two feet.

“Well,” she says brightly when their parents leave half an hour later, “I feel like that was enough parent time for the next few months, don’t you? I don’t feel like we need to stay with them this summer if you don’t want to.”

“No, I—I don’t think I do.”

She puts a hand on his arm. “If Dad said anything—you know you have as long as you need to decide what you want, right? You’ve always got a home with me.”

That doesn’t make him look any less miserable. “I know, Maddie.”

“I’ve got a job offer,” Evan tells her softly two weeks later.

Maddie, in the middle of washing up the dishes from his surprisingly competent chicken dinner, drops a spoon so it clatters in the sink and sprays suds all over her scrubs. “Evan! You didn’t tell me you were applying anywhere so soon. What field? Do I know the place? What kind of pay?”

“Not, uh. Not great pay to start, but room and board, so that’s pretty cool.” He clears his throat. “My CNA instructor, I asked her about positions, and she’s got a cousin who’s staff at a nursing home that needs some help to cover maternity leave for someone, said they’d make it live-in for me.”

There’s something awful here, something he’s talking around. Maddie dries her hands and turns to face him, sees the way his hands are stuffed in his pockets. “That’s great. Maybe not super interesting, but a solid first job. Why do you need to live there?”

“It’s in Virginia.”

Maddie surprises herself with the desire to grab on and cling. She should want this for him. She should want this for her. But she and Evan have been a team for so long now, and she doesn’t know how she’s going to stand without him. “Evan—”

“I want to do this,” he says, but he doesn’t look any happier than she feels.

“I know. I know, you said and I’m not going to stop you. But you don’t have to.”

Evan hugs her. He has to bend over so far now to bury his face in her shoulder, but he does it. Still her little brother. “I know. But you’ll still hear from me all the time, okay? You’ll be sick of me.”

“Never,” she promises, and maybe one of these days he’ll believe her.

Evan leaves three weeks later, packing up the Jeep to leave at nine in the morning. He’s spent the time weeding out his room, getting rid of what he doesn’t need, and the Jeep is so much emptier than it was when Maddie drove it to Harrisburg to go to college. She’s just glad she can afford to give him the Jeep, that part of those three weeks have been taken up with test drives and financing. Maddie wants to load him down with food and comforts and memories, but Evan actually looks free, bouncing on his toes outside the car door while she fusses over the packing job and makes sure things won’t shift if he swerves on the highway. The Jeep will have to do.

“You’ll call me all the time, right? My co-workers will think I’m so boring without stories about you,” she says, voice trembling, when the time comes and she doesn’t have a reason to keep him. “And all the neighbors are going to ask about you too.”

“I’ll call you. And I’ll send postcards too, from all my travels.”

“And you’ll visit. For Christmas at least. Please?”

He hesitates. “I’ll try, Mads. I swear I’ll try.”

“You aren’t getting a present if you don’t come.” It’s an empty threat. They both know it. “Oh, Evan. Be safe. And be happy, okay? That’s all I want for you.”

“I’m gonna try to figure it out.” He holds up his pinky. “Promise. But you have to be happy too. Do all the things you couldn’t because you were raising me. I’m expecting to hear about wild parties.”

Maddie laughs, a little wet, and locks her pinky with his. “I’ll try to figure it out too.”

Evan draws her in and holds in tight, tucks her head under his chin so she’s encompassed by him, like for a second he’s the one who raised her, like he’s the one who has to let her go to fly or fall on her own and like it’s killing him as much as it’s killing her. Maybe it’s true. “I love you,” he says into her hair.

“More than anything,” she says, and wipes her face when he lets her go. “Call me tonight so I know you drove safe. Make use of that nice new cell phone we bought you.”

“I promise,” he says, and she steps back from the Jeep’s door to let him get in.

Maddie stands on the curb and watches him drive away, and holds back the sobs until he’s turned the corner.

Her co-workers are all still treating her with kid gloves two days later. They send Maddie on a mission to steal some supplies from somebody else’s inventory closet like it’s a treat, and it usually is. Maddie just isn’t feeling up for pretending she’s in a heist movie, so she keeps her head down and goes looking for the gauze pads they need on one of the surgical floors.

She almost walks into a doctor on the way out, and he interrupts her mid-apology with a shocked “Maddie? Maddie Buckley?”

And there, of course, is Doug Kendall, who’s aged well enough that she’s a little mad about it, wearing crisp surgical scrubs and an expression that’s nothing but happy surprise. “Oh my God, Doug! How long have you been back in town?”

“Six months or so, I’m a fellow here, thoracic surgery—of all the hospital wards in all the world, it’s so good to see you. Are you an OR nurse here? I would have run into you by now.”

Maddie shakes her head. “Emergency room, I’m just here to borrow some gauze before our next shipment. And I should probably get back—”

“Of course, we’re both on shift.” He smiles at her. “But maybe you’d like to get coffee sometime? I always regretted the way things ended with us. I just wasn’t mature enough or ready enough for what you needed, but I really missed you.”

“Evan just graduated last month, and he’s in Virginia now, about to start working,” she offers, and then blushes because she knows that it sounds like she’s telling him she’s free, when she’s not really. But maybe he gets that now, that she needs to be there for Evan. That’s what he’s implying, she thinks. “And I missed you too.”

“I’d like to hear all about him. Over that coffee?”

“Yeah,” says Maddie, and then “Yes. Yes, I think I’d really like that.”

Chapter Text

Evan takes the long way to Virginia Beach and still gets there before sunset.

It’s a pretty spectacular way to see the ocean for the first time, he decides, sitting on the hood of the Jeep at some scenic overlook watching the sandy beaches dotted with tourists. The sun’s not setting over the ocean, wrong ocean for that, but he still sits there and lets the sun behind him paint the water orange and pink, always getting broken up by the waves. He takes a picture to email Maddie, since the phone’s data plan isn’t good enough to be sending her pictures all the time, but the camera sucks too, so she won’t really be seeing it.

She’s seen the ocean. She says one time when Daniel was just barely sick, before it was all hospitals all the time, before Evan came along, they went to New York City and saw Cats because Daniel wanted to, and then they spent a day on some beach in New Jersey.

He wonders a little how she saw it once and hasn’t spent her whole life wanting to go back. Evan left home this morning knowing two things about his future: that he wants to help people and that he doesn’t want to be bored. Now he knows three. Probably he’ll spend some time away from the ocean, but when he settles down somewhere, he wants to be close to it.

Evan doesn’t usually keep secrets from Maddie, mostly because he’s a really bad liar, but he keeps his first one that night: instead of going to the nursing home, where he isn’t expected until the morning, he sleeps in the Jeep in a quiet corner of a beach parking lot, hidden in between a couple RVs, so he can get up early and walk into the crashing waves, freezing cold with the morning.

There are surfers out in the waves, wearing wetsuits, and Evan watches them from where he sits at the line of the surf. He can swim in pools, but he needs to learn how to swim in the ocean, he decides, how to do what they do.

“Hey, man,” says one of the surfers when they come out of the water, laughing and dripping and tired. “If you’ve got a board, we’re out here most mornings the weather is good.”

Evan likes that he’s “man” and not kid even though this guy has got to be, like, Maddie’s age. He likes that being tall means people think he’s older than he is. “I don’t know how,” he admits, and looks at all of them, the two guys talking about where to have breakfast, another guy with his arm slung around a woman’s shoulders. Like they’re a team, a unit, the way he’s only ever been with one person. “Do you know where I could get lessons?”

Virginia Beach is amazing. Evan trades car tune-ups for surfing lessons, even if he can’t afford a board of his own, and puts in the time and effort to learn how to swim in the ocean, to figure out how to look for riptides and what to do if he gets caught in one. He spends the whole summer tasting salt, going to bonfires on the beach, caught somewhere between tourist and local.

He texts Maddie about all of that, and promises he won’t get eaten by sharks. He teases her about reconnecting with her old boyfriend, who apparently is taking up all her free time, and asks about her co-workers and their neighbors. He really hopes she can’t tell that he’s avoiding talking about work.

It’s not that he doesn’t enjoy it. He likes the people he works with even if they all baby him, and he really likes the residents of the home. He loses at checkers with Mr. Allenby, at Scrabble with Mrs. Miller, and at euchre with literally everybody who plays euchre because nobody under the age of sixty knows how to play euchre. He listens to memories and cleans people up while talking their ears off so they don’t feel embarrassed and he learns how to make really good scrambled eggs from the kitchen crew. He finds out one of the surfing group works at the local animal shelter and begs her to bring friendly dogs over for the residents to meet, and she does, every other week.

It’s just that they lose people. It’s a big facility, and it’s a nursing home, not assisted living, so he figured that was the case, but it’s awful every time. It’s awful the way it’s business as usual, the way he cries while he washes the sheets and then has to put fresh ones on for someone else to move into the same room the next week. He listens to a story about Mrs. Perez’s daughter one day and meets the daughter for funeral arrangements the next. He walks in to wake up Mr. Webb and has to be the one to call in someone who’s officially allowed to sign off for resident deaths and spends that night in a girl’s hotel room more because he wants out of the nursing home than because he wants to fuck anyone when he’s feeling that sad.

Jessica, the woman he’s replacing, is due back in September. Two weeks before her return date, Evan gets called in to meet with the facility director and walks in feeling like he’s been called to the principal’s office. Jenna just wants to be called by her first name, but Evan mostly avoids using her name at all. He doesn’t feel like enough of an adult to use her first name.

“I wanted to see what your future plans are,” Jenna says when he sits down and declines any kind of beverage because he’s worried he’ll spill it on her rug. “I know you came down to us from Pennsylvania. Are you planning to go back for the fall?”

Evan doesn’t know what to do about a September where he’s not going back to school. He shakes his head anyway. “No, that’s not the plan. I thought I’d look for other work. Maybe keep going south. I’m kind of hoping to avoid snow this winter.”

“We don’t get a lot of snow in Virginia,” she says, and follows it up with an offer. “Jessica will be back, but it’s hard to find competent and caring staff for elder care homes. The residents all have enjoyed spending time with you, and your dog program has been so popular. If you want to stay, I’m happy to recommend you for a position with a pay bump, and if you ever want to go to school part time to eventually get certified as an RN, we could offer you a small educational stipend.”

“I’ll think about it,” he promises, feeling like all the air has gone out of the room, and a week later he pretends he got a job offer in South Carolina and hopes maybe people who aren’t Maddie can’t tell when he’s lying.

The nursing home gives him a party when he goes, serves him sad institutional cake and sad versions of a Philly cheesesteak because it’s the only food from Pennsylvania they know about. Evan cries and says goodbye to everyone, cries when he says goodbye to the surfing group, and calls Maddie on his way out of town.

In South Carolina, he gets a job at some chain that changes people’s tires day in and day out. Evan complains about this job to Maddie, when he can catch her on the phone. The doctor boyfriend keeps taking her time, so she doesn’t always pick up when he calls anymore. That’s cool, though. That’s why he’s gone. Evan’s always known she gave up a lot to take care of him, and this is how he can give her the time back, by going away and letting her figure out who she is without him.

Evan surfs some more, and stops when it gets cold because he can’t afford a wetsuit on minimum wage, not if he wants to eat. He meets the local party group and goes out with them, gets a fake ID he definitely doesn’t tell Maddie about so he can try drinking, which turns out to be pretty fun, or at least the parties that happen around it are fun.

He’s renting a room in a family home, so he spends Thanksgiving kind of awkwardly lurking so he’s not in the way of their holiday, cooking Ramen on a hot plate. When the tire shop won’t give him a week off for Christmas, he’s not sorry to quit and head north to Maddie and Harrisburg.

Maddie greets him in the parking lot with a hug around the neck, a complaint that he’s gained another inch on her, and some fussing that his tan means he should be wearing more sunscreen. He wants to tease her right back, but she looks good. Well-rested, happy, wearing a nice sweater he doesn’t recognize. “Being an empty nester agrees with you,” he says instead.

“Never call me that again,” she says, pointing at him, and drags him inside. “Did you pick that up from the nursing home?”

He definitely did but he’s never telling her that. He asks her other questions, about work, about the boyfriend, about Mom and Dad, who haven’t called him once since graduation. Duty discharged, or whatever. But then again, he hasn’t called them either. When she asks questions, he answers, talks a little more about the things he’s been leaving out because it’s way harder to lie by omission in person when everything feels like it used to.

“Where next?” she asks. “The hospital always needs CNAs …”

Evan shrugs and hates himself a little. “Probably south again. Maybe back to the Carolinas, or even Florida now that hurricane season is done for the year. I’ll look around for work, see what I can find. What do you want to do while I’m here?”

She hesitates. “I kind of thought … Doug and I are getting a little serious, and he knows you’re important to me, so he wanted to have dinner just the three of us sometime while you’re home. Are you okay with that?”

Evan hasn’t met any of Maddie’s boyfriends. She’s met a lot of his girlfriends, especially before he had a license, but this feels weird. He can be an adult about it, though. Maddie deserves everything, and if the doctor who broke up with her when she took Evan is what she wants, he’ll play nice for dinner. “Of course I’m okay with that. If you care about him, I want to know him.”

She hugs him again, huge and rocking him back and forth like he’s still a kid. “I missed you so much. You’re going to love each other, I promise.”

Halfway through dinner at Dr. Doug Kendall’s house, Evan is pretty sure they aren’t going to love each other, actually.

Evan is trying. He knows how to be polite to people. Sometimes in the summers in Hershey, his parents would host dinner parties to let the neighbors know that Evan wasn’t rotting in military school or dead or something, and he got pretty good at behaving in a way that wouldn’t make his parents look at Maddie like she was disappointing them through him.

So he compliments Doug on the food and Doug asks him about Virginia and South Carolina and calls him a snow bird when Evan says he’s probably going back down south, and it’s all really polite.

But sometimes Maddie will say something and Doug will make fun of it with a too-serious expression and take a beat too long to say he’s just joking, and once he corrects her table manners like he’s Dad or something, and whenever Evan tells a story, it connects back to one for him to tell that’s twice as long. Which, whatever, Evan doesn’t need the attention on him all the time. But he does that with Maddie’s stories too, and he’s her boyfriend. He should want to hear her stories. Evan always wants to hear his girlfriends’ stories. He always wants to hear Maddie’s stories.

“It was so great to finally meet you, Evan,” says Doug at the end of dinner, with the kind of mathematically perfect handshake Evan knows he doesn’t have. “Don’t be a stranger, your sister really misses you. Visit anytime.”

I get it, Evan wants to say. I get that you want her and I’m in the way. He doesn’t. Maddie wants Doug to want her, so Evan can’t say anything about it. This is why he left, so Maddie can have this. A doctor with a nice house who is okay serving her baby brother a glass of wine, who she can maybe have another kid with sometime, a kid who’s hers and not one she feels obligated to take in.

That’s not fair to Maddie. He knows she wants him. That’s kind of the problem. “Great to meet you too,” he says instead of any of that. “I’m really glad she found you again.”

“It was meant to be,” he says, possessive hand on her waist, and Maddie smiles, so maybe Evan and Doug hate each other, but Evan is going to get over it. Maddie should get what she wants.

Evan spends eight months in Atlanta as a CNA at a small hospital before he gets bored and heads to Florida, where he tends bar on a beach near the keys and surfs again. Maddie worries over him, not using either of his qualifications, but Evan likes it, talking to people and hearing their stories.

Anyway, he worries over her too, because she moves in with Doug in July and she sounds happy about it, but it feels soon, and Evan doesn’t even get to say goodbye to his Harrisburg home. Maddie packs everything he left behind up in boxes and says they’ll be in Doug’s guest room, and in the background Doug makes jokes about Evan paying rent if he stays long enough to unpack those boxes. That’s fine. He doesn’t like Doug any more than Doug likes him, and he can’t blame a guy for finding someone as cool as Maddie and wanting to start fresh with her, without any baggage weighing her down.

When he goes looking for stories to tell Maddie, avoiding the ones about sleeping in his Jeep, about going to parties and meeting girls, about the one party where he met a guy instead, something he still doesn’t know what to do with, he finds something really stupid to tell her, which is that he keeps meeting Evans.

“I mean, that’s not too weird, right?” Maddie says, laughing a little, when they’re both on a break at work around Thanksgiving and he’s complaining about it. “It’s a pretty common name.”

“Yeah, I looked it up at the library the other day, and it’s been in the top hundred names for boys every year since 1983. There were a couple Evans at school, too, just none in my class.” He tries to figure out what’s sticking out to him. “I’m just always the second Evan. Which makes sense, I know, that’s what comes of traveling around.”

There was an admin and a nurse at the hospital in Georgia, a bartender at the bar he went to there too, a member of the group he partied with most often. Another bartender in Florida, and a guy who surfs at the same beach where Evan does. And they’re all original Evans, so Evan is Evan B or New Evan or Evan Two or, unfortunately, at the surfing beach, Baby Evan. At best he’s Buckley, like he joined the army like Maddie said he shouldn’t do.

He tells Maddie that, all in a blurt, and she laughs more, bright and happy. “Oh, Baby Evan, I love that. If I’d thought of it, I would have called you that when you were little. Maybe I did.”

“Mads, I’m a grown man.”

“You can’t even legally drink,” she scoffs. “But seriously, this is bothering you. Why? Did you inherit Mom and Dad’s thing about nicknames?”

Evan likes those, actually. Likes the way Maddie would sometimes call him “sweetheart” when he was sick and a lot younger, liked the way the gym teacher at school called all the kids who were good at sports “champ,” liked the way the guys who played sports all went around calling each other by increasingly weird names the closer they got. He’s just never gotten a real nickname, and he doesn’t like that his first ones all are just saying he’s a worse version of somebody else. “I don’t know, it just feels weird. How would you feel if you ran across a Maddie in every workplace you were in?”

“Weird,” she admits. “Maybe the universe is trying to tell you something.”

Evan wants to say something to let out how sorry for himself he feels, like he’s having to learn over and over again that he’s not anybody’s first choice. Maddie would just have to say that he’s hers, and he’s really glad she says it like she believes it, but he knows it’s not right. She’s just now getting to live her first-choice life, working in the E.R., serious with a guy who’s kind of an asshole, not raising a kid way too young. “Yeah, it’s telling me to change my name. What do you think about Rupert? Bartholomew?”

“If you change your name to Rupert I’m going to call you Mr. Buckley for the rest of our lives.” Her voice softens. “You are my most important Evan, no matter what. It doesn’t matter how many there are on the planet.”

Evan is loved by one person in the whole world, and for now, at least, she probably loves him most. He thinks most people are loved by more than one person, but if he only had to pick one, he’d pick Maddie. It’s just lonely, but he doesn’t know what he wants to do yet, so he can’t put down roots. And when he does, is Maddie still going to come to him like she said once she would? Or is she going to stay with Harrisburg with Doug and he’ll only see them on Christmas forever?

“You’re my most important Maddie,” he says, and tries to find a funnier story to tell her.

Christmas in Doug’s house doesn’t feel a lot like Christmas, or it does, but it feels like Christmas in Hershey, not in Harrisburg. Maddie hugs Evan when he shows up on the doorstep and then runs off to pull something out of the oven, and she’s nonstop the whole week, insisting everything has to be perfect. She shoos Evan away when he tries to help, which is new. He’s a guest here like he’s not at home, but home doesn’t exist anymore. Someone else is renting it now.

He’s a guest everywhere, he guesses.

Doug keeps on not liking him. He calls him “bud” in a tight, unhappy voice that doesn’t sound like the kind of nickname Evan wants, and offers to sit down with him and help him find something longer-term and more steady. When Maddie’s not in the room, Doug says she worries about him, and how it would help her if he settled down somewhere, started finding other people.

Evan wants to whine like he’s a kid again, tell Maddie Doug sucks, but she loves him, and she wants him, and Evan isn’t going to take any more of her life from her. He’s failed everybody else, Daniel, his parents, he’s been failing Maddie by pretending he’s her son and not her brother, but he’s not doing that anymore.

When he packs up to leave after one week, Maddie grabs his arm, soft and so sad all of a sudden. “Do you have to go? I never see you anymore. If you don’t have another job lined up, you can stay.”

So Evan stays another week, and he’s really not surprised when Doug turns up with a smile when that week is over, says one of his med school classmates who stayed in Boston went into private practice and he’s down a CNA.

Boston’s cold, but at least it’s by the ocean, and Evan knows how to take a hint when he gets one. He goes to Boston and takes the job, and the receptionist for the practice is named Evan so he’s Nurse Evan, which he guesses isn’t the worst thing he’s been called. He moves into an apartment way out in the suburbs with four other guys and since the commute is the same length either way, he usually saves the Jeep a little mileage and takes the T instead.

He hears from Maddie less frequently. Calls turn into texts, texts turn into silences. She’s still happy to hear from him whenever they talk, but he starts getting nervous to call, not wanting to leave her a voicemail, not wanting to make her feel obligated.

When she calls him one day in June, when he’s so bored working the job Doug got him that he’s ready to jump in the Jeep and drive until he finds somewhere interesting, he hasn’t heard from her in more than a week, so he picks up just happy to hear her voice. She sounds bright, full of questions and stories, and it doesn’t take long before he starts worrying that it’s a little too bright, a little too much. It’s not that he doesn’t want Maddie to be that happy, but she usually isn’t.

“Are you okay?” he asks, cutting across her too-cheerful question about where he’s thinking of going next if he’s done with Boston. She’s never happy when he leaves a job.

“Yes! I’m great! I’ve got some really good news, actually, that’s why I called.”

Evan worries at the hem of his shirt. He should probably stop doing that, or learn how to mend them. The rest of the staff at the clinic keeps frowning at him for looking messy. He’s always getting rips in his scrubs and then he’s always messing with them. “What kind of good news?”

“Doug asked me to marry him! We don’t want to do anything too big, we’d rather spend on the honeymoon than the wedding, so we’re going to do it pretty soon, September or October. Do you want to be my best man?”

“Yes,” says Evan, so grateful that she asked a concrete question so he doesn’t have to figure out how to respond to the rest of it. Maddie loves weddings. She made him watch every romcom in the world and she always cries at the weddings, when there are weddings. She likes the big white dresses and the flowers and everything taking time and being special.

People change their minds. Maybe she really does want the honeymoon more.

“Evan? Are you still there?”

Evan and Doug hate each other, and maybe it’s just that they both want to be Maddie’s most important person. Evan hopes it is. But it’s still going to be hard to smile at this wedding the way he knows he’s got to. “Of course I’m here! Just already planning my best man speech, that’s all. Mads, I’m really happy for you, you know? You deserve everything you want.”

“You and Doug and two weeks in Paris in the fall? I think I’m pretty close to that.”

Evan fakes being happy for the rest of the call. So does she. Evan doesn’t know why either of them are faking, but they don’t stop, either.

Evan gives his two weeks at the clinic the day after Maddie tells him about the engagement, mostly out of spite, and heads back to South Carolina for the summer, not to work at the tire shop but to tend bar near the beach and start surfing again. He expects to hear about the wedding, but all he really hears is that it’s going to be at the courthouse, that Maddie found a dress, that the only guests are going to be close family, that they’re going to a restaurant after so there’s really nothing to plan.

He distracts himself flirting with the patrons at the bar, and does more than flirt with a girl his age, Bella, who says she’ll kill him if he makes a Twilight reference and spends three weeks watching him dark-eyed over the bartop before dragging him somewhere different every night, because he’s in the Jeep at a local campsite and she’s staying with her grandmother for the summer. When she leaves, he asks if she’ll call, and she laughs and says “This isn’t that kind of thing, Evan B. You aren’t that kind of guy.”

He takes home a different girl the next night, and calls Maddie the day after that. She doesn’t pick up. Just texts eight hours later saying she was on shift and she’ll call him soon.

She doesn’t ask why he called.

When he comes to Harrisburg a week before the mid-September wedding, Doug is at work, so he gets to stand in the driveway with Maddie and rock her back and forth while he holds her. She smells different, unfamiliar, some new shampoo, maybe even perfume, and it’s disorienting even though she’s the same Maddie as ever.

“I can’t believe how strong you’re getting,” she says into his chest.

Evan, who’s been swimming in the ocean almost every day for months now, the best workout there is, beams at her and finally lets her go to look at her. She looks tired, but she’s a nurse and even low-key weddings are stressful to plan, or so she tells him. “I bet I could carry you up the front steps.”

“I bet you could carry Doug up the front steps.”

They don’t need to talk about Doug. “Did I tell you I tried to help a beached shark last month?” he asks, and grabs his duffel to let her lead him inside. Most people his age are getting more things, starting to settle down, filling up dorm rooms and getting ready for apartments, but Evan decides to throw out more at every stop. He spends too much time in the Jeep to have it cluttered up.

“Evan Buckley, you did not. Do I need to start checking you for shark bites now?”

For a few hours, it’s easy. They laugh and they talk and they order takeout. Halfway through dinner, Doug calls, and Maddie takes the call in the next room, and when she comes back, her smile has frozen.

He wants so badly to ask her to leave with him. He wants her to have someone, he really does. He just doesn’t want that someone to be Doug.

The wedding feels like a weird kind of business meeting. Doug’s parents are as rich and frosty as Evan’s parents, and Evan is the odd man out among the couples. He signs as Maddie’s witness and feels a little bit like thumbing his nose at his parents about it, and he holds her bouquet and shakes Doug’s hand and hates everyone at the wedding a little bit for not stopping it, himself and Maddie kind of included.

“You should come back to Hershey with us tomorrow,” Dad says at dinner after the wedding, which is the first time Evan has ever heard him say anything like that.

Of course he says it, though. He’s the one who talked to Evan after graduation, told him it’s time to stand on his own two feet and let Maddie live her life, that he’s been enough of a burden on her. He was even nice enough not to say that she’s not the first sibling Evan stole something from. Daniel’s life. Maddie’s youth. “I figured I’d hit the road tomorrow,” he says. He’d do it tonight, but they’ve rented out the honeymoon suite somewhere, so he’s going to be alone in Doug’s house for a night.

“Evan.” Maddie, all soft and disappointed. “I was hoping you’d stay a little longer. We’re leaving for Paris in two weeks, you could housesit while we’re gone.”

“Yeah? Water your plants, feed your dog?” he says, and hopes his smile takes the teeth out of that. They’re medical professionals with long hours and busy schedules. No plants, no pets. Nothing to take care of. Maddie needs that, after taking care of him for so long. “No, I’m going to find something seasonal down south again, probably. Post-hurricane construction or something. You’ll send me a postcard, though, right?”

“To what address?” says Doug, and it’s supposed to be the same kind of teasing Evan just gave Maddie, but it doesn’t feel that way.

Maddie squeezes his arm. “I’ll get you a souvenir, and I’ll give it to you at Christmas. Don’t be a stranger, okay?”

Evan’s a stranger everywhere. He misses the crappy apartment in the crappy building halfway across Harrisburg. “I won’t. I promise.”

On a whim, Evan heads west instead of south, even if it is inland. He wants something new, and what he finds is a mechanic with a broken arm in a small town in southern Illinois. And then, three weeks, a successful cast removal, and an inadvisable fling with the mayor’s daughter later, he finds a road construction crew in Missouri.

He gets one phone call from Maddie before she goes to Paris where she worries about him the whole time, and then another phone call after Paris where she talks about everything but Doug, which is probably because she knows Evan hates him.

“I miss you,” she says at the end of the phone call. “Pick somewhere fun and tropical for your next long stay, okay? Go back to Florida, head out to California, let me come visit you and nap on a beach.”

He leaves the road crew a few weeks later, and heads back east, to Florida, but a new city. He doesn’t really want to repeat places, doesn’t want to see if people remember him. For Maddie’s sake, he takes an orderly job in a local hospital and supplements with bartending so he has enough to pay for a shitty apartment in a shitty neighborhood.

Sometime in November, she calls sounding stressed, which is a lot better than her sounding way too cheerful, but a lot worse than her sounding actually cheerful. “Evan, do you still have a suit that fits?”

“Why would I have a suit that fits?” he asks, baffled. He wore dress pants and a button-up to her wedding. Suits are expensive. He’s pretty sure he hasn’t had one since his parents bought him one for Christmas when he was like twelve and then he’d outgrown it by the time they asked him to put it on for a dinner party that summer.

“Shit. Can you have someone at work measure you, or send me your scrubs sizes? Doug’s parents want to have us for Christmas this year, which means you are coming to his parents’ house for Christmas this year, and they are a family that does holiday dinners in suits.”

Evan gives serious thought to pretending the Jeep is broken down on Christmas Eve, so he doesn’t have to face the prospect of that, but it’s Maddie. He’s never going to not be there when she wants him. He complains a little for show, but he goes back to Harrisburg for Christmas, and wears a suit, and stays two days, and gets all of fifteen minutes alone with Maddie the whole time.

“You’re happy, right?” she asks, clinging to him in the driveway when he’s getting ready to head out. “I worry about you, not putting down roots.”

Like Evan’s not aware that most people his age are getting close to graduating college, or they’ve already picked a direction their life is going. He doesn’t feel like he’s any closer than he was when he took off for Virginia Beach, just an endless string of not-quite-right failures. “Just have to find the right soil,” he jokes. “Maybe I should work at a nursery?”

“You can always come home.”

He can’t. Maddie always wants him, he does know that, but maybe she shouldn’t. She’s got a life with Doug, who wants to be with her all the time, and his parents, who are kind of assholes clearly judging Evan’s life choices but do seem to like Maddie. Her life is easier when he’s not around. He’s got to let her have what he took from her. “Maddie, are you happy?”

She cups his face in her hands. She has to reach so far up to do it now. He still feels so young, sometimes, but he’s a few years older now than she was when she took him in. “I’m happy if you’re happy,” she says, eyes all shiny with tears. “So you go find somewhere you love, Evan, somewhere that makes you happy, and then I’ll be happy.”

“You should be happy anyway,” he complains. “You’ve got a job you love, you’ve got Doug, who’s whatever, but I know you love him.”

Maddie laughs at him, a little wet. “He’s whatever, huh? You’re such a romantic. But someday you’re going to love a kid, and you’re going to know that you can’t be completely happy if they aren’t happy. Even when they’re not a kid anymore. So for me, that’s your only job.”

Evan pulls her in so he doesn’t have to make eye contact with her and swallows a few times before he speaks. “I love you, Mads. Call me more often. That will keep me happy until I find wherever it is I’m meant to be.”

“I’ll try,” she says, and lets him go.

Over the next year and change, Evan is Evan B, Evan 2, Evan Jr., Evan Buckley as his full name every time so he feels like he’s getting scolded whenever he’s spoken to, and at his most annoying workplace where the boss thinks he’s funny he’s “Essence” thanks to some band nobody even listens to anymore. He’s a CNA, an assistant mechanic, a bartender, a plant store employee, and a ranch hand, in Ohio, Minnesota, South Dakota, Colorado, Montana.

Someday he’s going to have to apply for a real job somewhere he wants to stay, and they’re never going to believe he’ll want to stay there, with the resume he’s got. Evan will cross that bridge when he comes to it. He’s starting to realize that when the itch comes to leave, ignoring it just means he’ll be miserable, and he promised Maddie that he’s going to try not to be.

Evan texts with Maddie most weeks, talks with her on the phone most months. He sends her postcards from most new towns, and starts sending them to work when she says they get a mail thief in the neighborhood.

She calls one night in Colorado sometime in early December when he’s starting to think about his route back to Pennsylvania, past midnight for him, way too late for her to be up most times. As soon as his phone goes off with her ringtone he sits up in bed, scrambles away from his night’s hookup even though he knows it’s going to mean that he has to explain that no, he doesn’t have a girlfriend, just a sister. “Maddie?” She’s crying. Sobbing, more like. “Mads, are you okay?”

“Yeah, I—I shouldn’t have called. It’s just. Middle of a rough shift.”

Evan starts putting his clothes on. Maddie cries a little sometimes after a rough shift, but not like this. Not to him, anyway. And all the nurses at the hospital love her, if she’s anywhere on hospital grounds, crying like that, they should be with her. Plus it’s too quiet. Hospitals, even break rooms, they’re never quiet. The microphone is always picking up something, but it isn’t now. “Are you sure? I can find somewhere to park my Jeep, I can get there tomorrow.”

“No, no, please don’t come. I just … really miss you. Wanted to hear your voice.”

“You can call me anytime. If I don’t pick up I’m just at work, and I’ll call you back as soon as I’m free.” He’s always saying the wrong thing. He wants to help her as much as she helps him, be her brother instead of her kid, but he’s not sure they’ll ever really get that back. “Tell me what I can do, Maddie.”

She sniffles. “You’re still in Colorado, right? I’ve never been that far west. The mountains in your card were pretty.”

“Yeah, they’re pretty cool, if you can see them through the haze of pot smoke. You thinking about coming to visit?”

“I … maybe? What would you think if I came to spend Christmas with you this year, instead of the other way around?”

Evan frowns, pulls back to look at his phone like that’s going to give him an answer. “I’m happy to have you, obviously, any day of the year, but what does Doug think about this plan? I don’t think he’s going to like my living situation.” Actually, neither is Maddie. If she’s coming, he has less than a month to get an apartment instead of a series of couches and, when he buys the right girl a drink, beds. Shit.

“Doug’s distracted. Going up for a promotion at work. He doesn’t really want to do Christmas much this year, I think. So I can spend it with you!”

He doesn’t like this. He wants it so much, wants to have her in his life, wonders if that will maybe finally make someplace besides Harrisburg feel like home, but this doesn’t feel right. “Of course, whatever you want. I’m probably not going to have a tree, but maybe we can get one together. I guess I won’t plan to quit my job and road trip back to you, then?”

“No. No, I’m coming to you,” she says, and he wants it to sound determined but mostly it sounds wavery. “I’ll call you with my flight info when I have it, Evan, okay? And I love you so much.”

“You could text it to me so I’ll actually remember it,” he says, making fun of himself a little so she can join in about how easily distracted he is.

“Don’t text me about it,” she says, sudden and harsh, and his stomach hurts, and his hookup is awake behind him and he doesn’t want to turn around and see the expression on her face. “Just … don’t. I’ll call you, and you can’t text me. I’ll see you so soon, Evan. I’ve got to go.”

“Love you, Mads,” he says, but he isn’t saying it to anyone. He turns around. His hookup isn’t even mad, just looking at him with so much pity. “I’ve got to go,” he says, and leaves even though it means he’s spending the night in the Jeep.

Maddie calls him from the hospital break room three days later, tells him to pick her up from the airport on the twenty-first, tells him the flight number, laughs when he tells her about the massive scary horse at the Denver airport, promises they can take a picture in front of it.

Evan waits outside the airport in the cell phone lot all day. She’s supposed to land at ten in the morning, but eleven passes, and twelve, and two, and five. He googles the weather all the time on the east coast and everywhere in between, but it’s a clear day. No storms anywhere that should stop her flight, and they don’t. He calls and asks about the flight, and it came in, and Maddie wasn’t on it.

He calls her a thousand times and she doesn’t pick up once. “I’m coming to you, okay?” he says in a voicemail sometime in the middle of the night. Not having an apartment means his stuff is already packed, always ready for the next thing, turns out it’s a good thing they were going to have a hotel Christmas. He can quit his job without notice. Just another problem for the resume. “I’m coming for Christmas, I can make it just in time.”

Weather blows in like it’s making a joke out of him. He barely makes it three hours out of Denver before it’s obvious it’s going to kill him to keep going, and he thinks about doing it anyway. Maddie would do it for him.

Or maybe she wouldn’t. Don’t come, she texts him in the morning. Don’t keep tying yourself to Pennsylvania like this. There’s so much more for you out there. Find your roots, Evan, don’t keep waiting for me. You won’t find them here.

Evan calls her. Evan texts her. He cries, he yells at her. He promises he’ll be at her side in an instant if she says she wants him. He begs her to just let him know she’s okay, admits that he’s scared. He thinks about going to Harrisburg anyway, and pounding on her door, but something stops him. This is what Dad told him, after high school graduation. He told Evan that it’s Maddie’s turn to live her own life, and Evan shouldn’t stop her anymore.

Maddie never answers. He texts her an I love you every Sunday night when they would normally be having dinner if she wasn’t on shift, and instead of heading east to Harrisburg, where he really wants to be, he heads west instead, for Montana, and finds a ranch that just had a hand get discovered by Hollywood.

He sends Maddie a postcard. He doesn’t hear back about that either.

“You need some direction, Evan Jr.,” says the guy nobody bothers to refer to as Evan Sr. in the ranch bunk house one night.

Evan’s heard that one before. “Sorry if you’re about to pitch me the military, man, I promised my mom I wouldn’t do that.” He’s found, over the years, that with people he doesn’t expect to know that long, it’s easier to say Maddie’s his mother than his sister. Especially now that she doesn’t call him.

Evan Sr. snorts in a way that Evan would be offended about if he weren’t so exhausted after a day of herding cattle, which is theoretically better than herding cats except they have big soulful eyes and it’s really hard to want to make them do things they don’t want to do. “I wouldn’t inflict you on a drill sergeant. No, I had a cousin that did the conservation corps a few years back. Spent a few months planting trees and building trails, bunking down with a team. It’s like the army for hippies. Supposed to be geared for kids like you with no fucking clue what they’re doing with their lives.”

He kind of wants to bristle, the way he does whenever anyone tries to give him advice, except it doesn’t sound bad, from just that. “Are you trying to kick me out?” he asks, mostly for show. There’s a lot of dude posturing at the ranch. Evan’s worked most often as a CNA, so he’s a lot more used to working with women. Most of whom are older than he is. He’s not sure if the posturing or the babying is worse.

“Listen to me or don’t, Junior. I’m just saying, I don’t think you’re a lifer here. Could be a decent next stop for you.”

He keeps expecting being a CNA to make him want to go to college finally, be an RN like Maddie, but at this point he’s pretty sure that’s not happening. Everything he’s been doing, cycling between the same few kinds of thing, is just a holding pattern. He doesn’t know what he’s waiting for anymore. “Shoot me a link. I can at least look into it,” he says.

Maybe it’s the right step. Maybe it’s just the next one. Maybe he’ll at least get to be Evan there, but he’s not sure he knows how to do that without qualifiers anymore.

He applies for the Sacramento base of operations because he’s never seen the Pacific and he misses the ocean, after more than a year inland. He gets a group of people in his cabin who he works with every day, and sure, there’s another Evan there and he’s not a monster, he’s not going to make a guy whose last name is Seamon use that in a group of burned-out twenty-somethings, so Evan is Evan B again for the next nine months, his most frequent name.

Evan has a real address for the first time in a while, even if it’s a care-of one, and he drops Maddie a postcard from California with a view of the Pacific and tells her the address, not that he has much hope about it. She’s just gone, and he’s even heard from his parents more than from her, a half-hearted birthday text two days early.

He doesn’t love the shitty pay, the way he comes home from a day of backbreaking labor and frequently lands in accommodations without a shower, the drama that comes from living with people at close quarters, but it’s closer, is the thing. He gets to see the ocean all the time, even if he doesn’t have a lot of time to swim. He’s not doing something new every day, or even every week, but he’s almost never bored.

Six months in, they get offered a volunteer task, digging a firebreak a safe distance from a wildfire that’s just picking up steam, and Evan signs on. They’ve been working mostly with the park service, but this time they’re met by a man in his forties who introduces himself as the captain of a wildfire crew. He tells them all what they’re doing, makes sure they know it’s important even if it’s boring, and picks up a shovel himself when they get to work.

He ends up next to Evan on the line, the two of them working faster than everybody else, and Captain Reynolds asks a few polite questions that Evan really doesn’t want to answer, so he starts rambling about his goals instead, about the few bright stars he’s got guiding him even if he still doesn’t know where they’re leading, and what he’s been doing in the meantime.

“Son,” says Captain Reynolds when Evan winds himself down, embarrassed as always for talking way longer than anybody wants to listen. “If you want to help people and you’ve got experience in the medical field and as a mechanic, and clearly you’re pretty active, you might want to look into fighting fires. Wildfire might get boring, it’s a lot of digging trenches, but in a big city, you get a variety, and they need people who don’t mind getting their hands dirty and aren’t squeamish.”

Evan loses his rhythm, thinking about that. Firefighter is the kind of job it’s hard to remember that real people do, even when he’s working next to them. So many little kids want to do the job, but it’s supposed to be the kind of thing you grow out of wanting to do. Some people don’t, though. Some people do it. “You think I could?”

“Seems to me like the job wouldn’t be an issue for you. Maybe the staying power, but that’s what this job is meant to teach you, from what I can tell.” Captain Reynolds nods at him. “Keep your pace up, son, someone else might start to catch up.”

Evan does, and he’s quiet for the next few hours of digging, worrying at the thought, wondering if it’s the right one. The fire is getting closer, they can all smell the smoke on the wind, so it turns out to be a one-day job before they go out of the likely radius, and after Captain Reynolds thanks them all, he takes Evan aside and hands off his number and his email address.

“I’ve got a friend at the Fire Academy down in LA. They’re one of the most competitive forces in the country, but they’re always looking for hard workers, and even if you don’t go into the LAFD, a certification from that academy will get you a job most other places. Give me a call if you want a recommendation when your contract here is up.”

If Evan is going to put down roots somewhere, he should do it closer to Maddie. She might need help someday, or might just want him around. But maybe he can stay away for however long fire training lasts. He should look that up, maybe. “Thank you, captain,” he says, a little too late. “It means a lot that you’d give me a recommendation after one day. Which, not to question you, but why did you?”

“Well, like I said, seems like the skills match up. But other than that? Some people need this job. I think you might be one of them. It’s Buckley, right? I’ll remember that name.”

Evan has to swallow before he can answer. “Thank you. I’ll remember yours, too.”

The last three months of his contract with the corps pass in nervous anticipation. On his days off, he spends way more time than he wants to admit looking up what firefighters do, since probably not enough buildings burn down regularly that he would be doing that all day, and how they get trained. It would be a year of training at least, depending on the academy and how he does, but he’s pretty sure his parents would release educational funds so he wouldn’t have to figure out how to afford it with his nonexistent savings.

A few weeks before he’s going to be a free agent, ready to give Captain Reynolds a call and ask about that recommendation, he breaks his long chain of unanswered I love yous in his text thread with Maddie. Any real news goes in his postcards, usually, but he wants to try. I think I’ve figured out what I want, he texts after typing out at least a dozen texts and deleting them just as fast. I’m going to have to train for a while, but I think I want to be a firefighter. Up to you where I do it, though. Just tell me where.

The next day, he gets a phone call. It’s rare that he does, other than quick check-ins from a boss if he’s running late, and this one comes in one a day off, when he’s sitting on the beach, and as soon as he hears the ringtone, he scrambles for it.

It’s not Maddie. Instead, it’s a phone call he’s been waiting for since he was fourteen. “This is the National Bone Marrow Registry,” says a very pleasant woman. “Am I speaking to Evan Buckley?”

“Yes, yeah, this is Evan. Thank you for calling. Is this, am I—you should know I’m just a couple weeks away from finishing a job contract that has like no PTO, is that going to be a problem? I could maybe figure that out if it’s urgent, I forget what they—”

“Mr. Buckley,” she cuts in smoothly, “I’ll give you all the information you need, I promise. A few weeks shouldn’t cause any problems in this particular case, we’ve found you as a match very early in treatment. I assume this means you’re still willing to donate? There’s a juvenile leukemia case in need of bone marrow, and very soon after the end of your contract, we’d like to schedule you to help.”

Evan swallows. Another way of helping people. It’s not contact from Maddie, but maybe it’s a sign that he’s on the right track anyway. “Yes. Of course. Tell me everything just let me get something to write on. Where am I going, anyway?”

“You’re going to Texas,” she says. “El Paso. Ready to write a few things down?”

Texas, Evan discovers, is as hot as Florida but way dustier. The air conditioning, like in Florida, feels frosty in comparison, and Evan sits in a hospital where he feels both like a superhero and kind of like he’s in trouble and tries not to shiver while doing his best impression of an adult and signing forms. “The family has expressed that if you want to meet the child receiving your donation, they’d be willing to set up a meeting,” says the patient advocate who’s been walking him through the process eventually.

“Is it really selfish to say I only want to meet them if the graft works?” Evan blurts, and winces. “I just … I really want to do this, but I’m doing it a little bit because of my brother, and how I couldn’t help him even though we were a match.”

“This process has improved so much since the nineties,” she assures him. She’s using the nurse voice. He knows how to do that too but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. “Of course you should only meet the family if you want to, but I can show you all sorts of statistics about how effective the treatments are.”

It’s not like Evan doesn’t want to meet the kid. He pretty much always wants to meet kids. “Is there … it’s totally cool if the parents meet me and know who I am, I don’t want to ask for anything weird, but if I meet the kid, is there a way for them to not know who I am? I don’t want them to have to be grateful to me. I just want to check in, make sure they’re okay.”

The patient advocate puts a hand over her chest and makes a face like Maddie did sometimes, when Evan said something she liked a lot. “Oh, honey. I’ll ask her parents, but that’s very sweet. Off the top of my head, we often get volunteers in the pediatrics ward to read stories to the kids, or play with them. You’ve got medical training, I see, so you’d do just fine passing our background checks for that. How long are you planning to be in town?”

Evan’s been looking up requirements for fire academies, for the LAFD if he’s going to use that recommendation to the academy there, and he’s been thinking about getting EMT certified. It shouldn’t be too hard, with the certification he already has, and it might be cheaper to take a course in El Paso than in Los Angeles. “Not sure yet, but I might be sticking around for a while. I just finished up a contract and I’m looking for what’s next.”

“Well, El Paso will be happy to have you. And we couldn’t put you in pediatrics without a conflict of interest, but if you’re interested in a job in the area, I know the hospital is always looking for experienced staff.”

“Thank you, I’ll look at the job boards,” says Evan, and goes back to signing paperwork. Everything is moving fast. If all goes well and the last few blood tests come back right, he’ll be donating within two days.

He gets to his motel that night and he wants to text Maddie more than he wants anything in the world. He wants to say that he’s doing this like he couldn’t for Daniel, like he couldn’t for Chase. If she won’t answer for that, she won’t answer for anything, but that means either getting a response or not getting one are both bad. If she doesn’t answer, probably she never will. If she does, he knows that this is what it takes to get her attention, and he doesn’t know what to do with that.

I love you, he texts instead, a return to form, and looks her up on the hospital website.

She’s still in the E.R., but the picture is new. She looks tired, and her hair is a little shorter than he’s used to. He stares at the photo on his phone until the screen goes dark. He thinks about the patient advocate asking him if anyone would be there to keep him company, and the pity on her face when he said no.

Evan gives his donation two days later and then spends another two days pretty much flat on his back aching and feeling like shit, first in the hospital during the observation period and then at the motel after being briefly upright for a taxi ride.

Everyone fussed about releasing him to stay on his own until he claimed he was going to call a cousin in California and see if she can come down for a few days. He wishes he had a cousin. He wishes his mom were here, how when he was sick or hurt as a kid she’d forget about Daniel for a minute and focus on him, how cool and steady her hands were. He wishes Maddie were here constantly, so much he aches with it, and leaves her a voicemail for the first time in months and hopes his voice doesn’t sound as tiny and pathetic as it feels while he tells her he misses her and he’s in Texas, just hasn’t had a chance to send a postcard yet.

More productively, he applies for an EMT course in El Paso, and then follows that up by applying for a job at a local mechanic shop, so he can hone both of his skillsets at once, or maybe so he doesn’t have any time to be bored or lonely. He interviews with the mechanics the next day, warns them he’ll probably only be around for a few months, and gets the job. The EMT course at the local community college accepts him, and he texts his father about his education fund and gets the money and dry congratulations for finally picking a life path. Maybe they’ll tell Maddie. Maybe she’s not talking to them either.

Numbers on your donation partner looking good so far, the patient advocate tells him via text a week into all of it, when he feels just about like himself again and is celebrating by spending the day under a car. Are you still interested in volunteering on our pediatrics floor?

Evan should say no. He’s really bad at secrets. But the mechanics are the taciturn types and the EMT course doesn’t start for another three weeks, and he’s lonely. He’s been lonely since he was eighteen, and spending a day with some kids might mask it for a while.

Sign me up, if the parents are okay with it, he texts back.

The parents, Adam and Paula, want to meet him, which Evan guesses is fair, so he puts on a button-up shirt and decides he should maybe buy a new one in a bigger size and lets them shake his hand a lot. Adam cries, can’t really get words out around it. Paula hugs him, rocks him back and forth, and it’s so close to how Maddie used to hug him that he closes his eyes and has to swallow down the tears.

They show him pictures of their daughter Charlene, Charlie, playing youth softball pre-chemo and wearing brightly colored Halloween wigs post-chemo. “We know she’d want to know,” Paula tries while Evan studies a picture of her sitting on Santa’s lap last year. “It’s real sweet of you to not want her to feel like she has to thank you, but she’d like to.”

Evan shakes his head. “I’ll write her a letter, okay? Telling her why I did it. And when I leave town, you can give it to her?”

They don’t like it, but they accept it, and that’s the last hurdle, so Evan is given a badly printed volunteer badge that cheerfully identifies him as Evan Buckle like he’s some kind of cartoon character and shown to the pediatrics floor.

“We’ve already got a Mr. Evan who visits the floor sometimes,” the charge nurse says apologetically while they’re waiting to go in. “Is Mr. Buckley okay?”

Texas, he’s figuring out pretty fast, is big on formality, or at least on respect. There’s a lot of calling people “sir” and “ma’am” even when you know them. Of course they want kids calling any adult they meet Mr. or Ms. Well, it’s Texas, so probably Mrs. or Miss instead of Ms., but he’s not here to judge. He’s also not here, though, to get called Mr. Buckley, but he can’t say Please, that’s my father’s name without it sounding bitter. Plus he can already imagine the lisps, becoming Mr. Buck-wee, Mr. Bucky, and he’s not at all sure he can keep a straight face if he ends up there. “How about Mr. Buck?” he asks, on a whim.

“Mr. Buck it is,” she says, and shows him in.

Evan doesn’t approach Charlie, not today. She’s about ten, holding court in the middle of a bunch of kids of similar ages, the life of the party, way too cool for an old book he picks out of the stack about a bunch of letters climbing up into a tree for some reason. That gets him mostly younger kids, but they seem to get a kick out of it.

The ringleader in this group is a kid who happily bosses the others around from where he’s leaning against the knees of a woman Evan’s age. The kid is maybe five, and the woman is a little young to be his mother, but she looks tired enough to be. Even if the kid isn’t hers by birth, though, he’s hers. It doesn’t really matter to Evan how they got that way, except that it makes him think of Maddie again.

“Are you new here?” the bossy kid asks when the story is over and people are scattering. He’s got a great grin and glasses, and he’s not very mobile, bandages on his legs. His mom lifts him like it’s easy into a wheelchair nearby while he talks, stammering unself-consciously over the words. “I’m kind of new here. Mom says I stayed here before but I don’t remember that. I’m Christopher. Is your name really Mr. Buck?”

“Evan Buckley,” he says to both of them, trying to seem non-threatening to this poor exhausted woman who could probably really use a nap. “But today I’m Mr. Buck.”

“Oh thank God,” says the mom, and her voice is great, husky and amused. If they met in a bar he’d probably try to take her home. “If your last name was actually Buckle I was going to lose my mind. I’m Shannon.” And then, like it tastes bad, “Diaz.”

That sure tells a story, but Evan tries not to assume people’s stories, mostly because he knows that he gives himself away all the damn time and he’d like people to not make assumptions about him. “Great to meet you both, Christopher and Shannon. Do you guys want to hear another story?”

“We’re off to PT,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “Great to meet you, Mr. Buck. Are you a regular volunteer here?”

“Today’s my first day, but I’ll be around for a while. Not every day, and I hope your stay is short, so maybe I won’t see you, but I’ll keep an eye out.”

Shannon’s smile is polite. Christopher’s is huge, and it’s enough to chase the loneliness off for a bit.

He stays for a while, and when he moves back down the ward, Christopher is in a bed, glum and alone, picking a loose thread on his sheet. Evan, who just got one last look at Charlie playing War with her friends, was planning to leave, but Christopher is alone and sad, and he’s there exactly to prevent that kind of thing. “Hey, kid, you okay in here? Need another story before I go? Did your mom have to go home?”

“She got a call. Dad was supposed to pick her up but he got stuck at work.” He picks at the thread some more. “I want to see him, I hope he comes instead of Grandma.”

Evan’s heart hurts for this kid already, and he can’t say it makes him like the dad very much. “Well, while your mom is on a call, do you have a favorite story you want to tell me? I’ve been telling people stories all day, I’d like to hear yours.”

Christopher tells a mostly incoherent story of his own invention about mice that live on the moon and scoffs so hard when Evan asks if it’s because the moon is made of cheese that Evan wants to hug him. Shannon unhappy-pause Diaz comes back halfway through, leans on the door and lets her kid finish, then smiles at Evan. “He’ll keep you all night if you let him.”

“I’d let him,” Evan admits, but he stands up. “Have a good night, you two. Maybe I’ll see you around, Christopher, and you can tell me about the space-faring cats that might hurt the mice, that sounds pretty scary.”

“They have lasers,” says Christopher, and Evan laughs and disengages, and it hurts a little to do.

Two days later Evan goes back to the ward, and he plays a few rounds of poker with Charlie, who’s a terrifying card shark and wins most of a vending machine bag of goldfish crackers off of him. When he reads a story to the younger kids, Christopher is there again, and this time he’s sitting on a man’s lap. The guy is just as young as Shannon and just as tired, and Evan is prepared to not like him but mostly he feels sorry for him.

“Hey, bud,” he tells Christopher once he’s finished up a book about a bat. “Do you have anything more to tell me about those cats with lasers? That sounded pretty cool.”

The dad gives Evan a sharp look, but he doesn’t complain or object or anything, and the second his son starts talking he dials in, nodding along as Christopher totally loses the plot. “I drew a picture,” Christopher says when he winds himself down. “Dad, dad, it’s the picture I showed you when you came, I said Mr. Buck would want to see, remember?”

There’s a bag attached to the back of the wheelchair today, and Christopher’s dad gives Evan a long look like he’s wondering if he needs to beat him up and then goes into the bag and takes out a picture that looks mostly like scribbles but also, if you squint, like mice on the moon. “You must have hired a professional artist to do this one,” he says, as dramatic as he can be. “It’s just too good for anyone who doesn’t put their work in museums!”

“My art goes on the fridge at home and Mom says it’s like a museum,” says Christopher, carefully sounding the last word out.

“Well, that explains it.”

“You should take it,” Christopher decides. “The story is for you.”

Evan has to swallow. At the bottom of a bag he almost never opens in the back of the Jeep, there’s a little packet of cards the kids he used to babysit in Harrisburg made him when he graduated. Those kids probably don’t really remember or care about him anymore, but he takes them out sometimes when the missing Maddie gets to be too much. “That’s amazing, Christopher, I’d love that.” He looks at the dad, who doesn’t look thrilled by that development. “If that’s cool with you? Maybe the fridge needs a few new pieces.”

“He’s prolific,” says the dad, who sounds grudging about it, but he does produce a pen from somewhere and hand it to his son. “Mijo, do you want to sign it? In museums, they like it when work is signed.”

Christopher laboriously spells out his whole name. The first R is backwards.

“I’m Evan, but the cool kids around here call me Mr. Buck,” he says while Christopher writes, because he’s pretty incapable of shutting up and Christopher is busy, which means the dad has to put up with him.

“Eddie,” says the dad, and then makes pretty much exactly the same face his wife did before he says “Diaz.”

“Dad’s leaving soon,” says Christopher, frowning a little as he finishes his last name. The Z is also backwards. Evan’s going to keep this picture until he dies. “So he’s here to spend time with me before he goes.”

“I re-enlisted,” Eddie Diaz says, so fast it’s like he trips on it. Evan winces, because probably his face got really judgmental when Christopher said the first part of that, for Eddie to look so miserable now. “That’s all.”

Evan doesn’t think often about almost joining the army. Maddie talked him out of it, and so she never had to know how close it got, how he’d put his name on a list for information and how they called him every month for years. Longer than Maddie called him every month, actually. He mostly didn’t pick up, but he still sometimes wonders if things would be different. If he’d have more of a direction. “You’ll have a whole gallery wall by the time you get back,” he says instead of anything serious. “Sucks, man. How soon are you shipping out?”

“A few weeks,” he says, and when Christopher hands over the picture, he gives Evan a tight smile and turns back to his son. “Hey, buddy, you wanted to go for a walk in the courtyard, right? Let’s make that happen before I have to go.”

Christopher gives Evan a cheerful wave, and Evan folds up the picture and puts it in his pocket, then turns to the next kid, going all-in with his attention, staying out of Christopher’s business.

The next time Evan goes to the ward, Christopher is gone, but the time after that, Evan runs into him in the hall on his way to PT, where he’s apparently going to be fitted for crutches. Shannon smiles at Evan and says Christopher’s been talking about him and then says, more quietly, that she hopes Eddie wasn’t too weird with him. Evan winces and changes the subject, puts his focus back on Christopher.

El Paso isn’t a small city, but he seems to run into the Diazes a lot after that. Shannon in the grocery store, staring at a few brands of bread like the secrets of the universe are stored in them. Eddie and an older couple who are probably his parents come into the mechanic shop to get a car fixed and Evan and Eddie pretend they don’t know each other with such skill that Evan goes around the other side of awkward and starts feeling like they’re in a conspiracy together. Christopher, Shannon, and Eddie are all at the park when Evan takes a run, and he ends up running a short way with Christopher’s arms around his neck sort of strangling him.

On the first day of Evan’s EMT course, Eddie is there helping the instructor set up, and they sort of blink at each other in shock before Eddie laughs and shakes his head a little. “Hey, man. I got asked to fill in for today last-minute, the co-instructor’s kid is sick and I owe her for babysitting Christopher.”

“Probably not how you want to spend one of your last days home, though,” Evan says, quiet because it’s not anybody’s business.

Eddie shrugs. “Shannon’s mom is in town for while I’m leaving, so she and Shannon are spoiling Chris today, no father needed. But yeah, getting on a plane in forty-eight hours.”

“Well, best of luck,” says Evan, awkward and knowing it’s the wrong thing to say, and expects to never see him again when the day is over.

Working and taking an EMT course at the same time is grueling, but Evan grits his teeth and keeps on with it. He stays at the motel, since the community college insists he needs an address to be on their rolls, which means he needs to keep on working instead of eating his savings up, but he focuses as much of his attention on learning a new facet of the medical field as he can.

He likes the CNA work, likes getting to know people and help them in small practical ways, but the EMT stuff is, he admits, way better for him. The memorization, the rote learning, that’s boring and thus hard, but the on-the-spot decisions, the ticking clocks, those are way better. He studies on his lunch breaks, at the park, gives his pillows CPR so many times that they get noticeably flatter.

He goes to the hospital pediatrics floor a few times a week. Charlie is improving, getting her color and her energy back, and Evan glows with the knowledge and almost texts Maddie about it before deciding not to.

He ends up telling Shannon when he runs into her at Starbucks one morning halfway through the EMT course. He starts with Charlie, ends with Daniel, tries to keep it short and not too pathetic, and manages the first but not really the second, judging from the look on her face. “That’s really great,” she says. She ducks her head. “My mom’s a survivor—not leukemia. Breast. But I really respect that.”

“That sucks,” he says, completely inadequate. “She lives out of town, right? Eddie said she was in town when I ran into him at my EMT course.”

Shannon gives him a weird look. “Okay. Yeah, she does. She lives in LA.”

One long day of driving away. He’s planned out his route to the LA fire academy a few times now. “How’s Christopher?” he asks, since that doesn’t seem like a productive vein of conversation.

“Doing a lot better. Moving around on those crutches like you wouldn’t believe.” She cups her hands around her coffee, takes a sip. “He really liked you. Thanks, for treating him like a regular kid. Not everybody does.”

Evan shrugs. “I’ve seen a lot. He’s a happy kid, which means you guys are doing great with him, and he’s so creative. I always just made my toys play house or store, but he’s got mice on the moon.”

“We read to him every night.” She swallows. “I do. Eddie had started to get into it, and now he’s gone. Again.”

“He must miss you guys a lot. Any word from him?”

“He’s on-boarding. They’ll probably—he’ll probably go back overseas soon.” She looks off into the distance, over his shoulder. “Can I tell you something?” And then continuing, assuming his answer, “I think I hate him a little. He leaves us and he’s got this ironclad excuse for it. Nobody’s going to blame him for being a young father providing for his family, and it’s not like we don’t need the money, surgery isn’t cheap, but he—in the end, it’s just him leaving. He’s too scared to stay.”

Evan left. He left Maddie, and Harrisburg, and his whole life. He’s left everywhere else too, not that anywhere else has wanted to keep him. But he knows being left, too, in hundreds of unanswered text messages and postcards and phone calls. “I wish I had advice for you but I don’t,” he admits. “It just sucks, being left. Not knowing why. Or guessing why but not being able to do anything about it.”

“The worst part is I get it. I don’t want to be in El Paso either. This isn’t what I thought my life would be like. I thought I’d be off having adventures. I love Christopher, but I’m still trapped. It doesn’t even make sense for me to work, with Eddie gone. Daycare is expensive, and if I let my in-laws take care of him I’ll kill them, so I just … take Eddie’s paycheck, and rot in that house.”

He wishes he could drop Shannon on Maddie’s doorstep (and maybe catch a glimpse of her in the window from the car). She must have felt trapped by him so many times, but she never showed it, just like Shannon doesn’t show it in front of Christopher. “He’ll be going to school sometime, right? Maybe you could work a few hours, or volunteer somewhere, or something?”

“You’re really sweet, Evan,” she says in the tone of someone who is definitely not going to do that.

Evan sighs. “Look, I’m glad to listen, and happy to give you my number if you want—actually, I’m probably going to LA after this, so if you’re worried about your mom I can check in, I bet she’s pretty cool if she raised you. But I’ve been Christopher, okay? I was ten when my sister started raising me. She was nineteen.” Shannon takes a sharp breath. Definitely about his age. “And I get that I was older than he is, but kids know, you know? When the people who take care of them are unhappy. He’s going to figure out sometime that you’re unhappy because of him, and that’s going to hurt him.”

“Just like it hurts him that Eddie is gone.”

“Sure.” Evan shrugs. “But it didn’t really seem to me like Eddie was happy here either? Like, I only met him a couple times, but it sounds like you two have a complicated life. So maybe if he was still here, working however many hours he would have to work to take care of Chris, I’d be giving him this warning too. You guys need money, but Chris needs non-miserable parents, and that’s all I’m going to say about it.”

“I’m not sure if I want to invite you for dinner or tell you I never want to see you again.”

Evan knows how to take a cue. He stands up, picks up his coffee. He’s going to be late for work as it is. “I’ll see you around. Tell Christopher hi from Mr. Buck, okay?”

“I will,” she promises. She doesn’t look lighter, but at least she looks thoughtful.

Evan finishes his EMT course with flying colors, and his fitness is good, between his runs and lifting weights at the Y. The academy in LA doesn’t have a class starting for months, though, so he sticks around El Paso, fixing cars and reading at the hospital and googling firefighter fitness programs.

He runs into Shannon sometimes at the Starbucks they both seem to frequent, usually while Christopher is doing half-days in pre-K, and when he catches her looking at a webpage on how to get certified as a paralegal, he tries really hard not to beam too obnoxiously. After a few meetings, he offers his number, and they exchange them, but they don’t really text, other than once after he runs into Christopher with his grandparents and Shannon is both amused and annoyed at how concerned they were about Christopher talking to some strange man.

Evan calls Captain Reynolds, who remembers him, and when he gets connected with his contact, Evan promptly gets told that there’s a spot for him in a class that’s starting in about five months. He’s getting a little restless in El Paso now that he’s not so busy, but it could be a worse place to stay until LA is ready for him. His Spanish is improving, anyway.

When he gets a phone call from an unknown number one evening, he almost doesn’t pick it up. It’s not a number he has saved, which means it’s probably spam, but before he can swipe the call away, he realizes it’s a Pennsylvania number. And it’s stupid, so stupid, to get his hopes up, to think that maybe Maddie just changed her number years ago and forgot to transfer his over, and she finally remembered the scrap of paper it was on, that maybe she just never got years of texts and calls that went unanswered. He picks up the phone anyway.

“This is a collect phone call from the Harrisburg Police Department,” says a calm electronic voice, “from—”

“Maddie Buck—Kendall,” says her voice, teary and wrecked but so completely familiar to him.

“Are you willing to accept this call?” the electronic voice continues.

Evan almost drops the phone. “Yes, yes, I accept, put me through,” he says, and he’s a mess but it seems to work.

There are some beeps, there’s a warning that this call will be monitored, and then there’s her ragged, shaky breathing on the other end of the line. “Evan?” she says, and it’s so small and wavery and scared and he wishes he could blink and be next to her. “Evan, are you there?”

“I’m right here,” he says. “I’m here. Are you okay? Are you in jail?”

“I’m—Evan, I’m so sorry, but I need you.”

“Anything. I’ll be there by morning.” He’ll find something to do with the Jeep. “Just tell me what’s wrong.”

“No,” she says, a little stronger, and his heart sinks, but all she says is “You can—you can take a few days. Drive out? You don’t need to fly, but I want you to call Mom and Dad and ask them to get me a lawyer. I’ll pay them back.”

Evan will get her a lawyer if he has to. Apparently he has to. “Okay, I’ll drive out.” If he doesn’t sleep, he can make it in two days. Maybe three if he doesn’t want to get in a wreck. “What happened?”

“It’s Doug,” she says, and Evan is so busy hating himself for leaving her with Doug when he guessed he was shitty that he almost misses what she says next. “I killed Doug.”

The next two days pass in such a haze Evan feels like he’s on his way out of anesthesia. He knows he does things, but he’s not quite sure how or when. He stuffs everything into the Jeep and leaves a check on the motel bed to cover the last week of his long-term stay, and he calls Mom and Dad until they pick up and tells them to get to Harrisburg, get Maddie a lawyer, and if they don’t want to pay he’ll clean out his education fund to do it. He’s pretty sure they agree to pay, but it doesn’t matter. He keeps driving.

He sleeps when he gets too tired for his eyes to stay open, nodding off for two hours at a time in rest stop parking lots. He calls people to stay awake in between, to start dealing with uprooting his life with even less notice than he usually gives. He calls the hospital to withdraw from volunteering, calls the mechanic shop to explain that he has a family emergency and he’s quitting, calls the motel owner to let her know about the check and apologize for the short notice and the stain on the rug.

He calls his parents again, constantly, until his dad finally answers almost a full day after Evan got the phone call from the jail. Evan’s somewhere in Tennessee by then, he thinks. “What, Evan? I think we’re busy enough here.”

“How is she? Where is she? Has there been a bail hearing yet?”

His father sighs in a way that has Evan’s shoulders curling up automatically. “There’s a bail hearing tomorrow. She’s in custody at the local hospital today.”

Evan almost fishtails into another car and gets honked at. That’s fair. “Hospital? What did he do to her?”

There’s a long awful pause that makes Evan wish he could kill Doug all over again. He could probably do it. “Her wrist was broken before that night, and she jarred it out of place doing compressions before emergency services arrived. There were other injuries, but they’re doing a surgery to reset it today.”

Evan clenches his hands on the steering wheel and sucks in a long breath. “Did you know?” he asks. “Did you guess?”

Some awful part of him wants his dad to say something that would let Evan yell at him, let him take this rage that’s shaking him apart out on someone. Because Evan guessed. Evan wondered. He just never did anything about it, and if he could yell at his father for doing the same, maybe he’d feel better. “We hardly see her, Evan,” his father says, sounding tired and … Evan’s not sure. Old, maybe. “Doug is—was. Doug was working a good job and taking care of Maddie, and we didn’t like that she kept choosing his family for holidays, but she’d been avoiding us since she took you. It wasn’t that different.”

By the time Evan realized that Maddie taking him in wasn’t anything close to normal, it felt too late to ask her why she did. He’s glad she did, can’t imagine how stifled he would have been with another eight years in Hershey, but it feels wrong right now, that he doesn’t know. “Why did you let her take me?” he asks, which isn’t really the answer he wants, but he’s exhausted and scared and needs to stay awake from the road.

“She wouldn’t take another answer. She said she knew you better and she—she wanted you more.”

Numb, Evan considers how ambiguous that sentence is. Did Maddie say she wanted him more, or was it true? It’s definitely true, but does his father know that? “I should have known. She stopped talking to me, I haven’t heard from her in so long, she doesn’t even text, I should have known it was him, not her.”

If Evan can’t blame his parents, he wants to be blamed. He wants someone to be angry at, and Doug is dead, so being angry at him isn’t going to do shit. “There’s no time for all of that,” says his father, still just tired. Tired of Evan, like always. “Is there something else you wanted to know?”

“I’ll be there for the bail hearing tomorrow.”

“Aren’t you in California?”

That was his last stop before El Paso. It’s theoretically his next stop, if he doesn’t call the LAFD academy and drop out. He’s not leaving Maddie again. Maybe if Evan weren’t so heartsick already, that would be enough. It’s not like he told them about the bone marrow donation. Just that he was in El Paso, certifying to be an EMT. He only tells them where he is because he’s still on their health insurance, one last vestige of childhood. “Well, right now I’m in Tennessee, I’ve been driving for a while though.”

“You can’t do anything at a bail hearing anyway, Evan, why would you bother?”

“Because Maddie called me.” And then, looking at the clear road ahead, “There’s some traffic coming up, Dad. I should hang up and focus on it.”

“See you soon, son.”

Evan hangs up. Slows down a little, because that’s the responsible thing to do when you’re wiping tears away.

He misses the pediatrics ward in El Paso, where everything is simple and he’s wanted and liked. He gets a stupid urge to call Shannon Diaz and ask her to put Christopher on the phone, ask him if he’s still into mice on the moon or if he’s got different stories now.

Instead, he fiddles with the dial on the radio, brings up some station playing the good kind of country, a distinction he learned way back in South Carolina the first time, and sings until his voice gives out to stay awake.

At her bail hearing, Maddie is small and hunched and bruised, her left wrist and forearm encased in an immobilizing cast. As soon as she’s escorted into the room, she looks around until her gaze locks on Evan, and then she starts crying, which isn’t a great compliment, but even after all this time, Evan knows her. She wants to see him.

He wants to run to her, vault into her space, hold onto her. He gives a stupid little wave instead, and his mother, sitting stiff and unhappy next to him, looks at him, completely horrified.

Evan listens to the lawyers argue. Maddie’s lawyer, courtesy of their parents, points out the state of her, the purple and magenta and green spreading across her face and her arms and her torso, the broken ribs, the hospital file that shows repeated cooking accidents with knives and burns. He talks about the shattered back windshield of her car and the bullet buried in the passenger seat headrest. He talks about how easy it is to hit the gas instead of the brakes by accident when you’re panicking and taking fire. He talks about how she called 9-1-1 and did compressions for the twelve minutes it took for help to arrive, even knowing it was a lost cause. Maddie mostly stares into space and cries.

The prosecutor does her job. She talks about a doctor, about to be promoted, a community member who’s never had a history of any kind of violence, and his loving, grieving parents.

The judge sighs like he sees this kind of thing every day and sets the bail so low Evan could pay it without even calling a bondsman. He doesn’t. His parents do, and then there’s paperwork and sitting around in the courthouse and probably a lot of instructions about medical care and about leaving town. Evan is so tired that everything blurs around him like he’s underwater. He misses the ocean. He and Maddie should go, when she’s free, whether that’s in two weeks or twenty to life. He doesn’t even know what they’re charging her with.

When Maddie appears, wearing a thin t-shirt not warm enough for the weather, clutching a plastic bag of her personal belongings, Evan ignores his mother standing up to fuss, his father already reaching for his car keys. He walks up to her and offers his arms because he’s too close to crying to speak and doesn’t want to touch her in a way that might hurt her.

Maddie wraps her arms around him so tight it hurts, her breath shuddering, and Evan is ten again, he’s fifteen, he’s twenty and hugging her goodbye after Christmas. Behind them, Mom is saying something about going back to Hershey, how it’s close enough according to the duty cop, how Maddie can have her childhood room as long as she wants it.

“I have a hotel room,” says Evan, who doesn’t.

Maddie squeezes him even tighter. “Yes,” she says, talking over Mom’s objections, Dad’s scoff. “A hotel room sounds great.”

Evan rents them a room at the Holiday Inn with two beds and they both curl up on one of them, Maddie on the side without broken ribs or wrist, Evan doing his best to make himself available to hug without pushing it. She’s hardly spoken since she came out, bail paid, free for the moment.

“God, Evan, I’m so sorry,” she finally says. “There’s no excuse, I kept—your texts were breaking my heart, and your postcards—I’m so proud of you, you have to know—”

He’s embarrassed, and a little mad at her, and mostly just sad. “Was it—it was Doug, right? He told you to cut me off?”

Maddie closes her eyes, takes a shaky breath. “That Christmas—when I called you, it was the first time he hit me. Things had been getting hard, and he’d been throwing things, and shoved me a little so I put my hand on a hot pan and then apologized, but I asked about you coming and he said … it doesn’t matter what he said. But he hit me, and I knew, Evan, I work in a hospital, I knew it wouldn’t ever get better from there, so I called you.”

“He figured it out.”

“He caught me leaving,” she agrees. “And he said if I went to you, he’d kill you.”

“I could have taken him.”

“I didn’t want that any more than I wanted you in the army,” she says, and puts a hand on his face, rubs her thumb over his birthmark, a well-worn gesture. “I would do anything to protect you.”

Evan wants to say it back, but he knows it’s not true, because he didn’t. “I wish I’d done something. I knew it wasn’t right. I knew, and I left you here because it was too easy to think maybe you were just sick of being my parent and not my sister.”

“I’m never sick of you.”

“Can I be your brother now, though? I want to help you, and I can. I’ve got a spot in the fire academy in LA in a few months, and if your trial isn’t done by then, I’ll ask to wait for the next class. We can leave, and start over. Put down some new roots. LA has to need nurses, right? Or I guess if it’s going to be a few years, I’ll join the fire department here and wait for you and then we’ll decide what to do.”

“I’m going to lose my nursing license,” she tells him gently and right, of course she is. They probably don’t want people with murder charges under their belt working on patients. “And even if my charges get dropped and they don’t revoke it, the hospital will probably ask me to resign, and I might be done with nursing, at least for a while.”

“So I’ll support you, like you did me, and we can be siblings. It’s been a while since I had one of those.”

She laughs a little, and then winces. “Me too. It’s not going to be easy to stop thinking of you as my kid, but I’ll try, okay? I really want to get to know you again, and hear about all the adventures you couldn’t fit on a postcard.”

“I’ll tell you everything,” he says, and thinks of Charlie and wonders if he really means that.

There’s a long silence, and he wonders if she’s pretending to be asleep or if she’s just thinking. She’s definitely not actually asleep. “I hit the gas on purpose,” she whispers.

Evan breathes out, shaky, and wonders how he’s supposed to help her with this. If anything but time and distance can help her. Therapy, probably, if he can find her somewhere to go. “I figured,” he says. “But maybe don’t say that in court.”

Maddie’s laugh is startled and perfect, even if she winces and clutches her ribs a second later. “I missed you so much.”

They say a few more things, but Evan is tired, drifting away. Maddie will be there in the morning. For the first time in too long, Maddie will be there, and they’ll figure the rest out together.

Evan hasn’t been in Harrisburg for this long since he was eighteen, and he still doesn’t feel like he’s back home.

Maddie goes home—to Doug’s house—long enough to pack a bag, and they go to a motel, which definitely isn’t a sustainable solution. Evan knocks on the door of every mechanic in the city until he finds one with a bay to rent and hates leaving Maddie for his work days, but goes anyway, while she meets with lawyers and attorneys and clears out her locker at the hospital.

The news makes a meal out of it for about three days, all about the hero doctor hiding darkness at home and the nurse wife who killed him and then tried to save him. Maddie’s co-workers give one interview talking about how amazing she is, how she’s one of the best nurses they have and how if she couldn’t save Doug he couldn’t be saved. After that, Maddie is anonymous again, especially as the bruises fade, but she doesn’t really want to go anywhere once they move from a hotel to a place with a month-to-month lease. Doug’s house, in his name alone, is in probate, and Maddie will only inherit if they drop the charges.

Evan’s learning a lot about that, all of a sudden. He’s learning a lot about a lot of things. What probate is, conditions of inheritance, how fucked Maddie’s life is if she gets convicted of involuntary manslaughter, which seems to be the charge the cops have settled on, what can revoke a registered nurse’s license in Pennsylvania or in California. A week in, he gives a harried thought to calling Shannon Diaz and asking if she was serious about the paralegal thing and if she’s maybe managed to get certified in the three weeks since he saw her last.

Dad is intermittently helpful, mostly by paying a very expensive lawyer but also by knowing things about probate that Evan doesn’t have time to google. Mom is maybe the most maternal Evan’s ever seen her, but Maddie seems a little impatient with the way she keeps crying all over her, so Evan runs interference as much as he can.

“You’re doing too much,” she says at least once a day, sometimes anxious, sometimes tired, sometimes smiling.

“I’m being your brother,” he says every time. He’s still feeling his way towards it, trying to put their relationship on more equal footing, but he really hopes he’s going to manage it.

“I should see if I can transfer to a fire academy closer to here,” Evan says over dinner one night, a week or two in, when Harrisburg is starting to feel familiar again. Maddie made haddock, some recipe he doesn’t recognize, but the kind of fancy that says she probably learned it for Doug.

Maddie drops her fork with a clatter. “No you shouldn’t. You were telling me it’s the best department, the best academy in the country. You have to go.”

“I have to be where you are. I’m not leaving you again. I’ll wait until sentencing before I decide where I’m going, but I’m with you.”

“No, you aren’t,” she says, scowling at him. “Most likely sentence is just a couple years, and that’s if they don’t drop the charges, which my lawyer says they might do because it’s a clear case of self-defense and they just need to make it look good for the Kendalls. You liked California, right? Your postcards from the conservation corps, it sounds like you really loved it.”

“I really love you.”

“Then you’ll make a life for us in California, and if I do go to jail, you’ll put up your hardened ex-con sister when I’m out and as a firefighter you’ll do your duty to make sure I don’t start,” she waves her good hand, the one not in the cast, “dealing drugs or something. I’m pretty sure that’s a hurtful stereotype, but you get my point, right? Don’t lose out on your opportunity for something that might not even happen. When does your class start?”

He counts in his head. It’s easy to lose track of time, in the middle of an emergency. “Four months.”

“Then we’ve got four months to figure it out.” She kicks him gently under the table. “You’re going to California. And I’m going to see you there. Four months, four years, I don’t care. This time I’ll write to you.”

“I’ll break you out. We’ll Bonnie-and-Clyde ourselves across the country.”

Maddie wrinkles her nose. “Evan, gross. Aren’t there sibling criminals you could compare us to?”

“I’ll check,” he promises, and then considers that. “At the library, though. If the cops subpoena my search history or something for the trial that could look really bad.”

She laughs, braces her arm against her bad side, and Evan is going to California, apparently, but if Maddie is in Harrisburg, he’ll be back every time he can be, every time he can schedule vacation time.

Maddie turns up at the shop a week later and throws her arms around him. “They dropped the charges,” she says. “I guess a few neighbors—they’ve been asking around the community, and people saw how bad it was. I knew they did, I had to send the police away a few times, but I didn’t realize how much they saw. But with that kind of pattern of behavior and how things happened that night, they dropped them.”

If she didn’t have so many broken bones, Evan would pick her up and spin her. He holds her tight instead, around the shoulders, which he’s found is the safest for the time being. “California here we come! You’ve got to sell the house and stuff, right?”

Her laugh is bright and disbelieving. “I guess so. God, I don’t have to live there anymore. I never have to go to Thanksgiving with his parents again.”

“We never have to come back to Pennsylvania again if we don’t want to,” says Evan, giddy with it. Maybe he should say something about visiting their parents, but he doesn’t care about that. “When do you want to leave?”

Maddie frowns a little before her face clears into a smile. “There’s a lot to do, but as soon as we can. I want to take the long way, and then we need to find a place to stay in LA, and I need a job.”

It’s a daunting list of tasks. Evan doesn’t really care. They’ll figure it out.

They leave Pennsylvania just under a month before Evan’s class at the LA fire academy is scheduled to begin. They hitch a trailer to the Jeep and sell Maddie’s car and Doug’s house. Real estate is way more expensive in LA, but Maddie thinks she’s got enough to get a start, anyway, and she’ll qualify for some first-time homeowner loans, since Doug never put her on the lease. It all feels like putting down roots in a way that none of Evan’s previous trips have ever felt like.

Relieved as they both are, they still end up in a fight before they’ve even hit western Ohio.

“I know the fire academy is live-in,” Maddie says, watching the highway out the window, “but I’m kind of excited to live with you again when you’re done with it.”

Evan takes his eyes off the road for just long enough to frown at her. “Come on, you don’t want me cramping your style like that. By the time I’m out of the academy, you’ll probably have some movie star pounding down your door, and once we’ve background checked the hell out of him, you aren’t going to want your kid brother around.”

“Of course I will! I’ve missed you! I’m coming to LA because I want to be near you, not because I want to sleep with a movie star—especially when I’m not planning to be with anybody for a really long time, if ever.”

All he can hear is Maddie giving things up for him again. Her privacy, her independence, a chance at something new. He pushes back, and she pushes back, and then there’s yelling, and then two hours later he’s introducing her to frozen custard at a chain he’s stopped by in the midwest a few times and the atmosphere is about as cold as the treat is.

“I’m going to get paid for shit for my probie year,” he finally says by way of a peace offering. “How about I promise to live with you until I’m a full firefighter, and when that’s done, I find an apartment and we do that whole thing where we try to have a slightly more normal sibling relationship?”

She steals a spoonful of his flavor, just like they always have together. “Deal. I take the time you’re in the academy to find a place, then you stay with me long enough to get established, and then you find an apartment that is close enough to me that we can have dinner at least once a week. Once I figure out what I’m doing with my life, anyway.”

Evan wants to say something about there being hospitals in LA, since the dropped charges and the distance mean she could probably do the same thing she’s been doing for years. But Maddie is adamant that she’s done with being a nurse, at least for now. They’ll find something else for her. “You could try out for reality TV,” he offers. “I feel like they’d really dig the murder angle.”

Maddie whacks the back of his hand with her spoon and laughs, the fight forgotten, deal reached. It feels good, to know they can fight and forget about it.

Evan’s driven through a lot of places, but he hasn’t spent much time in the states where it seems like the highways are endless and empty and dry, where there are signs on every gas station warning there won’t be another one for a hundred miles. The desert, he discovers, is like the ocean, makes something in him go quiet as he looks out over the distance, but Maddie gets fidgety and upset, so he doesn’t linger or suggest stops in any of the national parks when they hit Utah.

Maybe he’ll come back someday, if California turns out to be the wrong place. He really hopes it turns out to be the right place, though, so maybe he should start to plan vacations. It’s weird to think about planning to be somewhere long enough to take time off.

When Maddie asks questions, he talks. He tells her about the ranch and learning how to ride, tells her about the corps and Captain Reynolds steering him in the right direction. He tells her about El Paso, taking his EMT course and running into the Diazes everywhere.

“How did you end up in Texas?” she asks around a yawn when the Nevada border is creeping up on them. “You were in California, planning to move to another part of California, why would you go down there?”

And Evan could tell her, he knows he could. He should. She would be proud of him. But Evan has been counting apologies, and at this point she’s at about one per state, guilty for leaving him alone when the only person to blame is Doug. She just apologizes more when Evan tries to make his own apologies, and he wants all of it to be over, the apologies and the tears and the years of catching up they have to do. “Cost of living is pretty low,” he says with a shrug. “Can’t say I’d recommend it for a long stay, though. Seems like everyone nice I met there wanted out.”

Maddie hums and gives him a scrutinizing look. Evan tries not to squirm. He’s never been a great liar, especially not with her. “Tell me you aren’t in love with a married woman, no matter how cute her kid is,” she requests.

“You’re so mean to me. No, I do not have a crush on Shannon. You should worry about me kidnapping her kid, though. Now, what do you think? Wild night in Vegas as we pass?”

She lets him get away with it. She wouldn’t have before, but not everything is going to get fixed in one road trip. “One night, small stakes,” she proposes, and grins at him across the gearshift. “I’m feeling pretty lucky.”

She wins them a few hundred playing blackjack, and Evan loses them a few hundred playing roulette, so they come out even and happy as they set their sights on California.

When they hit LA the next day, Evan drives them right to the Pacific, to a beach where they can sit and watch the waves come in. Maddie leans her head on his shoulder and cries a little and they sit there until the incoming tide splashes them and Maddie takes over and gets them to the AirB&B they’re renting for the next week.

Evan, exhausted from the drive, collapses on the bed fully dressed, and wakes up smelling salt and the more distant scent of Maddie’s scrambled eggs. It doesn’t feel real yet. Maybe it will soon.

After almost two weeks of logistics and hunting for short-stay apartments and filing paperwork with the LAFD, Evan walks into his first day of the fire academy to find three other Evans all there ahead of him and watching each other warily. The fire academy is a last names kind of place, but they’ll be spending downtime together too, so the nicknames and the numbers are going to creep in.

“Tell me you have a nickname,” says Evan O’Connor. Nobody even has a shitty last name that would let them win the first name contest easily.

Evan is tired of being extra, latest-arrived and least-liked. The only person who loves Evan Buckley is finally with him again, and he’s fine jut being her favorite Evan. For everyone else, maybe it’s time to be someone else. “Yeah, definitely,” he says, and he thinks of the last place he felt like he was the right person in the right place, everything aligning, not the lesser version of anybody else. Thinks of Christopher and Charlie and all the other kids calling out for another story or another hand of poker or Go Fish. “Buck. You can call me Buck.”

Chapter Text

Eddie needs his first day at Firehouse 118 to go perfectly. If he’s perfect, if he commands respect, if he shows skill and stability, then when he ends up in divorce court, maybe they won’t dismiss him as a single man doing shift work.

He doesn’t even know how much custody Shannon wants, if any. He knows that he texted her his new LA address hoping he could prove to her that even if he was slower than she needed him to be, he’d always been willing to follow her, and he knows that her reply was divorce papers delivered to the front door. He still hasn’t signed them or sent them anywhere. There’s been no time to get a lawyer, finishing up the academy, and there’s the fear, too, always, of losing Christopher.

So he needs to be perfect, and that’s why it’s frustrating that he can’t place this guy he definitely knows. Eddie gives him sidelong looks while he meets the shift’s lead paramedics, the improbably named Hen and Chimney, and tries to figure out where he knows him from. His build says military, so Eddie’s first tour could be an option, but his posture sucks, so that doesn’t feel right. His accent isn’t Texan, so he didn’t go to school with Eddie, and that doesn’t leave a lot of options. Eddie hasn’t been many places. Maybe he’s a minor celebrity, or something, but he keeps looking at Eddie like he knows him too, so that doesn’t make sense.

Nash, the captain, answers the question by turning to the guy and sighing. “Buck, are you going to introduce yourself?”

The time between re-enlisting and leaving El Paso isn’t something Eddie thinks about a lot. Mostly he remembers it as shame and fighting with Shannon and feeling torn in half every time Christopher asked for him, knowing he wouldn’t be able to answer those requests soon. But now that he’s looking, he recognizes him. A hospital volunteer who started showing up everywhere, who made Chris love him like it was easy. Eddie had wanted to hate him, but hadn’t quite managed to hate someone who was so delighted by his son. “We’ve met, right?” Eddie asks, offering a hand.

Buck gives him a tentative smile. It looks wrong. Eddie wouldn’t have said he remembers his real smile, but this isn’t it. “So you are Chris’s dad!” he says, weirdly hearty, like he’s putting on a show about it. “Your hair is different. Great to see you again, man, welcome to the 118.” And then, to Captain Nash, “Bobby, I’ve been practicing my omelets. Good treat for Eddie’s first day?”

Captain Nash raises his eyebrows. “I wasn’t going to cook until lunch, but if we don’t get a call, I’m sure everyone would appreciate breakfast. Right, Eddie?”

“Right,” says Eddie, more than a little confused. “Thanks, Buck. Christopher will think it’s cool that I saw you.”

Buck clearly knows Chris was a little young to be forming memories of random guys he met a few times more than two years ago, judging from his raised eyebrow, but he produces another awkward smile. “Tell the little man I say hi and still have his picture,” he says, and takes the stairs up to the loft two at a time.

Hen and Chimney, when he looks to them for some kind of help, are craning their necks to watch Buck like he’s a home run ball and they’re waiting to see where in the stands he ends up. “I will never understand that guy,” says Chimney.

Hen shakes herself and turns a smile on Eddie. “You have a kid? Always good to have another parent around the station, let me tell you about Denny while I give you the tour.”

And now he’s being managed. Not a perfect start at all. Eddie puts on his friendliest smile and gets ready to make conversation even though he wasn’t planning to talk about his complicated family situation this shift.

By the end of his first shift, Eddie feels a little insane.

Some of that is that the calls are insane, starting with a man blowing up like a balloon and moving on from there. Most of it is Buck, who is being kind and polite and welcoming and absolutely nowhere near Eddie if they don’t have their hands on the same backboard.

There’s no possible way to complain. Buck makes Eddie a delicious omelet, changes the subject when Chimney tries to ask questions about Eddie’s service, and does a bunch of chores that any firefighter who’s just moved up in seniority should be glad to write off as probie scut work. He scowls a little when Eddie accidentally outshines him on his first call, but then he says Eddie should get the honor of going to the hospital in the ambulance with the balloon man and books it to literally anywhere else.

“Are you some kind of Buck whisperer?” Chimney asks midway through the shift, when they’re in the gym and Buck abandoned his workout to make a phone call before Eddie could offer to spot him. “We figured he’d hate you at first, we’ve got him well-trained—well, his sister has him well-trained—but he can be a little territorial. Did you guys bond in Texas?”

Eddie is pretty sure he mortally offended him in Texas, actually. “What’s his deal?” he asks without meaning to. “He didn’t talk much about himself in Texas.”

“I thought I’d heard the whole Buck travelogue, but Texas never came up. He and his sister Maddie came from Pennsylvania, moved out here together after he traveled around on frat bro rumspringa and her marriage ended badly, which you can google but if you ask questions he’ll get pissy.” Chimney shrugs. “She raised him. He’s a decent kid, and she’s amazing. Works at dispatch, he told her to apply two weeks into the academy and now he’s reaping the rewards of being the little brother of the best dispatcher in the city.”

“Chim is carrying a torch,” Hen says from nearby. “For the sister, obviously.”

Eddie doesn’t really care about the sister. Except for maybe wanting to look her up, if Chimney thinks it’s worth doing, but that feels invasive. He’s more caught on the “frat bro” of it all, because that’s not the impression Buck gave off in El Paso. Maybe he’s wrong, though. “I only met him a few times,” he offers, because he’s going to be working with these people for the next year and it can’t hurt to provide a little information. “He volunteered at the hospital my son was at, and got his EMT certs.”

Hen comes closer, head tilted, smelling blood in the water. “He was a CNA, why was he volunteering instead of working there?”

Eddie raises his hands. “Don’t ask me. Like I said, we only met a few times. It’s weird to see him, but not bad.”

They exchange a look so familiar that he misses Shannon for one stupid second, not his wife but his high school best friend, the shorthand of looks they would exchange in class. “Are you sure?” Chim asks. “Seems like you’re pretty curious. Come on, if there are Buck stories you have to tell us.”

He took my son seriously makes a bad story. I’m pretty sure I accused my wife of flirting with him during one of our many fights before I shipped out for my second tour makes an even worse one. And even if they were good stories, he has to work with Buck for at least a year, and he knows Buck’s specialties from what he’s been called on to do at each scene. His skills complement Eddie’s, so they’re supposed to be able to work as a team. Buck is already avoiding him. Eddie refuses to make it worse. “What I have to do is get a workout in before that bell goes off again, I don’t have equipment this nice at home.”

They exchange another look, but they don’t fight him on it. Eddie tries not to sigh in relief, and then tries not to be offended when, for most of the rest of the shift, Buck continues to be wherever Eddie isn’t, but so friendly about it that Eddie can’t even call him on it.

At least until they get a call about a man with a grenade in his leg.

“I,” says Buck, mouth stuffed full of french fries in the wake of them pulling a grenade out of a man’s leg and blowing up an ambulance, a thing Eddie can never mention in any custody hearings, and then he stops. Eddie doesn’t know Buck well yet, but once he starts talking, he doesn’t tend to stop at one word.

Disconcerted, Eddie eyes him. “You?” He doesn’t want a recurrence of the weirdness. They were so in sync in the back of the ambulance with a life in their hands.

“I think we need to talk about some things. Not while we’re on shift. You probably have to get right back to Christopher after shift, totally understand that, but can we figure out a time to grab a beer, maybe?”

Nobody else is close enough to overhear them. Bobby, who Eddie still feels uncomfortable calling that, is on the phone getting them a replacement ambulance, and Hen and Chimney are on the phone with Hen’s wife together for some reason. “Man, if I did something, I’d rather just hear about it so I can apologize.”

“Oh God,” he says, around more french fries. Christopher has better table manners. At least he swallows before he continues. “No, you definitely did nothing. I did something, kind of? That makes it sound really bad, shit. So I’m in touch with Shannon? And my advice might have inspired her to send you some papers?”

Eddie, desperate for a reason to not have to respond right away, takes a bite of his burger. Buck watches him wide-eyed while he takes his time chewing. “We should definitely talk about that over beer, yeah,” he eventually manages. He would have guessed almost anything else. He’s regretting the burger a little, too. “So you and Shannon are—”

“Shit, no, we absolutely are not. Uh, any further details are probably best saved for the beer? But I’m not in love with your wife, I’ve got other things going on. She just … needed a friend, I guess? And I want to be your friend too, so transparency is important.”

Eddie takes another bite, and regrets it again. His stomach is churning. This isn’t how any of it is supposed to go. He’d love to blame this on Buck, take back the tentative friendship and partnership, the relief of having someone around who he has to explain less of his life to, but this is Eddie’s life. Anything good is too good to be true. “Yeah, I don’t think I can do more of this conversation without alcohol. I’ll text you with a time that works, I’ll have to talk to my abuela about when she’s free to take Christopher for a few hours.” He hesitates. “Just you and me. Anything else is too complicated.”

“Yeah, no, Maddie would kill me,” he says. “She would tell me you guys have each other’s numbers. I don’t have a message from her, and honestly I’m still trying to figure out how to tell her who walked into my firehouse. It’s a hell of a coincidence.”

Eddie laughs a little, disbelieving. “It’s an impossible coincidence, but I guess it happened, and we’ll have to deal with it.” He sighs and leans back in his chair. “I don’t want to leave the 118, that’s not going to look good to any future fire captains.” And any future divorce court judges. “I’ll talk to Shannon at some point, I know I can’t just ignore the papers, it’s just—really shitty timing. And it wasn’t what I hoped when I followed her out here. But that’s a beer conversation.”

Hopefully Buck doesn’t try to keep a lot of secrets. The expressions on his face play out his whole internal monologue, all curiosity and surprise and guilt and sadness.

“Come on, you two,” says Bobby from somewhere behind Eddie, but Buck doesn’t look startled so probably he didn’t overhear any of that. “I got us an ambulance, so the station’s coming back online, which means we need to get there.”

Eddie stands, abandoning his food, which functionally just means Buck packs up both of theirs. Eddie winces at him, but it feels too late to go back and help now.

Maddie Buckley turns up at the station with several boxes of doughnuts and a worried frown in the morning.

She looks almost nothing like Buck. There’s just something about the quirk of her eyebrows that tips Eddie off to who she is before she hands her boxes off to Chimney and throws her arms around her brother. They talk in the kind of shorthand he recognizes from his own sisters, the banter he always felt a little left out of, half-sentences and references that leave everyone around them confused, and Maddie shakes him a little before she lets him go. “Even Abby says you need to be careful,” she says when she pulls away, and Buck goes red as the engine, so probably he’s not lying about not sleeping with Shannon.

“You heard from Abby? Is she still in Ireland? Or is it Italy? Have you told her she should do Iceland next? She should just do all the I countries, I was reading about how cool Indonesia is the other day.”

“Sure, Evan, I’ll tell her to go to Iraq,” says Maddie, but she’s smiling and looking around, waving at Hen and ducking Chimney’s comedically starstruck gaze before she frowns at Eddie. “You must be the new probie? Evan was telling me you had one.”

Eddie is about to say something, but Buck jumps in, giving him the wide eyes like there’s some secret they’re in on even though there definitely isn’t. “Yeah, it was when I was in Texas doing the EMT course before you called, I met him and his family. He’s Shannon’s ex, actually. But also a great guy! Eddie Diaz.”

Does Maddie know Shannon? Does the 118? This is a massive city, what possible coincidence could have brought them all together? Chimney and Hen both look politely baffled, though, and Bobby just frowns a little where he’s drifting closer to start dealing with the breakfast. Maddie is the only one who looks like that name means anything to her, and even then she looks confused, not judgmental. “Great to meet you, Eddie. I come around whenever Buck does something stupid, so you’ll probably see a lot of me.”

One of my younger firefighters could use a partner who’s cool in a crisis, Bobby had said during their interview. And when Eddie had tried to find a polite way to ask why he’d kept on a firefighter who was bad in a crisis, he’d smiled a little and said He’s good in a crisis, but it’s instinct. He runs hot. I want someone to think it through and make sure he’s safe while he follows his instincts.

“Maddie,” Buck is whining, ignoring Eddie putting pieces together. “Eddie was the one who went in for the grenade first, I was just there as backup.”

“And I was there when Sue told me the ambulance you’d been in two minutes before blew up!” She smiles at Bobby, who’s finally drifted close enough for her to acknowledge him. “Hi, Captain Nash, I hope it’s okay that I brought some breakfast for the end of your shift? It should be enough for you guys and B shift as they come in.”

“Are you planning to stay?” Bobby asks, relieving Chimney of a box of doughnuts and herding them all into the kitchen. Eddie is still mostly full of his burger and fries, but the doughnuts are the good kind, from some small bakery, so he takes one.

Maddie keeps up polite conversation and keeps one hand on Buck at all times like she expects him to wander off if he’s unsupervised. The worry seems to wear off after a few minutes, and she turns her attention to talking about movies with Chimney and updating Hen more on her friend Abby, a former dispatcher who’s apparently on some kind of European tour and whose apartment Buck is subletting while she’s gone.

Breakfast lasts through shift change, and Maddie gives Buck another hug before promising that she’ll cook him dinner once he’s slept the shift off. Eddie wants to get back home, get the chance to clean and think and maybe sleep a little bit before Christopher comes home from school, but when Buck waves him over in the parking lot, he goes.

“Let me give you my number,” says Buck, and does when Eddie hands his phone over. “Text me when you’re free for that beer? Even if it’s during a school day, I figure parenting probably doesn’t give you a lot of free nights.”

Eddie blinks, surprised at the consideration and then, a second later, sorry to be surprised. Buck might not have his own kids, but almost the first thing Eddie knew about him was that he cared about them and their welfare. “Sounds great, man. Might take a little while, I’m still getting my feet under me, but I do want to get this taken care of.”

“No rush,” says Buck, and gives him an awkward nod before he jogs off.

In the end, they don’t get their beer until the day after an earthquake has shaken Los Angeles apart and Buck has met Christopher again.

Christopher claims to remember Buck, but doesn’t know any specifics, just says he remembers telling him stories in the hospital. Eddie wonders if he does remember or if he’s just being kind, if Buck’s hopeful face when Eddie introduced them and said they’d met before made him pretend. He almost hopes that’s true. He likes to think he’s raising Chris to be kind.

There’s no school the next day, but Eddie sets Christopher up with some toys and some books and promises he can play a game with Buck later and then he takes out two beers from the six-pack of some fancy IPA Buck showed up at his door with, with a grin and a claim it was on sale because the store’s cooler had broken in the quake.

“So, Shannon,” says Eddie when they’re both sitting at the kitchen table and he can’t put it off any longer. He immediately winces. “Just … keep it quiet? Kid’s got ears like a bat.”

Buck picks at the label on his beer, doesn’t take a drink. “You want to know how we connected? Or why I think maybe it’s my fault she filed for divorce?”

“Both. Probably the first one has to do with the second, though.”

He finally takes a drink, and traces a finger through the ring of condensation on the table. Tripping over the words, he talks about running into Shannon at the coffee shop in El Paso, hearing her mom was in LA and offering to stop in when he went for the fire academy. Shannon hadn’t texted him for a long time, he said, and he figured she’d forgotten about him, and then she’d gotten in touch, asked him about his fire academy schedule, asked if he could drive her mother home from chemo because she was stuck in Texas.

“Shit,” says Eddie, and takes a swig of his own beer. He doesn’t want to hear about being the monster in Shannon’s story, how he kept her away from her mother for too long.

“I didn’t have a lot of time, but I drove her a few times. Maddie did too.” Buck frowns, makes the condensation into a smiley face. Eddie should buy coasters, maybe. “I didn’t want to question, but I always kind of wondered why she didn’t just bring Christopher out here. Like, not convenient to care for your kid and your mom at the same time, but you wouldn’t have had her prosecuted for kidnapping or anything.”

Eddie blinks, brought up short. Shannon could have. His parents would have complained, but they couldn’t have actually stopped her. She’s Christopher’s mother, and nobody would have prosecuted her for caring for her own mother even if it disrupted Christopher’s schooling. “Obviously not,” he says. “She only told me a day or two before—before my injury.”

“Yeah, she told me a little bit about that. Sucks, man.” Buck grimaces elaborately. “Or something better than that? I don’t know the etiquette here, but I feel like if I thank you for your service you’re going to throw something at me.”

Eddie, with an older brother’s instinct, throws a paper napkin at him and watches it flutter uselessly down on the table in between them. It’s worth it for the break in tension. “So I got home after a few surgeries and some rehab, probably that’s when you were taking Janet to chemo.”

“And then the next thing I knew, Janet texted Maddie that she didn’t need a ride, her daughter was in town, so I texted Shannon, offered a listening ear or some babysitting, and she said she didn’t need the babysitting but she could use a drink.” Buck shrugs. “So we got one.”

“Did she say why?” Eddie asks. It’s been the question on his mind the longest. “I know why she left. I needed time, but I would have done the same thing for my mother. But we could have had video calls with her like we did when I was overseas, talked on the phone. She didn’t have to leave Christopher like that.”

Buck drinks, drums his fingers against the table, wipes the condensation away in one impatient sweep of his hand. “Is there a good answer to that question?” he asks, and Eddie hopes it’s rhetorical, because he has no idea. “I asked. She mostly just said she couldn’t be a mom right then. I—in El Paso one time, she said she remembered it, that I told her that kids can tell when the people they’re taking care of resent them or are unhappy, and she didn’t want that for Christopher.”

That hits like a bullet. Eddie’s unfortunately familiar enough with the feeling to say for sure. “She resents him?”

“I think she felt trapped. Christopher himself? She loves that kid. But the whole army wife thing, not having the money for daycare so she had to stay at home and get judged by her in-laws all day? Yeah, she resented that. You have to ask her for more details.”

“And you kept meeting up with her?”

“Her mom was dying,” Buck says, a little reproachful, and then shrugs again. “Look, I didn’t love it. I can’t imagine having a kid and leaving them if I didn’t have to. But she didn’t have anybody but her mom and I was finishing up at the academy and didn’t really have anybody but Maddie. And I—you don’t need my sad backstory, but I believe what I told her. If you don’t want to be parenting a kid, temporarily or forever, you shouldn’t be parenting them. There’s a reason Maddie mostly raised me.”

“Do you think she wants to parent him now?”

“That’s a question you have to ask her. Definitely don’t want to be in the middle of this.” Buck hesitates. “Janet died a couple months ago. Right around the time my friend Abby’s mom died, actually.”

Eddie always liked Janet. He should have called her. He should have come. He should have at least written a damn card, and he definitely should have known when she died, but he didn’t know, because if she died and Shannon didn’t come, didn’t ask him and Christopher for the funeral and then come home or ask them to leave again, that would be it. He couldn’t see coming back from that. He still can’t. “She never told me.”

“I got her really drunk after the funeral. I think she was maybe hoping you two would show up. Like, she knew you wouldn’t, she’s not psychic, but—whatever. And since then … I don’t know. We get together for drinks or coffee every other week or so. I don’t think she’s doing great, but she’s got a job she likes.”

“What does she do?”

“Legal secretary. They’re paying for her to get certified as a paralegal, and maybe they’ll pay for more continuing ed at some point, but she doesn’t have an undergrad degree so that’s a hard sell.” Shannon wanted to go to college. Poli sci, maybe, or literature. She had a different plan every week. She’d make such a good lawyer, though, and Eddie and Christopher might have taken that from her. “Anyway, a few weeks ago she said she’d heard you were moving to the area—I promise she didn’t give any identifying details, I had no idea you were coming, I don’t know if you told her enough that she would have known either—and she seemed pretty torn up about it.”

“So you told her to divorce me?”

“I told her if she wasn’t happy to see you after more than a year when she could probably use some comfort from someone familiar who knew her mom, then probably she doesn’t want to be married to you. I didn’t know she’d go immediately for the nuclear option, but I get it, and I wasn’t surprised when she told me after the fact.”

Eddie rubs his face. “I really want to know if she wants custody, but I’m guessing you won’t tell me.”

“I have no clue, but I wouldn’t if I did, yeah. That’s about as much as I feel okay saying.” Buck finishes his drink. Eddie wants to offer another one, but it isn’t even noon and they’re both still exhausted after one hell of a long shift. Plus there’s only so long Christopher is going to play on his own. “Except, I guess, that I told her you’re working at my firehouse. I did say I’m not going to run messages, so I’m not going to start nagging you to sign papers or whatever. I’m just going to tell her what I told you, which is that probably you guys should get coffee and at least work out what to do with custody of me, if not Christopher right away.”

“Who said I want custody of you, Buckley?” says Eddie, but he smiles to soften it. “Thanks, Buck. I know you didn’t ask to be thrown into the middle of our mess.”

“Hey, no problem. I like cleaning up messes. Just—if you feel like you owe me for this, don’t let Christopher get caught in the middle of the bad parts. It’s going to suck for all of you, that’s nobody’s fault, but make sure he knows you want him.”

Eddie swallows. “I do. Every day,” he promises, and watches Buck’s face light up with his smile.

Eddie procrastinates on calling Shannon until Abuela breaks her hip and he has to admit his childcare system is fucked. Buck is apparently trying to get in touch with a friend of Abby’s who he swears will fix Eddie’s whole life, but Eddie has another option. He doesn’t want her, but he has her.

They meet in an anonymous downtown coffee shop on a Saturday morning. Buck is with Christopher, who’s developed a healthy case of hero worship that Eddie would be mildly offended by if it weren’t so cute, and Buck is sending a picture what feels like every minute and a half. Eddie lets himself be distracted by that in the parking lot because it’s easier than debating whether he should put his wedding ring on, but eventually he has to go in. Shannon’s at a table with a laptop, gives him an uncomfortable look, but waves him off when he points at the drink in front of her and tilts his head, asking if she wants a refill. He gets himself enough caffeine to hype up an elephant and joins her when the bored barista calls his name. She shuts her laptop when he gets close like she’s worried he’s going to spy on what she’s doing.

“Thanks for meeting up,” he offers into the awkward silence. They’ve never done silence before. Shannon used to talk, and she never had to stop for more than five seconds before he prompted her to keep going. Even when things were bad, they were fighting, and they could never manage the silent treatment. Somebody always had to have the last word. “I was sorry to hear about Janet. I wish I’d known.”

She looks away, looks back, hands moving restlessly to cradle her coffee cup. Eddie wonders helplessly if he’ll ever know someone like he knows her again. “I guess I thought you would have a google alert set or something. Or that you’d ask.”

“You weren’t answering other questions,” he says, eye for an eye, and tries to rein himself in. “And I would have if I’d thought of it. I don’t know how, though.”

Shannon’s smile is small and reluctant, but it’s a smile. “I guess you wouldn’t. God, you’ve been a grandpa since I’ve known you. You were probably born one.” Eddie shrugs. He won’t be insulted by that. A few of the guys he patched up overseas called him Gramps sometimes, when he scolded them too much while he patched them up. He preferred that to Mom, which he got way more. “I really wasn’t expecting Buck to run into you.”

“I definitely wasn’t expecting my new co-worker to tell me you guys are coffee friends. I definitely thought for a minute—”

Her laugh is sharp. “Can’t say I never thought about it, but I didn’t think he’d go for it, and then he’s been pining after Abby. She’s cool, though, I can see why. We talked a few times about our moms.”

“If you thought about it, does that mean you—sorry,” he backtracks when all the light goes out of her. “Sorry, you’ve made it clear that’s not my business.”

“You’re right it’s not. And I—I know I owe you some apologies. Christopher too. But I’m not going to grovel. You ran away too.”

Eddie wants to snap. If they weren’t in a busy coffee shop with at least three dates happening at other tables, maybe he would. He wants to point out that he did video calls when he could and letters when he couldn’t, that his insurance paid for Christopher’s surgery and his salary paid for their food. She knows that. But she also knows him just as well as he knows her, and she knows he ran away. “Christopher.” He swallows. “I’ll sign the papers, I’m not interested in chaining you to me, but I need to know what to expect, what you’re going to ask for. If you ask for everything—I’m a single father doing shift work. If I’m lucky, I might get a weekend a month, and I can’t do that.”

“You want full custody?”

Yes. Selfishly, yes. If he can’t have both of them, he wants Christopher. “I know it’s not realistic. I work day-long shifts. Sometimes two days. My abuela and Aunt Pepa have been filling in, and I’m looking into other options now that I have a few paychecks behind me, but once he’s used to you again, trusts you, those would probably be good times for you to have him.”

Shannon lets out a long, shaky exhale. “I think I want that.”

“You think?”

“God, Eddie, I don’t know. Does he hate me for leaving?”

“He was sad for a long time. It’s been easier since we moved to LA. He’s not looking around every corner for you here. But he’s going to forgive you. He’s way too forgiving, if he forgave me.” She’s staring into her coffee like it’s got the answers. “But if you don’t want custody, let’s figure it out before you see him again.”

“I wish I knew if I would resent him, or if it was all just about you and your parents. I know I want to see him, watch him grow up. I know I want to contribute now that I make some money. I just—I want to be really sure I can be the best mom for him.”

“Buck said he freaked you out about that a little, but you were. You were always so much better at it than I was.”

“I don’t know if that’s true. I was a kid, we were both kids. I just did what I could and tried to keep your mom from running my life.” She takes a drink. “Buck gets it, from Christopher’s side. It’s hard not to think about it when he points that out.”

Eddie doesn’t know what to say to that, but he tries to offer an olive branch. “It’s the Buckley puppy eyes. I barely know him, but they keep calling him a golden retriever at the station.”

Shannon dismisses that with a wave of her hand. “That’s what people say when they really want someone to be simple to understand so they don’t have to pay more attention. If he were a golden retriever, he wouldn’t be so good at kicking my ass about Christopher.”

That doesn’t feel true of Hen and Chimney, the most frequent offenders at the station, but sometimes it’s easiest to look simply even at the people you love. Eddie has spent a long time overseas trying to make his family simple, but it doesn’t look like it’s ever going to be. “I don’t—I’m not going to say you can’t see him. But I’m going to say you can’t see him until you know what you want. I need to know what to prepare him for.”

“That’s … I don’t like it, but it’s fair.” She closes her eyes for a second before she looks at him again. “I’m not on shift schedule, but I work late a lot, and I’m in classes too. So I want to spend nights with him, I think, but probably we need care of some kind anyway. They pay me okay, though, and my mom owned her condo. I know how you are, but I want to at least help out with childcare, his other expenses. We’ll talk about what’s fair.”

It’s instinct to say no, that Eddie’s been doing it alone and he can keep doing it, but he can’t. Firefighting pays decently, and the insurance is good, but LA is expensive, and he’s barely keeping his head above water. “Okay. We can do that.” He hesitates, but he may as well put his cards on the table. “Do you want me to tell Christopher you’re here? I’d rather wait until you know what you want, but I’m willing to listen.”

“I don’t know yet. But I’ll tell you when I do.” She smiles a little. “Old dogs, new tricks. I think we’ll be better at being divorced than we were at being married, once we work it all out.”

Eddie doesn’t want to admit it, but he thinks he agrees.

Buck introduces him to Carla, and Eddie guiltily wishes he’d waited for that before reaching out to Shannon. Carla is perfect, warm and uncomplicated and willing to help without making Eddie feel like he might lose his son. Eddie grits his teeth and asks her to talk to Shannon on the phone so she can know who is taking care of Christopher while she sorts out what she wants, and Buck beams at him in a way that would get his hackles up if Buck apparently didn’t bypass all those instincts.

That meeting is also the first time that Eddie ends up in Abby’s apartment. And it is, he has to say, definitely Abby’s, not Buck’s. It’s decorated with her things, and Buck’s only contributions seem to be kitchen gadgets and clothes and, on one wall, a picture Eddie can’t look at without getting a lump in his throat. Her lease runs out in a few months, and she hasn’t shared whether she’s coming back or not, and Eddie asks about her, trying not to let his judgment come across in his tone, trying not to compare her to Shannon.

“Look, I know we’re not a thing,” says Buck, hands up, defensive in a way that says a lot of people have prodded him about this, and Eddie should drop it, but Eddie is curious. There’s a lot Buck doesn’t say, and Eddie thinks a lot about Shannon saying that people refer to their friends as dogs when they want to simplify them, and how he thinks Buck maybe does it on purpose. “Abby was just kind of the first person in LA who took Maddie and me in, and she started the whole joke about me being dispatch’s collective little brother, and just—you ever meet someone who made you want to be better? I just … want to be the kind of Buck who’s worth being her friend.”

“You’re the kind of Buck that volunteered with kids at hospitals long before you met her,” Eddie says, dry as he can, trying not to think of how much of his adult life has been trying to be the kind of man who’s worthy of being Christopher’s father. “What is this woman, some kind of saint?”

“Yeah, but I had—never mind, doesn’t matter.” Eddie immediately wants to ask what that means, and Buck must realize that, because he barrels on. “And no, she just … she’s so smart, and I love Maddie, but Abby’s just the best dispatcher, and she was taking care of her mom, and she and Shannon both helped me figure out how to step up as a brother so it’s not just Maddie taking care of me still.”

She doesn’t sound like an exceptional person, but to a stranger, maybe Chris doesn’t sound like an exceptional kid, and Eddie still gets that. “She sounds cool,” he offers. “How long are you housesitting?”

“She’s not sure still. Texts with Maddie every week or two, but she’s already said that if the lease runs out and she’s still gone, she’ll have her brother pack the place into storage for her, so I guess she’s got like four more months to figure it out.”

“Well, I’m fresh off a hunt for a rental on a firefighter’s salary, so let me know if you want help.” He nods at the door Carla just went out. “I owe you one, anyway.”

Buck opens his mouth, probably to brush it off, say no, and then he looks at the door too. “Thanks, man,” he finally says. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

When Eddie has to leave, he can’t help stopping at the wall where Buck has hung one picture. It’s a creased picture, in a cheap frame, and the scribbles don’t really look like much, but there in his son’s terrible pre-K handwriting is his name, Christopher Diaz. “What was it of, again?” Eddie asks, knowing Buck is watching, shifting foot to foot, maybe feeling awkward about it.

“Mice on the moon. Which was not made of cheese,” says Buck. “I wish I thought he remembered the story. I kind of wanted to know what came next.”

Eddie has to swallow hard, embarrassed to find himself on the edge of tears, missing Chris at that age, at every age he wasn’t around for. Glad that for a few weeks, Buck happened to end up in that hospital to listen to him and, years later, make his life so much better. “Yeah,” he says. “Me too.”

“I want to talk about Mom,” Eddie tells Christopher a few weeks later, sitting on the couch after dinner. He and Shannon have been talking, and it seems like time, and she’s tentatively said that she wants Christopher when Eddie is working weekend days, but that on weeknights he should have Carla. It’s not a perfect solution, but nothing is a perfect solution, and Chris has just started at his new school, so his routine is already unsettled.

Chris’s face falls. Eddie curls an arm around him, can’t help himself. “Did something happen to her? At school we were talking about Amelia Earhart and how she disappeared and people thought maybe she was just living somewhere else but actually she died.”

Eddie definitely knew about Amelia Earhart at Chris’s age, but it feels too young, hearing him say it like that. “No, your mom is okay.” He’ll let Shannon explain what happened to Janet. He doesn’t want to derail this conversation. “She’s in LA, and she wants to see you. I know you probably want to see her, but I wanted to talk about how that’s going to work.”

Chris looks up at him, all painful hope. “She’s coming back?”

“Kind of, mijo. We’re not going to be married. You’ll see her when I’m at work and it’s not a school night, and probably on some holidays, and I bet she’ll want to come to that Christmas concert you’re putting together with your school.”

“But I’m still going to have you, right?” He scowls down at his lap, one of those expressions Eddie really wishes he didn’t recognize from the mirror. “It’s not fair. First I didn’t have you and then I didn’t have her, I just want both of you. Other kids have both of their parents.”

Eddie’s heart hurts. The only time he and Shannon ever lived together was between his deployments, and that was such a small amount of time, a time Christopher hardly remembers. They never had a normal marriage, and now they never will. “You’re going to have both of us,” he says. “Not on the same nights, at the same times, but we both love you, and we both want to see you. You’ll see more of me, Mom is really busy, but she’s excited to see you.”

There’s a long silence. Eddie lets it play out. Sometimes Christopher needs a minute to think. “When you were busy,” he finally says, “really busy, and I only saw Grandma and Abuelo, you brought us here. And you’re still busy, but I see you a lot now. Can Mom be less busy like that?”

Eddie is so selfishly grateful that Shannon is only ready for a few scattered weekends and emergency coverage, but he’d give up almost anything to give the hope from just a minute ago back to Christopher. Now he’s looking down, tracing a careful pattern on his shorts. Eddie wants to leave this to Shannon too, telling him how terrifying being a parent is, how sometimes you run. Eddie is done running, but he knows what it’s like to want to. “Not yet,” he says. “Maybe someday, once you two have had a chance to talk and spend a lot of time together. But she loves you, just like I loved you even when I had to be gone.”

“Did she say why she left?”

Eddie knows why she left. It was for the best reason, to take care of family. He knows why she stayed away, because once you’ve put down roots, gotten a job, inherited a condo, it’s hard to pull them up again. He doesn’t know why she didn’t take Christopher, even if it was the one thing that would have made Eddie follow her, and he doesn’t know why she didn’t at least call. Their interactions are too fragile to bear the weight of those questions. “I don’t know for sure,” he says, trying to think it through as he says it. “But I know she loves you, and that she’s sorry, and that there were probably a lot of reasons why she did it, but maybe nobody will ever understand all of them.”

“I want to see her.” Chris’s voice is wobbly, and Eddie pulls him in. “Will she be mad that I’m mad at her?”

He gets that anger from both of them, but neither of them will ever let it touch him. “No, buddy. We’ll all talk about it, but you can be mad all you want. I was mad too, and sad. Still am, sometimes. But whatever else we feel, we love you, okay? And if you tell us what you want, we’ll try to give it to you. We just won’t be married while we do it.”

Christopher is silent for a long time, and when he speaks again, it’s just asking about logistics, about when and where Shannon wants to see him. That’s okay. Eddie can wait.

The next few months are a slog. Getting used to firefighting shifts takes time, and Eddie is working as much overtime as they’ll give someone with as little seniority as he has because divorce lawyers aren’t cheap even for amicable divorces. When he’s not at work, he’s with Chris, trying to help him sort out how he feels about having Shannon around again, and how he feels about spending nights with Carla and Pepa and Abuela and once or twice even Buck when Eddie’s doing overtime when Shannon could theoretically do it.

Weekends with Shannon vary wildly, some good and some rough. A lot of times he’ll cry and cling to Eddie when Eddie drops him off, and then cry and cling just as much to Shannon when Eddie comes to pick him up at the condo that’s haunted as much by Janet as Buck’s apartment is haunted by Abby. Every time, Shannon gets the trapped-animal look she had when Eddie told her he needed time, but she doesn’t leave.

Maddie is the one who recommends therapy, when she overhears him talking about the situation with Hen at the station. For once she’s not there to check on Buck after a rough call, but seems to have fabricated an excuse to visit mostly so she can talk about reality television with Chim, but Chim got called away to do the dishes. Eddie should have been paying attention, but instead he’s startled when, from behind him, she says “A lot of kids from divorced families go to therapy these days.”

“Not sure my insurance will cover that,” he admits, turning around, and hopes that his immediate flinch at the thought doesn’t come through. He can just imagine his parents’ reaction to him telling them Chris is in therapy. They’re having enough trouble with the divorce. “I guess I could talk to the school guidance counselor.”

She shudders elaborately. “Anything but that. I get it, though. I just know that custody things can be hard on kids.”

Everyone says Maddie raised Buck. Nobody has any more details than that, or if they do they aren’t sharing. Maybe it’s Eddie’s fault for never remembering to google her. “Did you—is therapy something you did?”

“No. I couldn’t afford it either, and it was a different time and it wasn’t California.” Maddie shrugs, and he’d buy how nonchalant she looks except that he’s been in war zones before. “It’s something I do now, though.”

Hen’s expression says that’s a good thing and is also another reminder that maybe he should learn more about Buck and Maddie sometime. “I’ll talk about it with Shannon,” he says, looking between them, hoping that’s the right answer.

Both of them smile. It’s a little embarrassing what a relief that is. “Christopher is lucky to have you,” Maddie says, and he wonders if she means him or both of them. He’s not going to ask. And then, conversation forgotten, she smiles over his shoulder, looking down from the loft into the app bay. “Evan, hey! Come on up, I’ve got time for a game of something before my shift.”

Eddie turns it over in his head for the rest of the day, and when he calls Shannon the next day and mentions therapy, she heaves a long sigh that reminds him how much time she spent in El Paso too and tells him she’ll coordinate it with Carla.

The whole firehouse seems to get involved when Chim and Maddie finally go for a date not long after Christmas. Eddie, who has plenty of his own drama to deal with, has mostly stayed out of it, but Chim’s been walking on clouds, Buck’s been hovering anxiously, and Hen and Bobby have been practically bristling with advice for both of them. Even Athena, Bobby’s partner, stops by to ask a few questions, using severity to cover up the same nosiness everybody’s got going on.

The day after the date, the second day of a forty-eight off, Buck shows up at Eddie’s door around noon with a six-pack and a hangdog expression.

“It went really well or really badly, I honestly can’t tell which,” Eddie offers, taking the beer and herding Buck to the couch. They have usual spots by now. He and Shannon never really had usual spots on the couch, but now he has one with Buck. He doesn’t know what to do with that. “Did Maddie tell you to stop hovering or something?”

“Yeah, kind of. She wanted to have privacy to call Chim.” Buck scowls. Eddie tries not to smile. “The date went okay, I guess. But she—fuck, it’s her business, I know it is, but she had a panic attack, thought she saw her ex-husband at the restaurant, it got messy.”

Eddie sits up straight, automatically concerned. “Did she? Is he the sort of creep to follow her across the country? I know you know to call Athena if—”

“Eddie.” Buck sighs. He’s fidgeting so much with his beer that if he takes the cap off it Eddie has serious fears about the fate of the carpet. “I figured someone would have said by now. He absolutely was that kind of creep. He’s dead, and it was bad.”

“Oh.” This is why he should have listened to them and looked Maddie up. Nobody likes to talk about violent death. Especially the violent death of people who, it sounds like, deserved it. “Yeah, I can see why she panicked. If Shannon were dead and I thought I saw her somewhere I would probably lose my shit, and we’ve got way less baggage than that.”

Buck tilts his head back, stares at the ceiling. “She killed him,” he says, deadpan. “So that’s even more baggage, I guess.”

Eddie takes his phone out to look up Maddie’s name, almost scrambling with it. He can’t make Buck say any more of this. “Shit,” he says, both because he types his passcode in wrong and because it seems like the only possible response.

“Kendall, not Buckley,” Buck tells the ceiling. “She only changed her name back after the will passed probate.”

Maddie Kendall, Eddie types, and reads the articles that come up. They’re almost two years old now, about a local doctor killed when he shot out the back windshield of his wife’s car and she backed it up into him. Charges were eventually dropped. He can see why, he decides, and lingers on the detail that Maddie, with a broken wrist, tried to do compressions for twelve minutes until help arrived. “The timing,” he says eventually. Everything else is too awful to comment on. “Shannon said you left pretty suddenly. This is why?”

“Yeah. I had to get back to her.”

“Of course you did. That’s not who you are. You wouldn’t let her do it alone.” Buck wants to be needed. He’s made a career out of it, and Eddie may have only known him a few months, but it’s clear in the day-to-day too. If someone needs him, he’s never going to turn away.

Right now, he scoffs a little. He’s still staring at the ceiling in a way that can’t be comfortable. “I had to get back to her. How is that not letting her do it alone?”

Eddie wants the right words, and he takes the time to let them fall into place, thinking about what he knows about Buck and Maddie, about how much Buck will accept before he tries to brush it off. “If someone was hurting me,” he finally says, “I would want Christopher as far away from me as possible. Wouldn’t want to risk the blowback coming on him. But once I got them to stop hurting me? I’d call him immediately.” And then, heading the next likely argument off at the pass, “And that would be just as true if he were eighteen or twenty-eight or fifty.”

“I’m trying so hard to be her brother and not her kid. I want to make this better.”

“Chim’s a good guy,” Eddie offers. “And Maddie had one panic attack. It’s not on you to fix. You can work on your relationship with your sister another time.” He shifts until he can shoulder Buck, and waits for him to finally look over. “She’s out, man. And according to her she’s in therapy, so she’s probably pretty okay.”

Buck gives him a baffled look, probably about the therapy thing, before he softens and finally takes the cap off his beer. At least he’s waited long enough that it doesn’t fizz out and over. “You know, you’re a pretty good friend. I’m glad you showed up.”

“I’m glad you showed up in El Paso,” Eddie counters, and it makes Buck give him a weird look, but they clink their bottles together, and Buck leads the conversation into safer waters.

Eddie’s probie year slips away in a blur of being given drugged brownies, moving Buck into a stupid hipster apartment he nonetheless seems to love and where he immediately hangs Christopher’s picture again (and gets several new ones when Christopher scorns his old work), avoiding Taylor Kelly, listening in on Chim and Maddie’s romance, and a series of calls he would call bullshit on if anyone he met in the academy told him about them over drinks. He and Shannon sign their divorce papers, and their smiles get a little less tight every time they ferry Christopher back and forth, and it’s not easy, it maybe never will be, but it’s a start.

When it starts going wrong, it’s almost funny. The heist plan the 118 gets accused of is so over-the-top and dramatic that Eddie can scoff at it even as he’s terrified that the courts will revisit the custody agreement. Shannon’s boss sorts it out for him, glaring the whole time, and Eddie hardly has time to relax before Bobby is suspended, and bombs start going off, and then.

And then Eddie is in the engine and Buck is in the ladder truck and Eddie will never really remember why they split up, what put them in that situation, why Buck isn’t fucking with them. Eddie is in the engine and he gets a front-row seat to an explosion that for a second feels so surreal that he thinks of action movies before memories of Afghanistan slam into him. He never spent much time in urban warfare, but now there’s this, and Buck is in the middle of it, and Eddie narrows focus in on him. He’s the only thing that seems real, that reminds him he’s home and not overseas again.

They finally get to Buck. He hardly cares how. Hen and Chim should be taking care of him, they’re the best paramedics in LA, but somehow Eddie is the one holding his hand, taking his pulse, stumbling through telling him to stay still while they figure out how they can possibly free him.

Buck is mostly gone. Eddie sees it all the time still, but right now it feels like Afghanistan, remembering how too much pain just kicks people down to animal instincts. On the worst days, when he was a scared kid in the middle of other scared kids, he could triage by what they were screaming. “Help” meant they were still there, still fighting. Calling for mothers and fathers and anyone else, that was worse. Just screaming, wordless, like Buck does, they were usually past saving, but Eddie doesn’t think about that while they manage to free Buck. He doesn’t think much.

Buck has a brief moment of almost-lucidity in the ambulance, suddenly going from hurt-animal gasps to meeting Eddie’s eyes. “If it’s cracked open already you should see if they need more,” he says, completely earnest and completely senseless. “Eddie, she might need more, you have to tell them it’s okay to take it.”

“Hey, who needs more of what?” Eddie asks, because if Buck is talking, he’s awake, and if he’s awake, he’s alive.

“Charlie. Daniel. I’m a donor,” he says, still insistent.

Hen breaks in, then, maybe seeing the way that freezes Eddie in place, tells Buck all his organs are staying right where they are, and the lucidity slips away, but the words are going to stick with Eddie for a long time.

Buck survives. Buck survives, and he keeps the leg and adds some hardware to hold it together, and he does another surgery sooner than Eddie would like, but Eddie understands that, after coming home from Afghanistan with some fresh hardware of his own and pushing hard so he could start working.

It’s a miracle, every success in physical therapy is a miracle, so it would be selfish to ask Buck about things he said in a moment of weakness.

“Do you ever think about what he said in the ambulance?” Eddie asks Hen sometime six weeks in, when Buck is barely walking and his big fake smile for Christopher self-importantly teaching him tricks for walking with crutches is starting to look wobbly and painted-on.

He’s never met someone meant to work with patients the way Hen is. She’s always competent, always soothing, steady in a way Eddie hopes he can maybe be someday. “You know people don’t make sense when they’re in pain,” she chides him. “And Buck hardly makes sense half the time anyway. He thought he was going to die and he remembered he was an organ donor.”

“Who the hell is Charlie, then? Not to mention Daniel. Charlie was the name of the guy with the grenade, but that makes no sense.”

“It’s just pain, Eddie.”

Eddie wants to tell her that nobody is that urgent about things that aren’t real, when they’re dying. He thought about Christopher and Shannon, when he was, wanted with his whole being to go back to them. If Buck had brought up Maddie, Eddie wouldn’t feel this off-balance about it. “I don’t know.”

“Ask him. Or ask Maddie, she might know who they are. Childhood friends or something.”

Eddie isn’t going to ask Maddie about this. Every time he sees her, usually just inside the door of her house, where Buck is staying while he can’t climb stairs, she looks more tired and worried. He can’t ask Buck either, because Buck is transparent about changing the subject anytime anyone asks him about that night. He won’t even answer Christopher’s nosy questions, which is more telling than anything. “You’re supposed to have other ideas, Bobby’s supposed to be the one who tells me to talk to people,” he complains.

Hen laughs. “If you want schemes, go to Chim. Or Karen. I’m just here to tell you to behave like an adult. Buck’s going through a lot right now. If you want to ask him why he was thinking about organ donation when he thought he was dying, that’s your business.”

Now he definitely can’t do that. Eddie sighs and goes back to the inventory checklist he was supposed to be going over. He misses Buck. It probably says something about him that he misses Buck at his most obnoxious, but Hen is still watching him, cool and amused, so he doesn’t bring it up.

Watching Buck recover from being crushed by a ladder truck is like watching him trudge through quicksand. It’s slow, and every step of it seems like it might swallow him up, but he keeps moving.

After he chokes on blood at Bobby’s when he’s on the verge of coming back to the 118, all of that determined forward motion stops. He doesn’t answer the phone, doesn’t make jokes about coming back, doesn’t invite Eddie to stay when he drops by on an errand. Maddie, who was starting to relax a little in the last weeks of his first recovery enough that she actually let him go back to the loft, starts looking haunted again when Buck refuses to move in with her again, and Eddie catches her talking contingencies with Chim, what they’re supposed to do if Buck can’t come back.

Eddie can’t think about that. Buck is going to recover, but the first step to that is trying again, so Eddie shamelessly uses his son as bait and drops Christopher off at the loft to see if that helps. It’s for Chris too, he tells himself, because it was his birthday a few weeks back and Shannon forgot about a gift he specifically asked her for and he’s been melancholy ever since, and that assuages some of his guilt.

He has a few hours to wait for updates and hope Buck and Chris are healing each other a little when a tsunami hits Los Angeles, and then he’s not thinking about anything but the job in front of him. His cell phone is back at the 118 in his locker, put there when the tsunami warning came through because he doesn’t trust the waterproof gear and phones are expensive, but Buck knows that if there’s a disaster, the LAFD will be there, so he’ll take care of Chris, or if he can’t, he’ll call Shannon.

Shannon covers in emergencies, when Carla can’t stay and Eddie has to work overtime. She makes it okay for Christopher, and every time Eddie picks him up, she looks haunted, hunted, ready to run again. Eddie tries really hard not to make her cover in emergencies.

Eddie puts one foot in front of the other, does job after job after job in a shift that never seems to end, and misses Buck at his back fiercely, however competent his team and then Lena Bosko are. When he gets asked to stay at the old VA hospital and help with triage and basic treatment, he’s guiltily relieved, and then really relieved when it means he catches a kid’s symptoms before he drowns on dry land from sheer bad luck.

He’s thinking of Shannon, after, watching the way the kid’s mother curls around him, holds on. Maybe someday things going wrong won’t make her feel trapped. He wants that, for Christopher, and he zones out watching the two of them, this totally different mother and son, until Bosko elbows him and tells him apologetically that he’s being kind of creepy and also they have a job to do. “But hell,” she says, frowning at whatever she sees on his face when he jolts out of it, “pretty sure we haven’t had our government-mandated half hour for lunch, let’s get some protein bars before we go back to it.”

The world is ending, hundreds if not thousands of people might be dead, and Eddie should be out there helping the ones who can still survive. It’s his job, his calling, his duty. But the world is always ending in LA, seems like, and Eddie is hungry and tired. He lets Bosko sweet-talk the admin in charge of food and water, and then he drinks a bottle and a half of water and eats two protein bars even though they’re a brand he hates.

When they get outside, back to the triage center, ready to check in with the 118 and maybe figure out a shift change, like Eddie’s worst nightmares conjured up, Christopher and Buck are there.

Bobby and Hen and Chim are there too somehow, Eddie will worry about that later, whether they all came together or just happened to meet here, but Eddie can’t pay attention to that right now. All of him is focused in on the way Buck keeps shouldering Hen and Chim’s hands away from him, the way he’s sitting on the ground and not on a nearby cot, all his limbs folded around Christopher. And Chris, no crutches, filthy, wrapped in a blanket, clinging to Buck right back.

They’re together. They’re together, but if they’re clinging this tight and this relieved, they haven’t been, and Eddie is with them before he even knows he’s moving. “You’re here,” he says, and hardly knows he’s saying it. “You’re here?”

“Dad!” Christopher shouts, right in Buck’s ear, but he only frees one arm from the embrace, just pulls Eddie in instead of switching targets.

“Eddie,” Buck says, raspy and wrecked, “Eddie, I’m so sorry. I lost him.”

Around them, Eddie’s colleagues, his friends, they’re saying words like “bleeding” and “infection” and “transfusion,” things that should make him back off, let go, pry Christopher away to check him over too, but Christopher isn’t hurt. If Christopher were hurt, Buck would have let him go. Eddie knows that like he knows his own name. “You didn’t lose him,” Eddie says, half-delirious with it. “He’s right here.”

Shannon, knuckles white on her steering wheel, meets the three of them at the edge of the civilian vehicle perimeter. Christopher is asleep on Buck’s shoulder, and Buck is practically asleep on Eddie’s, so Christopher never has to know that she doesn’t pry her hands off the wheel, just looks at him with so much love and so much fear. Eddie might mind, on another night, but his pulse is still thundering in his ears with his own terror.

“Maddie says she’ll see you tomorrow but she’s going to keep working overnight,” Shannon tells Buck, stiff, when he loads Christopher into the car seat and then climbs into the back with him. “Where are we going?”

“My place,” Eddie and Buck say at the same time, and Eddie turns around to glare at Buck from where he’s buckling in in the passenger seat. “You just got a blood transfusion, asshole, and you saved my son’s life, I’m going to make sure you don’t die in the night.”

“I took him to the pier,” Buck insists. It seems to be one of maybe three sentences he can consistently say right now. “And then I was so busy focusing on other people when the water turned that I lost him, I thought he was dead.”

“Cool,” says Shannon, sounding completely unruffled but clutching the steering wheel even harder. “You can join the now two-member club of people who love that kid more than anything and almost killed him anyway because the universe is a bitch beyond our control.”

That silences Buck. Silences Eddie, too, thinking of that long, horrible labor, and how fresh he was off of medic training and knew just how bad some of the fetal and maternal life signs were for a long time. Shannon turns off her hazards and pulls out into the slow meander of traffic. LA traffic is bad enough, but it’s worse now, of course. It will be worse for weeks.

Eddie wants to say something to make it better for either of them. The words won’t fall into place, and by the time he cranes his neck, looks at the backseat, maybe fifteen minutes later, Buck is asleep, buckled into the middle buckle of Shannon’s narrow backseat, folded over like he needs to keep Christopher safe even now.

When Eddie looks forward again, he catches his own eyes in the rearview. There’s something broken open in his expression, something new but familiar there that he shies away from, too big to handle after everything.

He looks at Shannon instead. She’s driving, hands gripped in textbook position on the wheel. Someone else’s headlights highlight tear tracks on her face.

He can’t do anything about that either.

Eddie wakes to the sound of Buck’s ragged, sobbed-out breathing, and for a second he’s on the street again, taking pulse readings and wondering if Buck can survive the pain. For a second he’s on Bobby’s patio and there’s blood on Buck’s shirt. For a second, he’s in Afghanistan, and Greggs is dying.

“You’re okay,” Eddie says when he remembers where he is, and why exactly Buck is in his bed. The tsunami. The VA hospital. Christopher. “Go check on him if you need to.”

It’s like Buck was waiting for permission. Probably he was. He’s rolling out of the bed before Eddie has even blinked the sleep out of his eyes. It’s late morning, but he can’t remember what time it was when they finally got to sleep. Four or five, maybe. Even Christopher, morning bird that he is, will still be asleep, so he expects Buck back within five minutes, once he’s sure Christopher is safe.

Eddie blinks, or thinks he blinks, and twenty minutes have passed on the clock, and there’s no sign of Buck. He groans and stands up. If Christopher is up, he should be too. He needs to call Bobby, see when A shift is needed for extra shifts, and he needs to beg Buck to take Christopher if Shannon can’t, and much as he misses Buck at work he’s guiltily pleased to have someone he trusts to look after Chris, especially given Carla’s trip out of town had terrible timing.

Buck and Christopher aren’t in the kitchen, aren’t curled up on the couch watching cartoons. Eddie forces himself to breathe and goes to Chris’s room. Chris is sleeping, face scrunched up, stuffed dinosaur clutched in his arms. Buck is sitting up against the wall, legs extended, staring at the bed like he’s forgotten how to blink.

There’s something Eddie’s noticed, the longer he’s spent time around parents as an adult and as a parent himself. A difference, between adults who aren’t parents and those who are. It’s not a gap of maturity—Buck and Chim are competent adults, and Buck is the one who reminded him about the tax deadline coming up this year. It’s more like when Buck complained about not being able to help Maddie out of her marriage, and he kept ending up compared to Christopher when Eddie tried to help. In stories of parents and their children, they identify with the children, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just a difference in instincts, maybe a difference in fear.

Buck isn’t Christopher’s father, but if they had that conversation today, Eddie doesn’t think he would have to explain where Maddie was coming from, keeping him safe and away.

“Come on,” he says, quiet even though Chris could sleep through the apocalypse. Buck doesn’t jump, doesn’t even look at him. “He’s okay. The wave didn’t come anywhere near here. Let’s get some sleep.”

“You should kick me out,” Buck whispers. “I can’t believe I—I had him, and I lost him.”

Eddie is going to have nightmares about that, he knows. About Christopher gone and Eddie never knowing why, or knowing and having to forgive Buck, or Christopher coming back alone and explaining that Buck died for him. But when he saw them again, they were safe and they were together. “Shannon left us, no contact, nothing, for more than a year,” he says. “Are you saying I shouldn’t trust her?”

“She’s his mom.”

“I trust you to keep him safe as much as I trust her to keep him safe.” More, some days, but he’s working on that, and it wouldn’t help to say right now. Well, maybe it would. “Actually, in this case, more, her swimming skills aren’t as good as yours. Now come on. Everybody in this house needs sleep, especially you.” And when Buck glares at him, pointed as he can be without raising his voice, “Blood transfusion, Buck. Come to bed.”

Another day, he might explain away that phrasing, flinch from it, but Buck finally stands up, wincing when he puts his weight on his bad leg, and finally looks away from the rise and fall of Chris’s chest. When Eddie climbs back into bed, he climbs in after him.

Eddie wakes alone three hours later, but this time he can follow the faint sounds of the TV to the living room, where Christopher and Buck are curled up together on the couch, floor around them littered with Pop-Tart wrappers, watching Finding Nemo. Buck is crying, and Chris is beaming at the screen like he doesn’t have a care in the world. Eddie snaps a picture for Shannon.

The days after the tsunami fall into a pattern. Buck stays with Christopher while Eddie works a shitton of mandatory overtime dealing with the impact of the tsunami, and every day he looks at Eddie like he worries today’s the day Eddie is going to blame him for a natural disaster and every day Eddie makes a point of not doing it. When Carla comes back, Buck goes with ill grace to be a fire marshal, still on light duty even though he survived a damn tsunami with at least a dozen rescues under his belt, but there are still nightly phone calls. Always before bed, Buck and Chris checking on each other, but when Eddie calls a few times at two in the morning to let Christopher reassure himself Buck is okay, Buck always seems to be awake. Some nights, Eddie can tempt him to sleep on the couch, but he won’t come back to the bed, and Eddie doesn’t know how to fight him on it without things getting weird.

Three weeks after the tsunami, there’s a break in the pattern on a rare night off where Buck has plans away from the Diaz house, maybe with Maddie or someone. Shannon calls, sometime around ten, and her name on his phone still makes him anxious, like any phone call might be her changing her mind, asking for more or less of Christopher, either option as bad as the other. “Is everything okay?” he asks, knowing that it annoys her when he immediately jumps to the worst-case scenario.

“Can you come get your boy, please? I have work in the morning.”

Eddie experiences a moment of awful terror that has him up off the couch and hovering in the doorway of Christopher’s room before he even realizes he’s moving. But no, there’s Chris, resting peacefully. “Shan, Chris is here.”

“Not the boy I mean.” Her voice gets weird and echoey, like she’s cupping her hand around her mouth and the receiver for privacy. “Look, Buck’s in a bad way and he came to me for legal advice, but what he needs is a friend, and we both know you’re going to help more.”

“Legal advice?” He eases away from Christopher’s door. “What the fuck happened, is he in some kind of trouble? I can’t leave right now, Chris is asleep and he’s still waking up with nightmares most nights, I don’t want that to happen while I’m out picking Buck up. Is Buck not safe to drive?”

“Honestly I made him drink most of a bottle of wine before I started telling him things he didn’t want to hear so he couldn’t run off, so no, probably not. And no, he’s not in trouble, but I can’t say I’m super impressed with your boss right now.” Shannon sighs. “I already made him call in sick to work tomorrow. I’ll drive him over, he can Uber back for the Jeep tomorrow, I am not driving that monstrosity across the city tonight.”

“Shannon, what happened?”

“He’ll tell you.” There’s a murmur in the background. He recognizes the cadence of Buck’s voice, and then her voice changes as she turns away from the mic. “Yes, you will, Buck. Or I’ll tell Maddie and she’ll solve it.”

“I’ll see you in a few,” says Eddie, baffled and worried, and lets her hang up to wrangle Buck out the door.

When they arrive, half an hour later, Buck isn’t drunk, but he’s pink-cheeked and loosened up enough that his misery is obvious. Shannon escorts him to the door with a hand clamped around his elbow, and Eddie remembers her at high school parties on the weekends, so good at holding her liquor, keeping her friends away from assholes. “Just tell him,” Shannon tells Buck, soft with him like she was soft with Amanda Torres when her boyfriend felt her up in public. She looks up at Eddie. “Sorry about this. I have a meeting I can’t miss at eight and I still have homework to do, but I—I want to help. Just not the way he wants me to.”

“You get that you’re only making it worse,” Eddie tells her, but he ushers Buck inside, points him sternly at the couch, and then turns back to Shannon, who’s frowning after Buck. Eddie is struck with sudden guilt for taking Buck from her like he knows he has. They still see each other, get coffee every few weeks, but Eddie sees him so much more, all the time. Christopher all over again. It’s a miracle she doesn’t hate him. “I’ve got him,” he says. It’s the best he can do.

“You always do.” Eddie inspects her, looks for signs of bitterness or anger in that, but all she seems is tired. Sad, maybe. He’s always going to have an instinct to try to fix that for her, but that’s not his job anymore, and that’s probably a good thing, since he never succeeded. Christopher is his job. Maybe somehow Buck is starting to be. Shannon will find someone to take care of her. Someone she wants to take care of all the time, when she’s ready for that. “Go. Deal with this, Eddie.”

“Thanks, Shan,” he says, and lets her walk away before he shuts the door.

Buck is standing next to the couch like he doesn’t know what to do with himself. “I said she shouldn’t bother you,” he says.

“If you don’t want to bother me, I’ll call Maddie,” Eddie offers, because that’s an effective threat, and only feels a little guilty about it. Buck’s attempts to be Maddie’s brother instead of her son have been undercut by almost dying three times. If she sees him like this, she’s going to get protective about it. “But you can tell me what this is about. Shannon says she’s not impressed with Bobby. What’s up?”

Buck fidgets with a loose thread on the top of the couch, then stops before it starts to unravel. He keeps staring at it, though. He can’t seem to look at Eddie. “I keep getting stonewalled, and I—I show them my medical records, and I offer to recertify again, and they keep saying no, so I went to Bobby, figured he could fight for me, tell them I’m not going to be on the blood thinners that much longer and Hen and Chim aren’t going to let me bleed out on their watch, I saved a shitton of people in a tsunami, and we didn’t get that far. Because he’s the one who doesn’t want me back.”

Eddie gets it, is the worst thing. Eddie wants to move Chris a hundred miles inland, where he’ll never have to see the sea again. He never wants to see Buck screaming or bleeding again. But Chris loves the ocean, and Buck loves saving people, so when the beach opens again, cleared of debris and bodies, Eddie’s going to take Chris and make a holiday out of it. When Buck comes back, Eddie’s going to clap him on the shoulder and check his harness before every rope rescue. “Did he say why he’s stopping you?”

Buck scoffs. “I’m reckless. I don’t take care of myself. If he wanted to talk about the blood thinners, then sure, fine. I’m in more danger than most people, I guess. But hell, make me man behind, have me on the winch, send me to the academy, I don’t care. I just can’t sit by and watch other people do my job anymore.”

“Did you tell him that?”

“I left before I could say anything I couldn’t take back.” Buck finally looks back at him. “I—there was this lawyer. Mackey. After that drill that turned into a mess. I thought maybe … this has to be some kind of labor rights violation, right? But he was kind of a slimeball, so I thought maybe Shannon’s bosses, but she said no. Or I guess she said probably the city would throw money at me but not actually give me my job back if I sued them, so.”

Eddie owes Shannon flowers, or a bottle of wine, or something, because he can imagine exactly how that would go, all the hurt and mess spiraling out from Buck suing … what, the city? Bobby? “Yeah, I don’t think that would have made anybody very happy in the end,” he says, light as he can manage. “Did Bobby say if this was a never thing, or a not now thing?” When Buck scowls, he raises his hands. “Look, it’s bullshit either way, man, a few extra weeks isn’t going to make you more or less reckless, but I need to know how bad it is.”

“Again, don’t know, left before dessert, but.” Buck swallows. “It’s not even the blood thinners, I don’t think. It’s just me. I don’t know how to fix it if it’s me, if he’d just—if he’d tell me what’s wrong with me, I’d try, but fuck knows he’s not the first person in my life who I’ve disappointed by just being who I am.”

Eddie doesn’t know what to say to that, so ashamed of it as he is, he deflects. “Cool, so are we doing self-pity all night, or are we going to sit down and actually fix it?”

Buck finally looks at him, stung but present for the first time. “I just literally said I don’t know how—I should go.”

“You are not going anywhere. Sit.” Eddie crosses his arms and tries to duplicate the expression he uses when he’s serious about making Christopher do something he doesn’t want to do. Buck frowns mutinously, but he sits. Eddie glances out the peephole to make sure Shannon has pulled out of the driveway and goes to join him. “I may get why Bobby worries, but this isn’t going to help.”

“Great.”

“Would you let me talk for a second here? All of us at the 118 have watched you almost die twice, and we all know how close the tsunami got.” Eddie has fewer nightmares than Chris or Buck about it, but that doesn’t mean he has none. “And we all know if someone’s in trouble, your own safety falls way down your priority list. That and the blood thinners … yeah, I get it.”

Buck leans his elbows on his knees, a picture of misery. “I wasn’t even trying to help people with the truck, or the embolism. That was just random fucking chance.”

“It wasn’t. Someone wanted to hurt Bobby,” Eddie points out. “And he succeeded, seems like. Otherwise he’d realize the best way to keep you safe is to have your back while you do the stupid brave thing.”

“I feel like I should complain that you’re calling my heroism stupid, but I’m still wondering what I’m supposed to do. Sure, whatever, sympathy for Bobby, that sucks, Chris took a bath the last time I babysat and I almost had a heart attack, I get it, but what am I supposed to do? Tell my boss I think maybe he needs some therapy and a reality check?”

“Maybe don’t do that.” Eddie sighs. “You give yourself a day or two to cool down, to start. You ask your friends to remind Bobby that it’s going to be safer to have you supervised than doing a fire marshal inspection on a new restaurant and ending up in witness protection because it’s a mob front—”

“Man, what movies are you even watching—”

“—and then you remind him that fire marshals don’t get a lot of overtime and their hourly is pretty low and you have an overpriced money-suck of a loft to pay for. If he digs his heels in, maybe we try the union. Or Maddie.”

“Maddie’s freaking out about the job too.”

“Her boyfriend does it too and you haven’t had a metal pole in your brain, so maybe she should rethink that, but again, I get it. Parenting stuff.” He knocks his knee into Buck’s. “We just try the next thing and the next thing until something works. Or until you get off the blood thinners. If Bobby is still holding you back then, then you can call Shannon about it.” Shannon still won’t let him sue LA, but Eddie feels fine making that unlikely scenario her problem.

Buck is silent for a long time. Eddie lets him have the space. He’s said what he knows how to say, and he’s got the confidence that Buck isn’t going anywhere until morning. They’ll figure out the next step then. “I’m really glad you’ve got my back,” Buck finally says.

“Any day,” Eddie promises, and to prove it, goes to get him some water and a tylenol to make his morning less shitty.

In the end, Buck is a fire marshal for another month, more bitter and rebellious about it every day. It turns into a quiet kind of war, Buck on one side, Bobby on the other, everyone in between desperately wishing there weren’t sides at all but knowing they’re both too stubborn for that to work out.

Even Bobby can’t deny that Buck is ready when he saves a guy who’s been stuck in some woman’s windshield on Halloween when he’s not even at work. Eddie isn’t there when they talk it out, but he’s there for the party when they finally welcome Back back to shift, for the cake shaped like a headstone that reads HERE LIES BUCK BUCKLEY: WAIT, NEVER MIND, for the way Buck grins through even the most routine calls in a way that’s maybe a little disrespectful to the people having the worst days of their lives, for the party Maddie throws where all of them freeze when Buck laughs while drinking water and coughs for most of a minute.

After that, it’s like he was never gone. Things are never normal at the 118, Eddie’s learned that by now, but Eddie finally feels like he has his rhythm. He has a job he loves, people he cares about. Christopher’s nightmares are starting to wane, and he’s finally in therapy. Shannon keeps her promises and doesn’t make ones she won’t keep, and he’s starting to be okay with that and hopes someday Christopher can be too.

It’s the happiest Eddie has been in years, stupid as that feels to think, and he lets himself have it, something like a family that’s less complicated than the one he grew up in.

It’s the happiest Eddie has been in years, and he thinks about that, dazed and horrified, when forty feet of mud collapses and buries him in a well when he already knows there’s no safe way to get him out from above. It was risky enough for the kid. It’s worse for him, with the ground so unstable.

Once before, Eddie almost died. Three shots, bleeding out in the sand. Christopher and Shannon, they kept him alive, but they gave him peace too. If he died, they would have each other.

This time, when there’s no wound, and he’s got time to think of all the ways he could die anyway, there’s no comfort in that. Shannon would take Christopher, he knows she would, but would she want to? Would it hurt her, and hurt him? His head echoes with Shannon telling him what Buck told her, that kids know when their parents resent them. Could Shannon, who still only takes weekends Eddie works and doesn’t ask for more, take Chris without resenting him?

Buck won’t let that happen, Eddie thinks, knowing how stupid it is, knowing Buck doesn’t have any legal right to his son. He knows it’s true anyway. Shannon likes Buck, respects him. If Eddie dies and Buck offers to help, she’ll let him.

That’s what gives him the courage to duck his head under the water knowing odds are he’ll never come up for air again.

Shannon is the one who picks him up from the hospital when the baffled doctors tell him there’s no reason to keep him overnight. “Care instructions?” she asks when he buckles himself into the front seat.

“My lungs are clear, no sign of concussion. Nothing to do but stay warm, so I’ll empty out the linen closet tonight. Chris?”

“I told Buck to relieve Carla and I’d get you.” She taps her fingers against the steering wheel. “I saw—I was at the office, and the partner I was staying with was on Twitter, saw a news clip, turned it on live. Recognized the number on the truck and got me watching the broadcast just in time for … I knew it was you. Because of how Buck reacted.”

That’s a question he’s going to have to ask later. A news report he’s going to have to look up. “God, I’m sorry. I never wanted that for any of you. But it’s the job, and—it was a kid. You always have to try hardest to save the kids.”

“You have a kid, Eddie. I thought you were done throwing yourself into danger and risking leaving him, but I guess not.”

This is the fight they come back to, time and time again. The one they’re never going to stop having. Eddie’s exhausted by it, but he falls right into the trap like it’s still that lost time between his deployments when he felt torn in half, wanting to run, wanting to stay. Back when they were first having it, though, he didn’t have ammunition. “So what? If I die, you lose the option to run again?”

Shannon pulls sharply into traffic, knocking his shoulder into the window when he isn’t braced. “You know I can’t do this alone, Eddie! God knows I feel like a fucking failure about it every day, but I can’t do it. I did it for so long, I was nothing but his mom, he was my whole life!”

“You think he’s not mine?”

“I know he is! That’s why you can’t die on me!” Shannon takes a few deep, shaky breaths. “I don’t know how you—when it was me, when I was the only one taking care of him, except when your mom tried to take over, I was so drained. I wasn’t me, I didn’t know who I was. Shannon Diaz was just someone completely different, someone I didn’t know, and it wasn’t his fault, but God, the second I got out of El Paso, I was me again.”

“Shannon—”

“And I thought,” she says over him, loud and sharp, “I thought maybe it’s like that for all parents, you know? And I’m just a shitty one, which we both know I am, but I guess I thought I was shitty because I wasn’t willing to give up my whole self for him. And I don’t know—I don’t know how to be his mom and still be me, even though it kills me, God, Eddie, it kills me that I can’t do more.”

It’s hard to want to fight, after that. “I shouldn’t have left you. I was scared, and it was the only way I thought—anything else, there never would have been a way out of El Paso, or at least I felt that way.”

“I thought it was like that for all parents,” she says, like she’s not even hearing him. “But then I saw you again, saw you with him, and you were Eddie again.” Her voice breaks. “When you were in the army, when you were trying so hard to be the man of the household, I didn’t know you anymore. You weren’t my boyfriend—husband, I guess. But being his dad, it didn’t take away from you like it took away from me. I hate you for that sometimes.”

“God.” He closes his eyes, tips his head back against the headrest. He’s so tired. All he wants is Christopher. Maybe that’s the point she’s making. “Being a dad is the best thing I’m ever going to do with my life, but that’s—since I came to LA, I haven’t been doing it alone. In El Paso, working three jobs, trying to fight off my parents from just taking over, you think I wasn’t scared? But I’ve got people here. And a job I love, even if it’s not always safe.”

“Just—don’t die. I never want to run away from him again, but I don’t want to stop being me either.”

Eddie makes himself look at her. She’s always been more observant than he is, better with people. He didn’t see how much she was hurting, or maybe he did see and he was hurting so much he thought it was just the price of admission. Now that he’s looking, though, he can see that she’s herself too, way more than she was in a shitty house in El Paso with nothing to do but take care of Christopher. She was always the one with big dreams. She was the reason he hadn’t wanted to let them both work minimum wage in El Paso forever. “We can’t control that,” he says. “Me dying, I mean. Either of us dying. You can definitely control running away again, by telling me before it gets that bad.”

“You’re so warm and fuzzy and good at communicating.”

“No, listen to me. Maybe I’ll die. I try to be safe, but lightning is kind of the dictionary definition of an act of God. So we need a backup option. No court is going to give anyone but you primary custody of him no matter what I say in my will, but that doesn’t need to mean you’re the only option. We can name someone else as a legal guardian so you can have backup.”

She waits until they hit a red light to turn and look at him. “I’m not co-parenting with your parents, but that’s not who you mean.”

Eddie is never going to shackle Shannon to his parents again, even if they do love Christopher and that’s what he wants more than anything. Sophia and Adriana might be willing, but they hardly know him, and they might not want to move to LA. “It’s not who I mean,” he agrees.

“Okay.” The light turns green. She takes a breath, steps on the gas. “I’ll talk to my bosses about getting my will updated, and yours too, if you want, now that we’re not on opposite sides of a divorce.”

“You’d do all the work?”

“Not all of it. You’re going to talk to Buck.”

Eddie goes home and Buck is pacing in his living room, relaxes all at once when Eddie comes in, and Eddie invites him to stay, goes to wake up Christopher and reassure him that he’s okay. He lets Buck make him tea and nods off over it when the heat finally starts chipping away at some of the cold at the core of him. He thinks of blurting it out, what he and Shannon are talking about, but it’s the wrong time, and he’s too tired.

There’s no right time. Eddie takes two shifts off to heal up his bruises and scrapes and spend time with his son, and Buck stops by in between but doesn’t stay long. When Eddie’s back at work, Buck is getting attached to a retired firefighter, trying to do what Buck does and fix things for him, and Eddie can’t distract him from that, even if he can see the heartbreak on the horizon.

“I’m not changing anything until you tell him,” Shannon says, flat and immovable, when she asks and he admits they haven’t talked about it yet.

“It’s not like he’ll say no,” Eddie grumbles, but he promises to try.

In the end, two things make it easier to have the conversation, though neither of those things is exactly good. The first is that Red, the firefighter Buck wants to help, dies. It renders Buck quiet, sad, a thousand other things he usually isn’t, and Eddie can’t jolly him out of it like he’d usually try to do. Even Chris doesn’t help, when Eddie shamelessly uses a movie night to bait Buck into coming over.

The second is that Eddie stumbles on a video of what happened up top when the well collapsed on him.

It’s late, and Eddie’s too wired to sleep because he napped too long after a shift. Maybe he should do crosswords or something, he’s always meaning to take up some kind of quiet hobby or get better about reading more books, but he scrolls on his phone instead, through all the posts and reposts on Instagram. Someone he knew at the academy has a video reposted, captioned with some variation on lol this is crazy, and Eddie watches it mostly out of laziness.

He realizes what it is five seconds in. Stormy night, serious reporter, fire trucks in the background. He turns the volume up slightly to find the reporter is giving updates like everything is calm, and it’s seconds before. They’re bringing him out of the well, the kid, and then he’s out and the lightning strikes and Eddie sees it all happen, the chaos.

The camera focuses past the reporter. Buck is screaming, clawing at the ground. Screaming Eddie’s name, until Bobby pulls him away. The video ends there, Buck sprawled over Bobby’s lap, the reporter saying a few words to try to move past that.

Come over while Chris is at school tomorrow, he texts Buck before he can think better of it, and ignores the five texts Buck sends him after that, because if he talks to him longer, it’s just going to come out.

“Okay, I thought no text would be as bad as ‘we need to talk,’ but you proved me wrong,” Buck says when Eddie opens the door for him the next day.

“I literally just invited you to come over, a thing I do all the time.”

“You never specify I should do it when Chris isn’t here! Give it to me straight, man, are you dying?”

“Why is that the first thing you jumped to? Would you just—come on.” Eddie tows him into the kitchen and starts making coffee. Neither of them actually likes it that much but it seems early in the day for a beer and they have to be sober to pick Christopher up later. “Shannon and I had a talk after the well.”

Buck winces. “Are you getting back together? Because, you know, more power to you, if you’re happy I’m happy but also is that the best idea?”

“We’re not doing that. Ever,” he says, and he’s surprised by how sure he sounds about it. “Can you maybe stop guessing? This isn’t anything bad.”

Buck doesn’t look convinced, but he sits down at the table anyway. “Okay. Lay this definitely-not-bad news on me.”

Maybe Eddie should wait until the coffee is made and he can give Buck his undivided attention. It’s easier, though, to fuss over the coffee maker and grab Buck’s favorite mug out of the cabinet while he talks. “Shannon and I want to file paperwork to make you Chris’s legal guardian,” he says, ripping the band-aid off fast and clean. There’s a sharp sound from behind him, but now that he’s started, he can’t stop. “It’s not going to—basically all it means right now is that you can sign permission slips for him and have an easier time getting on the school pick-up list. But I almost died.”

“Yeah, I know.” Buck’s voice is unsteady. “But you’ve got Shannon, and I know things are hard, but I’m not his mom. He wouldn’t want me instead of her.”

“Shannon will do it, but she doesn’t want to do it alone. She needs someone to back her up. I know it’s a lot to ask, even if it wouldn’t involve legal custody, but I know you love Chris, and that you’d do anything to keep him safe. That’s what we want for him.”

“You have a family.”

“They’re in El Paso. I’m never sending Shannon back there. I’m never sending Chris back there.” He pours the mugs out, starts doctoring them up. He can’t remember when he started keeping Buck’s favorite creamer around. “And that doesn’t matter anyway. If he can’t have me, I want him to have you, and that means I want him to be used to having you around, like he isn’t already. Simple as that.”

“Eddie.”

“Evan,” Eddie counters, kind of to be a dick about it, because he doesn’t know how to handle everything in Buck’s voice right now.

For once, Buck, who’s never met a silence he couldn’t fill, waits him out. He waits until Eddie has no choice but to serve the coffee, to turn around and face him. When Eddie does, places the mug down and leans back against the counter holding his own, not quite able to sit across the table from Buck right now, Buck cups his hands around the mug, but he ducks his head, looks away from Eddie the second he has his attention. “You know why I picked this nickname?” he says eventually.

It’s not quite the last thing Eddie expects to hear, but it’s pretty close. “A lot of Evans at the academy, right? And then I figured you just picked the first syllable of your last name. Not that complicated a nickname, and also not really relevant.”

Except that’s not right, is it? He remembers it as soon as he sees Buck’s expression shift, that it was Mr. Buck in the hospital. “It was what they called me at the hospital in El Paso,” Buck says, and finally looks up. “And I’d … it’s okay, it’s whatever, I’m not looking for pity here. But it really stuck out to me because being on that hospital ward, that was the first time since I’d left Maddie that I really felt like I was in the right place, doing the right thing.”

“I always wondered why you just volunteered there instead of working,” Eddie offers. Maybe it connects because Buck is the first name Chris knew him by, but it seems bigger than that.

“Conflict of interest.” Buck takes a sip of coffee, squirms in his seat. Eddie wants to shake him a little, but he’s scared to break this moment, when he might find out the solution to a mystery he didn’t even know exists. “Maddie and I had a brother.”

Eddie gives up and sits down across from him, does it so fast he splashes hot coffee on his hand. “Buck, what?”

“I never knew him. Maddie did. But my parents, they had me to save him. He had leukemia, and I was a match, they made sure I was a match, but it just … didn’t work.” He shrugs, like that isn’t the worst thing Eddie’s ever heard. “My parents wanted a match. They didn’t want me, especially when I failed—”

“You did no such fucking thing,” Eddie says, way too loud and way too passionate, but he can’t stand listening to Buck saying this, even if the picture of his life is coming clearer, all the reasons Maddie was the one to raise him, all the reasons what Eddie’s asking of him now mean so much.

“Daniel is still dead, so yeah, Eddie, I kind of did.”

Daniel. Daniel, and Buck’s words on the night the ladder truck blew up. Buck’s insistence that—fuck. That if his bones were already cracked open, maybe they could get some marrow from them. A little more, for someone who needed it, when he thought he was dying. “Charlie was your conflict of interest,” he says, and Buck jumps like Eddie shot him.

“How the fuck do you remember one kid on a pediatrics floor when you were so busy with—”

“I don’t. But you did, after the truck.” Eddie swallows, and he can feel his heartbeat in his fingertips, in his throat. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, and is terrified that the first instinct he has is to cup Buck’s face with them and tell him to never split himself open for anyone else again. “You said you were a donor. And if you were already cracked open, maybe they needed more. Daniel or Charlie.”

Buck closes his eyes. His hands are shaking. “Fuck. Tell me nobody told Maddie.”

“She doesn’t like to be reminded?”

“She doesn’t know. About Charlie, I mean. I couldn’t … she was out of touch. I didn’t want that to be the thing that made her be in touch again, and then it started feeling awkward and weird and it’s done, so she doesn’t need to know.”

Eddie loves Buck, it turns out, like he only loves one other person in the world. He’d crack open his bones for them without complaint, but of course Buck did it and then, as far as Eddie can tell, hasn’t told anyone since. There are a thousand things he wants to do with the information. Wants to shout it from the rooftops to remind everyone how good Buck is. Wants to cradle it close, keep it as the secret Buck wants it to be. Wants to pull Buck’s shaking hands to him and kiss his knuckles, wrap their fingers together. “I’m distracting you,” he says instead. “You didn’t start telling me this for fun. Where are we going here, and are you saying yes or no?”

Buck drinks some of his coffee. Eddie tried to order for Shannon once when they met up for coffee to talk about Christopher’s parent teacher night, and he got her order wrong, got her what she used to like in high school, not what she likes now. He knows Buck’s coffee order, all its variations, as well as he knows his own. Fuck, Eddie loves him, and he doesn’t know what to do with that. “I guess this was all a really long way of saying that there haven’t been a lot of times when I felt like I was in the right place doing the right thing,” Buck finally says. “But I think being with you and Chris is—it’s the closest I’ve gotten since the first time I met you guys.”

“So that’s a yes?”

Buck smiles at him, tremulous and so bright. “That’s a yes.”

“I talked to him,” Eddie tells Shannon that night, on the phone in his room while Christopher and Buck go over Chris’s homework. Guardian privileges, Buck called it with a smirk, like helping out with the first steps of pre-algebra is some kind of honor they’re fighting for.

“And?” she asks, impatient. He can imagine her, phone caught between her ear and her shoulder while she makes a late dinner in between work and homework. She’s one course away from being a certified paralegal. Then the question becomes whether she’s going to start the long road towards law school. Eddie doesn’t have any say in her decisions, these days, but he hopes she does it. Hopes Christopher can understand, someday, how much it matters that she wants to try. She won’t be an uncomplicated parent for him, but parents never are.

“He’ll do it. He was … he’s really happy, Shan.”

“You sound like shit,” she observes. “You sure about that?”

“Of course I’m sure,” Eddie says, stung. “It’s Buck. He was never going to say no. I just …”

“You just?”

They’re laughing, in the kitchen. There was never as much laughter in Eddie’s home, before Buck came into it. Eddie lowers his voice, because he can’t say it to Buck, not until he knows how and trusts it won’t hurt anything, but he can say it to Shannon. She still knows him better than anybody but Buck, and she doesn’t have Buck’s blind spot. She’ll figure it out anyway, if she doesn’t already know. “I just love him,” he says.

Shannon exhales. “Oh, Eddie.”

“I know.” Buck’s voice rises and falls, the cadence like he’s explaining something he’s excited about. Probably they’re distracted from homework, but it’s probably about space, or sharks, or something else Buck listens to podcasts about while he works out just so he can share with Chris later. “It’s not going to change anything.”

“I know it’s not.” It’s not quite pity in her voice, but definitely not amusement. It’s a tone Eddie doesn’t know because they were too young for this kind of thing when he knew her well enough to understand all the tones of her voice. “And it’s not my place, but it could if you wanted it to.”

Eddie shakes his head. “No. What I’ve got is good. Maybe I’ll change it later, but I’m going to give it time. Let him get used to being part of the family as Chris’s guardian before I try anything else.”

“If you’re sure. I’ll get that paperwork started. Guardianship isn’t too complicated, it’s adoption we’d have to worry about.”

Before Eddie can get caught by that daydream, Christopher raises his voice from the kitchen. “Dad, come on! Buck says he can explain it with M&Ms!”

“Coming!” he calls, even if maybe he should play up like he’s annoyed about the sugar this late on a school night. And then, to Shannon, “I’ve got to go, but you can let Buck know when the papers are ready for him, yeah?”

“I’ll let him know. Tell the boys hi from me,” she says, and they hang up without any more fuss.

By the time Eddie makes it to the kitchen, Chris and Buck are hunched over some careful piles of M&Ms, pawing all over them, taking the objectively silly task seriously like they always do. Like they’re a family, and they are, somehow. Eddie’s made a family, with his son and Buck and the 118 and even Shannon, which seemed impossible when they came to LA.

Buck looks up at him and beams, all the emotions from earlier shoved aside if not forgotten. “Eddie, there you are! Come on, sit down, I’ve got a genius metaphor planned.”

Most nights, Eddie would tease him about it, mostly to make Christopher laugh, but he’s a little too raw to do that tonight. He sits down, steals an M&M out of Buck’s pile to make him squawk, and smiles. “Okay, genius. Wow me, I’m waiting.”

They all finish the night more confused about math than they started it, but they finish the night together, as a family. If it feels wrong, now, to leave Buck on the couch when they all to go bed, Eddie’s got time to figure that out. Buck isn’t going anywhere, now that he knows he’s wanted.

Chapter Text

There was a really embarrassing period, after Abby left, when Buck daydreamed about reunions. He thinks, looking back on it, probably it was partly because he was living in her house, using her spare sheets, and partly because before, if he’d wanted to see someone he was missing again, he would have had to go back to them. It was almost never them coming back to him, and that waiting drove him crazy a little, it turned out, especially when combined with the feelings that Abby definitely knew about. He knew even dreaming about it that she wasn’t going to come back, throw her arms around his neck, tell him Europe made her realize he was what she wanted, but he dreamed anyway.

These days, when he thinks about seeing her again, he thinks about seeing Maddie’s friend, who apparently moved to Arizona instead of back to LA and who’s engaged now. Abby might have refocused him, given him a new goal to chase, but he hasn’t really thought about her in years, so when he runs across her in the worst disaster he’s seen since the tsunami, he’s not expecting her.

Funnily enough, she does kind of throw herself at him, interrupting her conversation with Eddie as soon as he says her name, going right into his arms and holding on even though the only time they hugged before was once at her mom’s funeral. “Whoa, hey, Abby, it’s okay, I’ve got you,” he says, arms automatically coming up to catch her. “Are you okay?” And then to Eddie, “Is she okay?”

“This is Abby?” Eddie asks, in a deeply weird tone of voice, but he shakes it off when Buck glares at him. “She was in the dining car. She was asking about her fiance.”

Buck dredges through his memory of Maddie’s way-too-casual mentions of Abby’s exciting new relationship while he lets her go. “Sam, right? He’s on the train too? Did I know you were visiting?”

“Yes, Sam.” He watches her pull herself together, put on that dispatcher calm, pull away from him. “We were traveling together, but he fell asleep and I got thirsty. He’s not answering his phone, and I can’t get to that part of the train.” She turns, and Buck follows with her, looks up to the train car that’s jack-knifed up in the air. “I counted the cars. He’s in there.”

“Well, you know you picked the right person to ask. I’m a daring rescue specialist.”

“We’ll do our best,” Eddie cuts in, a little too loud, and Buck turns back to stare at him, baffled. Eddie is usually right alongside him in this kind of thing. “You were a dispatcher,” he continues. “You know we can’t make promises.”

“Eddie and I have dealt with way worse situations than this, we should get coffee with Maddie and Carla and I’ll tell you all the stories so they can fact-check me,” says Buck, trying to get a smile on Abby’s face. “We’ll assess that car and look for him, okay? You sit down, get a blanket and some water. We’re on it.”

Abby looks between him and Eddie, and finally squeezes his arm. He can barely feel it through his turnouts, and he gets a brief pang of wishing he could have had this three years ago, her looking at him like an equal, like he doesn’t have to catch up to her. Like she can rely on him. “There’s nobody I’d trust more than the 118 to bring him home safe.”

Buck carries that with him, warm in the center of his chest, through the whole horrible rescue. Eddie, whose scowl gets darker every time Buck suggests a new angle to try like he didn’t get stuck in a well like a month ago, tattles on him to Bobby, and then they’re both watching him like hawks, and Buck has no idea how to say You guys remember I’d do this for anybody, right? without them getting even more annoyed by him, so he just keeps doing his job and hopes they’ll catch up.

Sam lives, and there’s never a second where Buck feels like he might not, so they don’t have a leg to stand on. Buck gets to get Abby to Sam so they can take an ambulance to the hospital together, so Abby can call her stepkids like any parent at the end of a long day. Abby hugs him again before she goes. “We’ll do that lunch with Maddie and Carla,” she promises. “I was always going to reach out once I was in LA again, Buck.”

Buck doesn’t know if he believes her, but he doesn’t know if that matters. He tells her to text Maddie to set up a time, and he moves on to the next task.

Several hours of overtime later, he’s doing his best not to nod off in the engine on the way back to the 118, already thinking about the showers and the bed at the loft. Hen’s on the phone with Karen, and he’s pretty sure Chim is texting Maddie.

Eddie is scowling out the window, and it’s partly that being tired always kind of turns him into an asshole but it’s partly whatever’s been up his ass since Buck saw Abby, so Buck feels justified kicking him in the ankle and raising his eyebrows when Eddie looks at him. “Are you good, man? Did I miss a story from your childhood where a beautiful woman murdered your friends and family or something?”

Predictably, that makes the scowl worse. “You put yourself at risk for her. She shouldn’t have asked you to. She knows better, she knows we would have checked the whole train.”

“And then I would have put myself at risk anyway, but maybe a little later, after someone had bled out,” Buck points out. Chim puts his phone down. Hen has her hand over the mic on her phone, jarred out of her conversation. Buck really does not want to be having this incredibly stupid argument in front of all of his friends. “An off-duty first responder caught in a disaster is just a person. She wasn’t the first person to ask me for help and she won’t be the last.”

“You’re telling me if Shannon had a new boyfriend dangling from a burning building and I started risking myself to save him you wouldn’t be worried?”

“Okay, first of all, in this scenario is Shannon dating the Rock? Most people who aren’t us don’t dangle from burning buildings, it’s usually a one or the other situation. Second of all, rude of you to assume I wouldn’t be right there with you.” Buck cares about Shannon. If she ever has time to date again, he’ll probably care about her boyfriends, if only as potential future stepdads to Chris. “I’m okay, man. Can you take the win?”

Eddie raises his hands, all offended that Buck is pushing back, and in the tone of someone who is definitely not taking the win, says “I’m taking the win.”

If talking like a reasonable human being isn’t working, distraction is clearly the right play. “And you should give Chris a call, he’s definitely seen the news and figured out where we’ve been by now.”

Eddie fumbles for his phone immediately, and then he’s bringing up a video call to Carla, gesturing Buck over like it’s second nature for them both to be on the call. Maybe it is. It’s easy enough for Buck to relax into it, anyway.

Buck is a little surprised that he actually gets invited to the reunion lunch, and even more surprised that Abby is the one to text him about it. They meet up at a diner down the road from dispatch, and it’s mostly dispatch people in before an evening shift, with Buck and Carla added on. Abby does most of the talking, answering questions about Europe, and Buck thinks it’s good, that she’s talking when she wouldn’t have a few years ago.

When they break off into smaller conversations, he sticks with Carla, or sometimes with Josh, who seems a little jealous remembering that Maddie and Abby were friends before he and Maddie were. Buck gets that. He and Carla mostly talk about Chris and how invested all three of them are in the books he’s reading right now, and he catches Abby looking a few times, head tilted like she’s puzzling over something.

Dispatch has to leave all in a mass, Maddie hugging Buck before she goes and telling him they need to have coffee soon, and Buck gets ready to stand, expecting the gathering to end, but Abby doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to go anywhere, and when he raises his eyebrows in question she just shrugs and gestures for him to stay, and when he doesn’t get up, Carla doesn’t either.

“You two definitely did not used to be this close,” Abby observes when dispatch is out the door and the noise volume in the diner has halved in their absence.

Carla grins at him, all conspiratorial. “Well, Buckaroo called me a few months after you left with a potential job that I ended up taking, so now I look after a kid who needs some help after school and while his father works overnights.”

“You met his dad,” Buck contributes. “Eddie, Firefighter Diaz, he was the one you were talking to the other night before I came over. He’s great.”

Abby nods. “I’m sure he is. Obviously we didn’t meet under the best circumstances.”

And Eddie flipped a switch from being his usual competent self to being kind of a dick, which she’s definitely smart enough to notice but way too polite to say. Carla, maybe picking up on some of that, laughs. “Eddie’s intense, but he’s great, and his kid is the best. Buck and Christopher are best friends.”

Abby asks about Chris, and Buck and Carla ask about her stepdaughters-to-be, who are freaking out about their father being injured in a different state to them but already planning a welcome home party. They don’t really talk about Sam, and they don’t really talk about Eddie, and Buck knows it’s a little weird that they don’t, but also he’s relieved not to have to ask any questions, much less answer them.

Carla excuses herself to the bathroom eventually, and Buck fidgets for a few seconds before he meets Abby’s eyes across the table. The wait staff is ready for them to leave, so at least if this conversation goes badly, they don’t have to stick around. “I’m really glad you found something good,” he says.

Her whole face goes soft. “Thank you, Buck. It seems like you’ve found something good too, with Christopher and Eddie.”

He hasn’t, not the way she means it, but he has in other ways. He doesn’t know how he got so lucky, getting involved with the Diazes not once but twice. Eddie scoffs whenever anybody brings up jinxes or the universe or fate, but Buck believes in it. He’s got to. The Diazes are too much good to be a coincidence. “Yeah. LA was already great without them, but it’s better with them. I don’t know if you picked it up, but Shannon is Eddie’s ex, Christopher’s mom.”

“I wondered. She’s doing okay these days, without her mother? I always wished she had the money to do something like I did. It seems like she needed it.”

Buck has no doubt that if Shannon had the money, she’d take a trip to Europe, stay in some hostels, go to some art museums or something. Maybe someday when she’s a high-powered lawyer. He knows that’s what she wants, even if he’s not sure she’s going to go for it. “She’s almost paralegal certified,” he offers instead of saying any of that. “Not as good as Europe, but not bad either.”

“Not bad at all. I’ll call her while I’m in town, if you think she’d like that.”

“She would,” Buck assures her. He feels bad, sometimes, that Shannon tells him less now than she did before Eddie and Chris came to LA. He wasn’t on her side, exactly, kept thinking about Christopher and mice on the moon every time he had coffee with her, but he could listen and sympathize. These days all of them know that when there are sides, he’s on Eddie’s. She could probably use Abby.

“I always wondered if you and she …”

“No, that’s not—that wouldn’t work.” Buck ducks his head, but if he can’t say it now, he’s never going to. “Come on, Abby, you know I was too gone on you back then to look at anybody else.”

She sighs, long and low. She does him the favor of not calling it a crush like everybody else did back then, like everybody else still does. “I’m sorry about that, Buck. Maddie was angry, when I asked you to sublet. Said it was leading you on.”

“I knew that wasn’t going to get me anywhere, and I had promised her I’d move out at the end of my probie year anyway.” Buck shrugs. “Look, that’s over with now. And I don’t regret it. You were a pretty great first love to have.”

Abby makes a sort of wow-Buck-your-life-is-really-sad face that he’s unfortunately used to even if he gets it less often these days, but then she smiles, and it’s a reminder of why he loved her in the first place. “This is going to sound selfish, but I don’t regret it either. I spent so long feeling like that kind of thing was over for me, after my last relationship ended so badly, and when I had my mother to take care of. I don’t think I would have Sam, if it weren’t for you. I wouldn’t have been able to take the risk.”

Maybe a couple years ago, that would have hurt. Instead, he just feels warm, or maybe the kind of fond nostalgia people are supposed to feel at the high school reunions he is definitely never attending. “Then I’m really glad we both had it.”

“If you want to come to the wedding—”

“I’m there if you want me there,” says Buck. “Someone’s got to go with Maddie.”

Carla, behind him, clears her throat. She’s probably been listening for a while, but he doesn’t mind. She won’t tell. “They are going to start charging us rent if we don’t move on,” she says. Abby’s already picking up her purse, waving down a waiter to pay the bill that she insisted she would treat everybody to. Buck throws a twenty on the table anyway.

Outside the diner, Carla and Abby promise to get coffee again before Abby heads back to Arizona, sometime Carla can meet Sam, and then Abby hugs Buck, holds on and lets him hold on in return. “I’ll see you at the wedding,” he says so she doesn’t have to. They’re never going to do a solo coffee. He’s okay with that too, these days.

“See you at the wedding, Buck,” she says, and walks off to her car.

Carla squeezes his hand. “I’ll see you at Eddie’s after you two’s next shift? Chris keeps talking about your cooking, it’s enough to give a woman a complex.”

There are a lot of answers to that. Buck decides to answer the subtext. “I know I’ve got a family.” And thinking of the appointment he’s got to sign papers at Shannon’s office next week, ones that are going to make him an official legal guardian for Chris in case they ever need backup, “Nobody ever lets me forget it.”

Maddie shows up at the loft a few days later with only a five-minute warning text before she shows up. She’s fidgety and anxious and just kind of paces aimlessly around while ignoring the first three questions he asks about how she is. It’s two in the afternoon, the kind of awkward in-between space that’s a little too late for coffee and a little too early for wine, but he offers her both and she looks at him like he maybe stabbed her and takes water instead, which she then doesn’t drink.

“Okay, you’ve got to give me something,” he says now that she’s anchored to the kitchen island but still not talking. “This is the worst game of charades ever. Two words, first word sounds like, uh … dog?”

That makes her snort, so at least it’s not bad enough that she can’t laugh. “What phrase were you thinking of that’s two words and the first word sounds like dog?”

Buck wasn’t thinking of a phrase and she definitely knows it, but he bluffs anyway, just to make her smile a little bit wider. “Log jam? Wait, shit, that’s one word, I think. Frog legs.”

“Evan, I’m pregnant,” she blurts, and then fumbles and spills her water all over the kitchen island.

“Shit!” he says, diving for the paper towels, and then, catching up with the words, “Oh, holy shit, Maddie, wow.” It’s just water. He offers his arms for a hug and holds on as tight as he can when she walks into them. “A baby, Maddie, that’s amazing, you’re such a good—wait. Shit. This is good, right? You’re not upset about it? We can go to a clinic if you want.”

She laughs wetly into his chest. “No, I’m not upset. Just—really overwhelmed. I wasn’t expecting this.”

Buck rubs her back. “You weren’t the first time either, but you did pretty great then.” She tenses up, and he pushes away just enough to see her face. “Come on, Maddie, give me something here. Is Chim being weird about it? I’ll kick his ass.”

“I don’t know, he’s scrappy, but—no, Evan. I haven’t told him yet. I took a test literally three hours ago and he’s somewhere with Albert today.”

A small, guilty part of him is glad that even though Chim is Maddie’s person now, Buck is still the first person she’s telling about this. Their circle is so much wider in LA, so much better, a family falling into place like it never did in Pennsylvania, but it makes him miss her a little sometimes. This is a good reminder that no matter what, they were each other’s first family. “Well, he’s going to be really happy, and probably also really overwhelmed. But if you want to do this, you’re going to be great at it.”

“I do.” She gives him a watery smile. “And I know this kid is going to have the best uncle.”

“Only because their uncle had the best sister.” He doesn’t bother giving her another glass of water, just draws her over to the couch. “What’s scaring you? You’ve parented before, and if there were parent Yelp, you’d be getting great grades.”

Maddie settles in, automatically tucking up a leg so she can face him more easily, automatically on the side of him where it’s his good leg he’s tucking up when he mirrors her. “Last time,” she says, “I didn’t do any of it on purpose, and I was too young—there’s a lot about the early years I don’t know. When they hit middle school I’ll be on top of it all, but before that scares me.”

“Lucky for you, I’m great with kids.”

“I know you are.” Her expression goes distant in the way that says she’s thinking about Doug, and his stomach tightens. They’ll never be free of him, in some ways. “There was—I don’t like to think about it. That’s the only reason I never told you. But I’m also scared because I was … when he had a conference to go to, continuing education, in Boston, I went with him, said I wanted to be a tourist. And I went to the Planned Parenthood, because too many people knew me in Harrisburg and I couldn’t risk it there.”

“Maddie.”

“Spent my escape fund on it,” she says, barreling forward. “But I couldn’t. I would have loved that baby, but I couldn’t risk the legal tie to Doug. Nobody would take custody away from a respected surgeon.” She swallows. “It was about a year before.”

And Maddie was alone, making a terrible, necessary decision. Buck knows even if he’d haunted Harrisburg, showed up at her doorstep every day begging her to leave, it might not have made a difference, but he still regrets those years, how alone they both were. “I love you, and you’re so brave,” he says, choking on it a little.

“I love you too,” she says, easy, like it’s a reflex. It is, with them. His one sure thing no matter what else changes around them. “I’m okay. It was the right decision. And this one I get to keep. It’s just hard not to think about it.”

It feels like a secret, but really it’s just a story untold. They have a lot of those from the years they didn’t talk, Maddie more than Buck, because they’ve both got a tendency to see through the surface to all the bad underneath and then start apologizing about it. Buck’s biggest untold story has been itching at him a lot lately, ever since he blurted it out to Eddie, even more since a few days after, when Eddie asked if he’d be willing to tell Chris at least the basics. Now would be a time to tell it. A story for a story. But today is about Maddie’s news, Maddie’s joy and her fear. If Buck decides to tell her, it can wait. “I bet,” he says, and it feels totally inadequate. “But we get to love this one, and we get to do that free and clear.”

Maddie grabs his hands, squeezes on tight. “I don’t want to do this without you. I want Chim involved, he’s the father and he’s my partner and I want this for us, but you’re my brother. We’re going to teach this kid what snow is like, and how to pinky promise, and how to drive stick.”

“You’ll both be sick of me,” he promises, and squeezes her hands right back, tries not to well up with tears. “A baby, Maddie! I’m so fucking happy for you.”

“I’m happy for me too.” Buck’s got to be tearing up despite trying not to, because she’s following suit. They’ve always been able to set each other off like nobody else. “Have I ever thanked you for getting us to LA? We would have been okay anywhere, but it’s hard to imagine better than here.”

There are days where Buck’s leg aches or he wakes up from a nightmare or Christopher calls him shaky the morning after one of his own where he wishes he’d never come to the west coast, but they’re overshadowed by the rest of it. “We’ve got a pretty amazing life,” he agrees, and they sit there smiling at each other like idiots until he remembers to ask more questions about the baby.

He gets a text that night from Chim, several hours after Maddie texts to tell him that Chim was perfect and they’re going to be okay, going to be a family together, something that only gives him a little pang. Can’t believe that the laws of uncle-hood mean my own kid is going to mistakenly think you’re cooler than I am.

Buck grins, texts some asshole comment or other back, and flops back in his bed to get some rest before his next shift, content and hopeful and focused on the future.

Two days later, a state of emergency is declared, and nothing about the future looks quite the same anymore.

Chim shows up first, after a late-night conversation at work where they both admitted how scared they are for Maddie, with how many people they have to see on any given day. They drink beer in silence and then wake each other up all night, Chim not used to the sounds of thin-walled apartments anymore after months in Maddie’s little house, Buck not used to anyone else’s snores in his loft.

Hen and Eddie show up together after their next shift and their first transport of a patient with a severe case of the virus to the war zone that Cedars-Sinai has become.

Buck’s loft is only so big, though, and it’s definitely not meant for four. Chim staked out the couch on the first night, and Hen shows up with a very nice air mattress, so Buck shrugs at Eddie and invites him up to the bedroom and gives him his pick of sides because Maddie raised him with manners. Eddie picks the side without a bedside table because he was also raised with manners, and then apparently is really feeling the toxic masculinity because he refuses to make eye contact with Buck again until lights out that night.

“I hate leaving him,” Eddie whispers into the darkness.

It’s probably what slumber parties are like. Buck never really went to those, but he’s not going to mention that right now. “You’re keeping him safe. He knows that.”

“It’s not that. I know that’s the right choice. It’s Shannon.”

Buck winces and is really glad that the lights are out. Shannon loves Christopher, Buck wouldn’t like her so much if she didn’t love her son as much as he deserves, but a few glasses of wine in once, she talked about how sometimes she wishes she could press pause on him, keep him safe and the same for a few years while she gets to have the freedom she never really got to have guilt-free. He doesn’t blame her, but it doesn’t make him happy that she’s got Chris in her apartment for the foreseeable future either. She’s a great mom, but she’s not always a happy one, and Chris is an observant kid. “How’d she seem when you dropped him off?”

“Scared, but I think that’s mostly …” Eddie trails off with a rustle of fabric that spells out a helpless hand gesture, the kind they’re all getting used to really fast. “I’m just worrying.”

“It’s a pretty worrying time, but she’ll keep him safe.”

“I know.” Eddie sighs, deep and heartfelt, and the sheets rustle again and then the back of Eddie’s hand is coincidentally against Buck’s arm. Buck is kind of charmed about it, both that that’s all the contact Eddie is going to allow himself and that he’s allowing himself contact at all. “It’s just … there’s no good scenario for me here. Maybe she hates it and Chris can tell or she asks to cut back on custody when it’s all over and breaks his heart, or maybe all this time together will make her realize that she’s ready for more custody that I’ll have to give her and breaks mine instead.”

“Eddie.”

“I know, okay? I just miss him already, and things are much better with me and Shannon, but they’re not that much better.”

Buck sometimes wonders what he did to earn Eddie’s trust. Christopher’s, that’s easy. He’s a good-natured kid, and he loves people who love him. But Eddie, he brushes things off. He makes friends with people but he takes care of himself, would rather be the person helping than the one being helped. But he lets Buck help. Sometimes, like now, he asks Buck for help, even if he’s not saying the words. “We’ll call him every day,” he says. “We’ll help him figure out whatever the fuck Zoom is so we can help with his homework, and you know Pepa is quarantining so she can help out when Shannon needs a break. And as soon as it’s safe, you go back to him.”

Eddie’s hand shifts, a light enough touch to almost make him shiver. “You make it seem easy.” Anyone else, any other time, Buck would be backpedaling, apologizing for overstepping. Only Eddie would make it sound like that’s a good thing. “And we go back to him.”

When Eddie says it, he believes it. He won’t in the morning, probably, believing he belongs somewhere never really sticks except with Maddie, but it’s a start, he thinks, that he can believe it this much. Enough for warmth to grow in his chest and his mouth to tick up in a smile. “Okay, Eddie. We.”

Spring passes like a nightmare. Buck, with three roommates and no space, watches people on the internet talk about their new hobbies and wishes he could post about his own sourdough starter, texts Bobby incessant puns for days about what he would name it, which on reflection is probably more obnoxious than if he actually got a starter somewhere and texted Bobby updates on the real thing. It doesn’t matter. With four people’s preferred brands of yogurt and milk and protein shakes and four people’s leftovers, there’s no space for anything else in Buck’s fridge.

“I think I might actually be an introvert,” he tells Shannon one morning in May, standing on the balcony and talking to her because he knows Eddie’s got Christopher occupied.

Anybody else, he thinks, would laugh, even Maddie. Hell, even Buck a few years ago. Buck’s always the guy banging down people’s doors on a Saturday morning to get brunch, begging for one more drink at the bar, trailing his friends around the station instead of doing chores solo. Shannon just lets out a long sigh. “Yeah, me too.”

Shannon’s apartment isn’t big enough for Buck to ask how she’s really doing. For lack of a better idea, he keeps complaining instead. “I don’t really think there’s a time in my life when I didn’t have the option of just being on my own sometimes. Hell, I spent years on my own on the road. And I want to see people these days, but then I get to come back to the loft and just do whatever.”

“And now you don’t?”

“Sometimes if one of us is covering an extra shift there’s only two or three of us around instead of four, but other than that, no. Best I get is going for a run, and half the time Eddie or Chim comes along for that because they’re going as stir-crazy as I am. And everyone else in LA has taken up jogging too.”

“Tell me about it. Chris and I both need some recharge time, this place is not as big as Eddie’s house, but we’re not going to get it anytime soon.” There’s a brief silence. “I’ve got him back with his therapist, telehealth. I’ve been seeing one too. Had been, since before everything shut down. You ever think about getting one?”

Buck swallows. He wants to dismiss it out of hand, say he’s not that kind of guy. He’s gone for a session or two, a few times. After Devon. After the truck, and then the embolism, and then the tsunami, when Bobby finally relented a little and said if Buck did some more therapy sessions he’d be happier letting him come back. He’s never had the same therapist for more than a few sessions. “You think me being sick of my best friends is a reason for therapy?”

“I think your life is a reason for therapy,” she shoots back. “And in the meantime, maybe tell Eddie and Chimney to stop coming on your runs. Or take a damn day off work.”

“I can’t do that. We’re short-staffed, emergency services are leaking staff and we’re already working mandatory overtime to cover all the people out with the virus, I can’t just take a day off to be alone in my apartment.”

“Then tell everyone to go meet their families in the park. I’d take Christopher to meet Eddie somewhere outside, if he wants.”

That sounds amazing, except that Buck wants to see Christopher with Eddie. He wants to see Maddie with Chim. Maybe it’s all excuses, because he needs to be alone, but the second he’s alone, he’s going to collapse. “Only if you also do that another time so I can see him too. I miss that kid.”

“Yeah, I—I need to talk to Eddie, see what he’s comfortable with, with Chris so high-risk, but I think we all need it.”

Buck tries to make his voice as soft and non-judgmental as possible. “Are you doing okay, Shan?”

“I’m holding on. At least this time I’ve got work to keep me occupied and the Diazes aren’t a few doors down the street to tell me I’m doing it wrong.” There’s a silence. “I need a vacation. And one of the partners is moving to Sacramento next year, starting a new office there. She’s said she’ll take me, if I want. I need … I need to think about it.”

The part of him that’s Shannon’s friend wants to tell her to do it. The part of him that’s always on Christopher’s side is less sure, but she already knows about that side. It’s less awkward for them both when he tries to just be her friend, when it’s the two of them. “You’d be great at it. Cheaper to live, too, more money if you want to do the law school thing.”

“I kind of do,” she admits. “I can’t just decide that without figuring out the logistics, but I’d be good at it. And he deserves to see me chasing my dreams, right?”

It’s all so complicated, and Buck has a stake in it now, they’ve given him a stake in it, but he still doesn’t feel like he’s got the right to actually weigh in. “You’d be great at it, and yeah, that’s probably a parenting conversation to have with Eddie at some point, which means I’m recusing myself. That’s a fancy lawyer term, right?”

Shannon’s laugh is sharp and bright. Someone taps on the balcony door, and when Buck looks, of course it’s Eddie. He holds up a finger, even though Eddie’s still got the phone up to his face, which probably means Chris wants to say hi. “I’ll invite him to the park, and another time I’ll bring up law school. Thanks, Buck. Take time if you need it, okay? You know I know how important that is.”

“I’ll kick them all out and have a naked dance party or something, I promise. Mind if I go? Looks like I’m being tagged in on that science assignment.”

“Yeah, of course, the more you help the less Wikipedia research I have to do. Think about finding that therapist, and we’ll talk soon.”

“Talk soon,” Buck promises, and goes to help Chris figure out kinetic and potential energy.

It takes a week, but he gets a whole amazing three hours alone, and spends most of it flat on his back in bed, enjoying the silence.

Hen goes first, sometime in the middle of the summer. Their social worker is desperate for temporary placements, and Karen can’t take that on alone, so they decide to take the risk and set up some strict protocols.

Two weeks later, Eddie taps on the loft railing after Buck’s third therapy session. He’s just telling people he’s talking to someone online and to leave him alone, but Eddie watches him, and gives him concerned looks whenever he comes back from the runs he goes on so he doesn’t overhear Buck’s calls, so he probably knows the calls are therapy. Chimney is constructing an imaginary girlfriend. Buck’s letting him, mostly because it gives everybody something easy to talk about at the station.

Buck looks up, and sure enough, there’s the concerned look, Eddie searching for eye contact and then holding on like he can read the morning headline’s in Buck’s eyes. A lot of times, he can. At this point, though, Buck’s pretty fluent in Eddie’s expressions too, and this one’s familiar, worn-down and anxious. Buck puts on a smile. “Kind of pointless to knock when there’s not a door, man.”

“This is your space.”

“You’re heading home,” Buck surmises, because that was the most likely option when Eddie came back looking like that, and saying that so pointedly is giving the game away.

Eddie looks startled, like he always does when Buck proves that he knows him. “Called Shannon while I was out, thought I’d see how Christopher’s doing now that it’s summer and he doesn’t even get to see his friends during online school. She’s getting worn out, and—fuck. Don’t want to put you in the middle of this.”

Buck gestures him up to come sit on the bed. The living room is Chim’s bedroom, and was Chim and Hen’s, which means it doesn’t feel like communal space anymore. The only place that does is the kitchen, but the bed is more comfortable, and it’s been his and Eddie’s for months now anyway. They can sit on it too. “You had a fight.”

“Worst one in a while.” Eddie sits down next to him.

They’re good about keeping their fights away from Buck just as much as they are about keeping them away from Chris, but Buck knows the outlines of them anyway. If Shannon takes on too much, she starts acting like an animal in a trap, ready to gnaw her own leg off but much preferring to snap out at whoever’s closest. If Eddie feels threatened or like Christopher might get upset, he’s even worse. When it gets really bad, they pull out the years Eddie was overseas and Shannon was suffocating in El Paso, and the years Shannon was in LA and Eddie was trying to get his life together alone. “Chris didn’t hear, right?” he asks, because that’s the important thing.

“I picked now to call because I knew Pepa was taking him to the park for a few hours.”

“You figured she was pretty close to her limit?”

“Yeah.” Eddie sighs. “I don’t want to blame her.”

“It’s got to suck listening to her be tired out when you’re missing him this much.”

Eddie loses some tension. Buck tries not to beam like he always instinctively wants to when he says the right thing to prove to Eddie that he gets it. It’s definitely not the right time for that. “It still doesn’t feel safe, but I don’t know if it’s ever going to feel safe again, and I’ve spent enough time away from him.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “He could stay with Pepa. I think she’s lonely with Abuela back in El Paso. Is it selfish to go back?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I might just be saying that because I want you guys to be happy.” Buck frowns down at his lap. “I’m going to miss you. I’ll still get calls from Chris, right?”

“Obviously, but you’ll also get visits.” Eddie elbows him. “If I’m going back, you aren’t really doing anything I’m not doing. If I’m safe enough for him, you are too, and Shannon will agree with me on that.”

Buck knows what missing someone feels like. He missed Maddie for so many years, and now he’s missing her again even if they talk almost every day. He never expected that he could miss anybody as much as he can miss her, but Christopher Diaz is proving him wrong. “I’d be so happy to see him, but just—only if you actually think it’s safe, okay? Not because you think I’m lonely.”

“Nah, I think you’re sick of us,” Eddie says, easy and unworried. “At least with Chim working extra shifts to save up for the baby you’ll get some time alone again.”

“I’m never sick of you.” Buck might want to be alone sometimes, but that doesn’t mean he’s sick of Eddie. “But that’s not the point of this. Are you and Shannon going to be okay?”

Eddie shrugs. “We have to be.” There’s a silence. “She told me about Sacramento.”

“It’s not happening tomorrow. Might not happen at all.” Buck flops back on the bed. He doesn’t want to be sitting up anymore. “Fuck. I wish there were a right answer here.”

This time, Eddie is quiet for long enough that Buck props himself back up on his elbows to squint at him. He finds Eddie watching him like he’s forgotten he’s got other options, like for instance blinking, with one of those quiet expressions Buck hasn’t quite managed to decode yet. “We’ll figure it out,” Eddie eventually says, shaking his head like he needs to clear it.

Buck’s not sure when exactly he became part of the Diaz family’s “we,” but he knows he likes it. He tugs on Eddie’s sleeve until Eddie flops down next to him, both of them sprawled across the bed fully dressed, which they’re probably going to regret later. “We will,” he promises, and they both stay there in silence until Chim yells up at them about dinner.

Eddie is home a week later, and Buck is at the Diaz house just a few days after that, even if he insists on staying in the backyard most of the time and feels weirdly shy and anxious, like everything with he and Christopher is reset.

Christopher, clearly, doesn’t feel like that. He clings to Buck’s side like a burr for the whole afternoon, telling stories, asking questions, only leaving him for long enough to spend some time in Eddie’s orbit instead. When Eddie goes inside to call his parents, who seem to have a lot of feelings about literally every parenting decision Eddie and Shannon make, Christopher turns his most imploring gaze on Buck. “Can we call Maddie? Dad says she’s having a baby, and I want to see.”

Maddie’s showing pretty well these days, even though she’s only partway through her second trimester. Buck and Chim both exclaim about bump updates, mostly to each other when they’ve gotten off a call with Maddie, since she gets impatient with too many comments on it but they’re both shamelessly entranced, both because they love Maddie and the kid-to-be and because it’s nice, to have a new life coming in the middle of everything. “Let’s call her and see. I think she’s off work today.”

Sure enough, Maddie picks up almost immediately, and her smile softens as soon as she sees Chris, halfway in Buck’s lap but in a plausibly deniable kind of way because he’s just starting to be too cool for that. Buck wonders what Maddie sees when she sees them, especially now that Chris is just about the age Buck was when she took him in.

He doesn’t ask. He lets Chris talk about the books he’s been reading and the online escape room for kids Buck found for him and his friends to do. Even as a kid, Christopher has the talent Buck unfortunately doesn’t, of making even mundane stories funny and interesting. It’s really good Eddie is his dad, or he could take over the world with that kind of charm.

With a kid’s frankness, he also asks Maddie about the pregnancy, about how she feels and what it’s like and if the baby is kicking. He’s interested, but he also gets quieter and quieter and more nervous with every question, never a good sign. Eventually, face half-hidden in Buck’s arm, he says “Do you want to be a mom? Or is it bad?”

Maddie’s eyes shoot over to Buck, asking him for guidance like she’s not the best example of parenting he’s got. He can’t help anyway. He’s frozen in place. This is Eddie’s worst nightmare and all Buck can think is that he should never, never find out about it but also that he needs to know immediately. “I do want to be a mom,” Maddie says, and Buck recognizes the dispatcher tone, the soothing voice that’s giving her space to figure out the problem. “I didn’t expect this, but I am so excited to get to know the kid.”

“What if the kid makes you sad?”

Buck closes his eyes and hopes that Chris isn’t looking too closely at their faces in the bottom corner of the screen. He can’t stand to look at Maddie’s face while she answers that one. “Sometimes when you love people they make you sad, or mad, but that doesn’t mean you don’t love them,” she says, voice choked. “Like it made me sad when Buck got really hurt, but I loved him that whole time.”

“That made me sad too,” Christopher admits, and Buck leans into him, can’t help himself. “But I don’t want people to be sad about me.”

Maddie could handle this. Buck forces himself to open his eyes and say something anyway. “The sadness is never instead of love, buddy. It’s just part of it. Love isn’t about whether you’re happy or not. Just about who you want on your side when you’re happy and sad.”

“And you want the baby on your side?” Chris asks Maddie. Her eyes are shiny on the screen, and Buck already knows they’re going to be talking about this later, and that he’s not going to get away with not telling Eddie.

“Yes. And I want to be on the baby’s side too. Probably I’ll make them sad sometimes.”

“Probably,” Chris agrees, and Buck can’t stand that. He sidesteps, asks Maddie about a few other things, and lets her go.

There’s still the murmur of Eddie’s voice from inside, rising and falling, not happy but not yelling. Buck puts his arm around Christopher’s shoulder and draws him in close. “You were asking Maddie some big questions,” he offers. “You can tell me why, or you can tell your parents, or save it for therapy, but probably you should talk to someone.”

“I really liked seeing Mom more.” Chris is mumbling, creeping closer word by word. Buck just holds on tighter in return. “I missed Dad, and you, and Carla and all my friends, but I missed her sometimes before. Because she’s busy. But I think I make her sad. She never said, but I make her so tired, and sometimes school would interrupt work and that made her stressed.”

Buck doesn’t know how to do this, how to say the right thing without lying. “Everything’s been really hard and scary for everyone since quarantine,” he finally says. “I think if your mom was sad or stressed, she shouldn’t have taken it out on you, but it’s probably more about the world than about you.”

“I heard Aunt Pepa talking to Dad once and she said—” His face screws up as he tries to remember the phrasing. “That they were babies when they had me. And that they never had the chance to be anything but my mom and dad. Do you think that makes them sad?”

There are a lot of responses Buck could make to that. He goes with one he thinks might be a complicated one for a kid Chris’s age to understand, but that doesn’t require him to say anything that Eddie or Shannon might not want him to say. “You’re so wanted. I know what not being wanted is like. My parents didn’t want me, not really.”

Christopher’s brow knits. “I thought Maddie’s your mom?”

“Maddie is my sister, but she started taking care of me when I was your age, because my parents …” He tries to figure out how to put it, what won’t sound too harsh or too tragic. “I made them really really sad,” he finally says. “It wasn’t my fault, but they made it feel like my fault, and I think maybe they were so sad there wasn’t room to love me. Maddie saw that, and even though she was the same age your parents were when they had you and it was scary, she took care of me. She loved me so much, and I knew that her life would be really different if she wasn’t taking care of me, probably a lot easier, but whenever I worried about that she reminded me that she loved me more than she wanted that. That’s how your parents love you.”

He gives Chris time to puzzle over that, and Chris takes it. The silence spins out. A plane flies overhead. “Your parents should love you too,” he finally says. Usually he looks like Shannon, but when he gets mad, there’s something in his expression that’s all Eddie. “It’s not fair.”

“I’ve got so many people to love me these days.” Chris doesn’t need to hear about how lonely he was for a long time. “I’m really lucky you’re one of them. And hey, me telling you that probably made you sad, right? And I feel guilty about that. But I know you love me, and I love you. That’s the important stuff.”

“Love you, Buck.”

They sit in silence, and Buck wishes for a porch swing, has a strong memory of one at a friend’s house way back in Hershey, how he’d beg to sit out there even in the winter. Eventually, he realizes it’s been a while since he heard Eddie’s voice inside, and he looks up at the back door on instinct, and there Eddie is, leaning against the door frame.

When he catches Buck looking, their eyes meet, and it’s enough for Buck to know Eddie caught way more of that than he wanted him to. Eddie looks so sad, and so tired, and so worried about Buck, but there’s something else in it too. Something wistful, gentle maybe. Something Buck isn’t ready to recognize yet.

“Hey guys,” Eddie says, voice so warm, eyes never leaving Buck’s, “I think our first time with all three of us hanging out in a long time means we deserve something special. Come inside, give me your orders for takeout.”

Chris is still young enough that he can shake off a funk with the temptation of Indian food in front of him. He hops up, smile lighting up his face, and starts talking about the options, all the local delivery places he’s been missing because Shannon’s place is halfway across the city in a totally different delivery radius.

Buck takes a minute, stands on the porch on his own, breathes in deep. He sends Maddie a text, thanking her for being herself and being so understanding with Chris, and he goes inside. Meets Eddie’s eyes again, and smiles.

Living with Chim is weird, but it stays a lot easier than living with half of A-shift, so Buck doesn’t mind it, especially when he has Eddie’s house as an escape. He starts encouraging Chim to go home anyway, mostly because he hates the thought of Maddie having Albert when she could have her partner instead, but Chim is weirdly resistant to the idea for someone who keeps complaining about Buck’s loft and occasionally Buck himself.

It takes some time, a landslide, and a tragedy to fix it. Turns out delivering a baby in a buried house full of traumatized women is a great confidence-booster or something, and Buck has about two hours to be happy for Maddie and Chim and maybe a little surprisingly melancholy for himself when Maddie calls and sheepishly asks if Albert can stay with him for a while since Chim has moved back into her house but not back into her bed, the only compromise he could live with.

“He’s paying rent,” says Buck, because the last few months have been expensive. He wasn’t going to charge his friends for rent when they were all paying their own rent, even if they chipped in on utilities and rotated groceries. Albert, though, doesn’t have another place to pay rent on, even if Buck isn’t sure if he actually has a job.

Maddie just laughs, amused and relieved, so probably he does. That’s good to know. “I think he can handle that.”

Buck sighs. He’s so glad to have his place to himself again, and Albert is a stranger, not one of his best friends. Living with him is going to be a lot different. Still, if he needs to get away, he can go to Eddie and Christopher. “Send him over. Just … tomorrow, maybe? Let me have one night.”

“Tomorrow,” she says. “But only because I love you. And let’s get lunch soon, okay? Food truck at the park?”

“That sounds great. Love you too, Mads,” he says, and hangs up so she can enjoy having Chim back and he can enjoy one night of living alone again.

He doesn’t do anything too exciting, just watches some documentary Chim would have mocked him about, cooks a meal he can be fancy with because there’s nobody impatient to use the kitchen. Eddie and Christopher call him at bedtime, and he grins and listens to the story for the night. He’s been catching patchy chapters of the book for a while now, and doesn’t really have any idea of what’s going on, but he doesn’t really care. He likes being part of it anyway, when they decide to call him.

Eddie doesn’t hang up when he kisses Chris goodnight, just takes Buck into the living room with him. “How’s having the place to yourself again?”

“Good, for the one night I’m getting it,” he says, and explains Albert.

Eddie makes a sympathetic face. “Sucks, man, but I know Maddie and Chim will appreciate it. Preparing to have a baby is brutal. And I think Shannon is going up to Sacramento next month sometime, staying for a week. I bet she’d let you stay in the condo if you promise to water her plants.”

Sometime in the last few months, Shannon’s move to Sacramento has become a fact that Shannon and Eddie both talk about. Chris doesn’t, and Buck doesn’t know if that means they haven’t told him or if he’s just keeping his feelings to himself. He hasn’t been brave enough to ask. He doesn’t even know how Eddie and Shannon managed to have the conversation without completely wrecking their co-parenting relationship. “I’m great at plant-watering. Just ask Abby, I kept her spider plant alive until I handed it off to her brother.”

“I’m sure you did,” says Eddie, and makes a face like he smelled something bad, which he does whenever Abby comes up, actually. Buck would make fun of him for it except that he kind of likes how overprotective of him Eddie can be. It’s different, somehow, than Maddie and her worries. Maybe because Maddie frets her worries out on him and Eddie always seems to be on the verge of taking his out on the rest of the world. “Anyway, if you need a break before then, there’s always my place. It’s not the same as being alone, but Chris is always happy to see you.”

Spending time in a chaotic house with a kid shouldn’t sound less stressful than sharing with Albert, who seems nice and like he’s not going to demand a lot of attention. “I’m always happy to see you guys, too.”

Eddie smiles, quiet and happy, and even though it’s Buck’s only night alone, which is what he’s been wanting for months, for a minute he wishes he were there instead, with Eddie on Eddie’s couch, debating whether Christopher’s dentist will ever forgive them for another week of Saturday morning pancakes. “Door’s always open,” Eddie promises. “And even when it’s not, you’ve got a key.”

“Hey, Evan, do you have a minute?”

Buck gives his phone a mistrustful look, something that he can do because Maddie audio called him instead of video. Between the audio call and that opening, there’s no way he’s going to like what’s coming next. Maybe Chim has another half-sibling for Buck to take in. He looks across the loft and gives Chim a mistrustful look too, for good measure. Now that he’s thinking about it, Chim’s been acting off since the start of shift. “Yeah, absolutely, is everything okay?” he says, frowning at Chim, who’s playing video games with Hen. If he can’t read Maddie’s face, maybe he can read his.

“Yes, I think so. I just wanted to give you a heads up.” She takes a deep breath. “I told Mom and Dad about the baby last week, figured they would want to know. They called last night to say they’re coming to town. Since they won’t be able to see the baby for a while after she’s born, they thought they’d come before, instead.”

Buck turns away from Chim and Hen. On second thought, he doesn’t want to know Chim’s reaction to any of this. It’s not like it’s a bad thing. Their parents aren’t really his parents. He forgets they exist, most days. Since he and Maddie moved to LA, he’s talked with them maybe twice, after the ladder truck and the tsunami, and only then because Maddie called them and handed him the phone. He texts them on their birthdays. They usually text him on his. “Is that safe?” he asks. It’s the first question that comes to mind. “They aren’t flying, right? Airports are way too high-risk for—”

Maddie interrupts that spiral. “Road trip. They’re renting an RV so they don’t need hotels. I’m not wild about it either, but they promised they’ll be safe.”

Buck doesn’t trust that. They’re too good at sweeping things under the rug, pretending inconveniences away. He should know, he was one of them. But even if they’re not his parents, they’re Maddie’s, so he has to make nice. “Okay. I’m guessing Chim knows?”

“I was with him when I got the call.” He can almost hear her biting her lip. “If you don’t want to—you know I never forced you—I just … I want this baby to have as much family as she can get. I want her to have a thousand people in her corner.”

If he and Maddie had had more people in their corner, loving grandparents, aunts and uncles, Maddie wouldn’t have had to grow up so fast, so young. She could have begged someone else to take him. But he already knows that if something happens to Maddie and Chim at once, for some horrible reason, his parents aren’t the ones named in the will to take care of the baby. Buck can’t quite look at that head on, the way that’s true of two children now. “I get it, Mads. Of course you want family for the baby. What do you need from me?”

There’s a pause, like maybe he said something wrong there, but before he can figure out what part of it was wrong, she exhales and answers him. “Just some family dinners while they’re here. The four of us, Chim, and probably Albert. This could be good for us, right? A reset, like you and I had when we came here.”

Every dismissive thing he wants to say is only going to hurt Maddie, not them. He doesn’t really want to hurt them, either, just maybe prove he doesn’t care about them. But he can’t do that. Part of the reset he and Maddie both wanted so much is that he supports her now too, not just the other way around. If what she wants is grandparents for the baby, Buck will give her that. “We’ll do some family dinners,” he says, a couple tones too bright, and then makes an excuse before she can call him on it, something about chores that he hopes she won’t text Chim about because it’s a slow shift and his chores have been done for at least half an hour.

Everyone finds him at least once that shift, pretending like it’s chance, like they’re not giving him the space to talk. Chim’s awkward, Hen’s practical, Bobby makes him chop vegetables and offers an ear. Buck doesn’t know what to say to any of them. His parents don’t mean much to him, but Maddie means everything, which means he has to care about this, but the only way he knows how to care is to be anxious, because excited isn’t in the cards.

Eddie steps into his orbit most often, and he doesn’t really ask questions. Eddie so rarely does. “Parent shit is awkward,” he says at the end of shift. “My parents keep trying to convince me to visit like Chris isn’t high-risk.”

“How about we swap?” Buck says, only half joking. “I’ll go get all the embarrassing stories about you, and you make polite conversation with my parents where they’ll call you Edmundo the whole time.”

Eddie wrinkles his nose. “Or I could just not tell them that’s my legal name. They named their kid Maddie, they could survive Eddie.” He nudges Buck with his shoulder. “Any kind of backup you need. I can show up, I can call you with an emergency like you’re on a Tinder date—”

“How do you know Tinder date protocol?”

“I can bully my way in and just go with you, too. Maddie and Chim wouldn’t kick me out.”

“We’re coming back to the Tinder date thing,” Buck warns him, but he can feel the way the smile on his face is already more real. “They’re not monsters, Eddie. They’re just … strangers. I disappointed them, they disappointed me, and now we exchange generic gift certificates on Christmas.”

Eddie grabs his arm, ducks his head around until he’s sure Buck is looking at him dead on, like he does every time he’s about to turn Buck inside out. “There’s nothing disappointing about you. They should feel so lucky to have you, and if they don’t know that, fuck them.”

“Yeah, well, same to you,” Buck says, and it’s not enough, he never finds the right words in the right order the way Eddie does, but Eddie smiles at him and squeezes his arm like maybe it helps.

Buck hasn’t seen so much as a picture of his parents since he put Pennsylvania in his rearview. They look older again, like they did when he saw them after Doug, but they look happier, too. They show up with baby presents that largely ignore Maddie and Chim’s careful registry choices, they’re polite about Maddie’s slightly rickety house that’s definitely a downgrade from Doug’s because property in LA is expensive, they call Chim Howard and don’t seem to know what to do with Albert, and Buck saves himself for last and only realizes what a mistake that is when he gets the force of both of them looking at him at once.

“Evan,” says his mother, pleasant and warm and totally impersonal, and offers her cheek to him to kiss. He obliges, because he doesn’t know what else to do, and because that’s a grandparent thing. It’s easier to manage his expectations if he pretends it’s all a grandparent thing. “How good to see you, it’s been so long. You’re enjoying LA?”

“It’s great out here,” he says, and shakes his dad’s hand. That seems easier than any other options. “How was your trip? You must not have had space in the RV to breathe, with all those presents in there.”

It’s a stupid joke, but they miss the dig behind it even if Maddie doesn’t, and talking about the trip keeps them occupied for the first few minutes while they all get settled in, even if they don’t seem to have taken any interesting routes or stopped at any parks or anything. Buck tries, a few times, to ask if they saw things he saw in his travels, but the second time his mother vaguely says “Oh, I think we did pass that,” he gives up.

When dinner is served, his parents focus in on Maddie and Chim. Mostly they seem to be vetting Chim, which is really funny given they didn’t vet Doug, but Buck can’t really blame them for that. He’s learned his own lessons from the whole Doug thing, and while Chim seems like if he were a horse the whites of his eyes would be showing, Maddie seems to appreciate it, and Buck can keep his thoughts to himself for Maddie’s sake.

They dig in on Chim’s job a little as dinner goes on, about the pay and then about the danger, and his mom’s little sideways glance when that comes up says this isn’t just about Chim.

Chim seems to know it too. “Sure, we risk our lives sometimes, but we’ve got a great team looking out for us. I’d trust B—Evan with my life any day, and you should meet Hen and Eddie and Bobby, they keep a close eye on us.”

If Buck were being uncharitable, he’d comment on the way his dad is too well-behaved to roll his eyes at the barrage of nicknames but gives the impression of rolling his eyes anyway. “You should come by the firehouse one day while you’re here,” he offers instead. “Stop by dispatch while you’re at it, get a tour of the city’s finest first responder locations.”

“That sounds lovely,” says his mother in the tone of someone who is definitely not going to do that. “Though I’m not sure—that was your team when all those awful things happened, wasn’t it, Evan? And your captain—”

“Hen’s the best paramedic in the city,” Chim says, way too loud, while Maddie’s eyes go all wide and shiny and Albert blurts something out about refilling the wine glass he hasn’t even sipped from and gets up from the table. Buck unclenches his fists. He wouldn’t have let them blame the ladder truck on Bobby, but he doesn’t know what he could have said to stop them. “She’s my partner there, we’re really lucky to have her. And Eddie is this one’s partner, they’re best friends, it’s very heartwarming, like those internet videos of baby goats that are best friends with ducklings.”

“Are you accusing me of being a goat or a duck?” Buck teases, cutting Chim of before he can try to defend Bobby either. They’ll need to do it sometime, if his parents want to be more present in their lives, he’s not going to pretend Bobby away, but the first dinner doesn’t seem like the time.

“Well, which one rhymes?” says Chim, smile growing in relief. Buck’s glad for an easier topic of conversation too, and Maddie’s calming down again, her smile responding to Chim’s. “Buck—Evan, sorry, Evan’s already proved he’s a great babysitter, he looks out for Eddie’s kid all the time. And, cool coincidence, they met before Eddie came to LA, when they were both in El Paso.”

Buck smiles just thinking about it. “Yeah, Christopher was on the ward where I volunteered after my donation,” he says, and it’s only after it’s out that he realizes his mistake.

He’s getting used to talking about it a little more, is the problem. Eddie and Shannon both know, and Buck did manage to tell Christopher when a character in a movie he watched had cancer not too long ago, so it comes up sometimes with the Diazes. Not a big deal, just a mention, when Bobby’s had another blood donation or Shannon’s bosses work on a case involving an organ donor. He spends more time with the Diazes than with anybody else, so he forgets that it’s a secret until the word is already out of his mouth.

“Donation?” Maddie asks, and it’s just pleasant confusion until she looks up from her dinner at him. Then her brow knits, because Buck’s never been able to keep his feelings off his face. His oh-shit moment has to be visible for all of them to see. In the kitchen, Albert picks up a phone that wasn’t ringing and says a hearty hello to someone with a very fake name Buck desperately wants to tease him about.

If he lies, Maddie will press. Maybe not now, but she will later, and it’s—it’s a good thing. He did a good thing, and he clings to that sometimes even if he doesn’t know if it worked long-term. He hopes it did. Charlie should be in high school now. She deserves to be in high school now. And here, among these people, she deserves not to be a secret. He puts his fork down. “My bone marrow donation,” he says, and keeps his voice as even as he can.

It’s like he dropped a bomb in the middle of the table. His mother’s fork clatters to the floor, and his father’s grip on his wine glass gets so white-knuckled Buck’s a little afraid the stem will shatter. Maddie presses her hand to her mouth, tears immediately jumping to her eyes, and the way Chim is reaching for her proves that she’s told him about Daniel. “Why yes, Winifred, I do think I should come help you with your blocked sink,” Albert says loudly in the kitchen.

“Evan?” Maddie says, voice tremulous.

Buck doesn’t want to hurt her. He’s taken so much from Maddie, failed her in so many ways, and now he’s going to hurt her. He shouldn’t have told Eddie, should have let his secret stay secret. It wasn’t for anyone else, but now Maddie is going to hurt when he tells her. He looks at Chim, hoping for some kind of right answer to this, but Chim’s just watching him wide-eyed too, because he has to know what Buck was born for, if he knew that those words out of his mouth would shake her up. He tries to keep his voice steady, cheerful, like he’s sharing any story from his traveling years. “I pre-registered for the donation registry when I was fourteen and a kid in my building had leukemia,” he says. Maddie knows that. He doesn’t know if anybody else does. He doesn’t know what battles Maddie fought behind his back. “They called me to El Paso when I was done with the conservation corps, and I stuck around for a while. Volunteered at the hospital, met Christopher down there—he wasn’t my recipient, just a coincidence.”

He feels how too-bright the words are as he says them. He hates that he can’t say them for real, a little more serious, a little more proud.

Chim opens his mouth, and Buck tries not to sag in relief. If anyone can say something that will end this conversation before it gets bad, it’s Chim, so of course before he can speak, Buck’s mother cuts in, voice shaking, wounded like he stabbed her, like she’s the one who had holes drilled in her bones. “Why would you do that? When you knew—”

Her voice breaks, leaves silence behind. Buck’s dad curls an arm around the back of her chair. “What we mean is, you could have consulted us about this.”

It’s always “we” with them, even though they haven’t had time to get on the same page. They’re just there already, somehow. Always on each other’s team, never on his, rarely on Maddie’s. He looks at her, hoping for help, but she’s drawn back a little, hand still over her mouth. She must be putting together the timeline. “It was minimally dangerous,” he says, as calm as he can. “Both to me and to my recipient. I was on the list, that wasn’t a secret. Should I apologize for that?”

“More wine, anyone?” Albert asks from the kitchen, loud and desperate, fake phone call suspended, and Buck hates it, hates that he’s having to play peacekeeper here.

“Are you telling us now because you want thanks?” his dad asks, dismissive. “You knew this would be difficult for us.”

“I didn’t mean to say, it was just relevant,” Buck says, and knows it will make things worse with Maddie but maybe a little better with their parents. That’s okay. He can get Maddie to forgive him sometime, probably. “And I don’t know why it’s difficult. It seems like a good way to honor Dan—”

“Don’t say his name like you know anything about him,” his mother chokes out.

Buck stands up. He’s pretty sure when this conversation reaches its inevitable conclusion he’s not going to be welcome at this table. His mom and Maddie both flinch at the scrape of the chair, and sometimes he hates how big he is, how he blunders through the world. He doesn’t want to be towering over them, but he can’t just sit there either. “Whose fault is that, Mom? Everything I know about him, I know because of Maddie, and you chose that. If she hadn’t told me, would you have ever done it?”

Everyone but Maddie talks all at once, Chim’s soothing “Buck, hey” overlapping his father’s “There was no reason to bring up something that would only hurt your mother and sister” and his mother’s “You have no right to him.”

“Right,” Buck says, and nods a few times. “No right to him because I failed him, right? Because you made me to fix him and I’m fucking defective?”

“Evan,” says Maddie finally, devastated.

“You couldn’t save him, but some stranger, someone who’s nobody to you?” his mother asks. “Are you even sure it worked? Did you just leave and call yourself—”

“I am never going to be good enough,” he shouts. “Can you just tell me that? Can you tell me there’s anything I could have done to make you love me after I failed him?”

His mother is crying, tears streaming down her face. His father is focused on her above anything else, like he always is. Chim and Maddie are both watching him with big, sad eyes, but they aren’t saying anything. Maybe they know there’s nothing they can say. “What did you expect us to do?” his mom asks, voice wet and broken like his. In this one way, like mother, like son.

Buck has never expected to be loved because. He’s aware that he’s kind of a fundamentally annoying person, always too much, inclined to selfishness. But these days, he’s pretty used to being loved despite. His friends might complain about his tactlessness or his fun facts but they do it fondly. Maddie might worry over him, but she still shows up to the hospital for follow-up visits about his leg. Hell, Eddie and Shannon both scoff at him when he’s being stupid but they named him Chris’s guardian. All that love, all of that forgiveness for his failings, but he’s never going to get any of it from his parents. They’re never going to love him, not even despite. “Nothing, I guess,” he says, voice like a dropped vase. “Been a while since I thought of you as my parents. Not too surprising you never thought of me as your kid.”

“Buck,” Maddie whispers. Finally, his name.

He looks at her. Tears all over her face, and it’s his fault. He swallows. No more family dinners. He’s pretty sure he’s ruined any possibility of that. The best thing he can do right now is go, and let her have her parents, and know she’s still going to love him once he’s apologized. Despite, despite, despite. “Maddie, Chim, I’m sorry. I’ll let you guys finish dinner in peace.” He wants to lash out, say a pointed As a family that he knows will hurt, but none of this is their fault. Buck is the one who carelessly exposed his own secrets. “Albert, do you mind taking an Uber back?”

Albert, when Buck turns to him, jumps a little. He still, ridiculously, has his phone pressed up to his ear, but his voice is serious when he says “No, that’s okay.”

“We’ll make up the couch for him,” Chim says quietly, like he knows what Buck needs, and all Buck can do is nod around the room one more time and walk out.

Eddie calls him before he gets home. Buck thinks about ignoring it the way he’s been ignoring his text tone, but that’s not something they do, not after as many shitty things as they’ve survived together. If they can get to the phone, they answer the phone. “Which one of them texted you?” he asks. His voice is still ruined, maybe because he’s been crying pretty much since he got in the Jeep.

Probably wisely, Eddie sidesteps that question. “Buck. Come home.”

“I’m on my way, I promise. Not planning to do anything stupid, and Chim implied that Albert can stay there tonight so I’ll even get some privacy.”

Eddie sighs, gusting into the microphone. “Come on. You know that’s not what I mean. Come home, Evan.”

That hurts. Hydrogen peroxide on a wound, scouring it out, cleaning it up, but stinging all the same. Buck puts on his hazards and pulls over, bends to put his forehead on the top of the steering wheel, where the plastic is cool on his aching head. He gets honked at, and Eddie hisses on the line when he hears it. “I’m not good company tonight. I can’t—Chris can’t see me like this, Eddie. I’m going to be okay.”

“Yes, you are, because I’m going to let Chris stay up past his bedtime for a movie night with you, and we’ll pick some Pixar movie you’ll cry over so you have an excuse, but you don’t need one. If we tell him you’re sad he’ll just try to make you feel better.”

Buck wants it too badly to let himself have it, not like this, so easily. Not when he hurt Maddie so badly. He’s ruined enough tonight. “Did Maddie and Chim tell you what I did?”

“You can tell me. All I know is that dinner with your parents wasn’t great and you need someone.”

Chim, probably. Maddie has probably already filled his phone with texts. She never sends him to other people, wants to fix things for him herself, because that’s what parents do. “I told them by accident about the donation. The bone marrow. Maddie didn’t know, and my parents didn’t—I don’t think they liked that I tried to make up for it. Or I don’t know, maybe they genuinely think there’s something wrong with me and maybe my bone marrow killed Charlie too and I just don’t know about it.”

“There is nothing wrong with you.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“No, I don’t. Your parents don’t get to take their grief out on you for thirty years, come on.”

“They don’t love me,” he blurts, and hates himself for it. “I don’t—it’s not like I really thought they did? If they did they would have fought Maddie when she took me. But it’s one thing to think it and another thing to know it.”

Eddie’s breath is so loud on the line. “Jesus, Buck, did they tell you that?”

“No. It was just obvious.” If he stays on the shoulder much longer, probably someone is going to stop, ask if he’s okay. Some well-meaning patrol officer. He can’t handle that tonight. “Look, I’ve got to go—”

“I’ll leave the porch light on.”

“Eddie.”

“If you don’t come here, Chris and I are coming to your loft. Your pick, but my couch is way more comfortable.”

Maybe it’s selfish, to want to be taken care of. Probably it is. But Eddie’s not just offering, he’s insisting. Buck will just have to make breakfast or something. Be the one to reach out next time Eddie and Shannon argue. “Okay.” He sighs. “Okay, I’ll be twenty minutes or so. Need me to pick up anything on the way?”

“Did you eat?”

“Not a lot,” he admits, already planning his route to the grocery store to pick up something ready-made. “Did you guys? The store has that soup Chris likes, right?”

“Pizza’s on its way,” Eddie says. Stubborn as shit, no room for arguments, a fact of life, knowing that now that Buck’s given in once he doesn’t have much fight left in him.

Buck tilts his head back, blinks a few times to clear his eyes. He’s got to be safe. Can’t let Eddie and Chris bear the guilt of Buck dying on the road on his way to them. “Then I’ll be there in twenty.”

“Drive safe,” says Eddie, and hangs up.

Before he puts the car back on the road, Buck goes to his texts. Ignores the ten new ones he has from Maddie, the three from Chim, the ones Eddie must have sent before calling, navigates to his thread with Albert instead. Go back to the loft if you want, he texts, knowing Albert will share the news to make Maddie worry less, knowing he owes Albert now for trying so hard tonight and ending up in the middle of the Buckley family drama anyway. I’m at Eddie’s tonight.

When he gets to Eddie’s, twenty-five minutes later, Albert has just responded with Oh thank god. Buck doesn’t reply, just puts his phone down on the passenger seat. Eddie’s waiting for him on the porch, arms crossed over his chest, shifting his weight from foot to foot until he relaxes all at once when Buck finally opens the door.

“I’m sorry about this,” he says when he gets to the porch.

“Just come inside, Buck.” Eddie’s voice is gentle, like it usually only is with kids, and he says Buck’s name like he wants to say something else. Buck doesn’t know what to do with that, so he comes inside, crouches automatically to catch Chris’s hug.

Maybe he should feel babied, embarrassed, at the way they treat him for the rest of the night. Chris, who over the past few months has started to get too cool for long hugs, practically crawls into Buck’s lap and rubs his chest like he thinks Buck is sick when Buck cries over Finding Nemo for at least the fifteenth time. Eddie does pretty much everything short of making airplane noises to get him to eat a few slices of pizza and when Chris goes to bed, Eddie keeps up quiet commentary on some sports game or other while Buck slumps further and further into his side.

There were a lot of years where Buck didn’t have a home. After he left the apartment in Harrisburg, he had nowhere, but he’s got one now. It’s not his loft. It’s not even Maddie’s house, even if Maddie will always be his family. Home is the couch at Eddie and Christopher’s place, where he wakes up tucked in with the blankets that aren’t really spares when they were bought specifically for him, with one of the stuffed animals he bought Chris at the zoo once tucked under his arm.

It’s early. He makes pancakes and listens to the house wake up around him, until he’s got two Diaz boys at the kitchen table, smiling and sleepy and treating him like he’s part of all of it.

“I’m doing the dishes,” Eddie insists after breakfast, hip-checking him away from the sink.

Buck winces and thinks of the phone he abandoned on the front seat of his Jeep. “Oh, yeah, I should go.”

Eddie twists to get a hand on him, landing on his shoulder, thumb positioned so he can feel the way Buck’s pulse jumps. “You know that’s not what I mean. Chris has a book he wants to finish. Pick up a book and just—stay, okay?”

Buck loves him, loves them, too much. Loves them a way that’s going to get him hurt someday, he realizes, making unavoidable eye contact with Eddie. “I can’t stay forever.”

“You’ve got to go to work eventually, yeah,” says Eddie, like he thinks that’s the only reason Buck would ever need to leave. “But for right now, sit down. Read a book.”

“I should at least get my phone out of the car.”

“I’ll get it,” says Eddie, and frowns at him. “Later, though. I’ll text Maddie after I’m done with the dishes so she knows you’re safe, and anybody else can wait.”

Buck is reeling, but Buck is safe. Even if Eddie doesn’t love him like Buck loves him, Eddie’s got him. He ducks his head to break contact, and ducks out of Eddie’s comforting grip, and goes to read on the couch, Christopher’s head on his lap, retaining absolutely nothing of the book.

Buck isn’t angry at Maddie. He texts her that, when she asks, and doesn’t respond to anything else, to her asking to see him, to her demanding proof of life he knows she’s getting from Eddie. He just doesn’t know what to say to her, doesn’t know how to apologize, how to tell her he’s not sure he can ever look Margaret and Phillip Buckley in the eye again, at least not while pretending they’re his parents.

His next shift makes him reach out. Chimney is somehow both hovering too sympathetically and too pushy about asking him to reach out to Maddie, and Eddie gets into it with Chim a few times, not quite out of his earshot, and the whole shift feels awful and awkward, battle lines drawn, and Buck doesn’t want that. If his parents aren’t his family, he doesn’t want to ruin the one he’s got, so when he gets off shift, he texts Maddie and tells her he wants to see her after he’s done crashing.

She takes him at his word. When he wakes up, back at the loft at his own insistence even though Eddie tried to convince him otherwise, she’s sitting at the kitchen island, hands curved around a mug of tea.

“I wish I’d known,” she says when he comes down and starts making coffee. Just because she’s mostly off caffeine doesn’t mean he can be, not for this conversation. “You always told me all your big news, and I knew—I knew you were quiet about Texas, but I thought … I don’t know what I thought. That you were in love with Shannon, or you didn’t want to talk about the place you got called away from because of me.”

“I almost told you,” he says. “I’m sorry I didn’t. I don’t know—I don’t know if it’s a situation where an explanation helps? It all keeps sounding like excuses when I say it.”

“I want to know.”

Buck turns and leans against the counter now that the drip is going. “I went to Texas, and I—yeah, it was big news. I told you the big stuff, if maybe not the small stuff that would worry you, it’s honestly a miracle I never got lice or anything from the places I stayed, but the point is, I typed the text out, about what I was doing, or I thought about typing it. And then I thought, what if this is what makes her answer me? Or worse, what if it doesn’t?”

“God, Evan, I’m—”

“Don’t apologize, that’s not … it’s not your fault. I just, I can’t even explain it, really? I just knew I couldn’t handle it if you didn’t respond to me and I couldn’t handle it if you did either. So I didn’t take the chance.”

Maddie sips her tea. “Can I tell you a story?”

“Mads—”

“We can—there’s a lot to talk about. But I need to tell you this. It’s about why I took you.” That shuts him up, and Maddie gives him a faint smile when she sees it. “I came home that Christmas planning to move in with Doug. It was all ready, we were going to commit, I was—I was probably going to move to Boston with him that next year.”

Buck sucks in a sharp breath. It’s hard to imagine her with him for all those extra years. Would she have killed him sooner? Would he have killed her first? “But?”

“I don’t—I really hope you don’t remember this, but I guess I hadn’t noticed it was a pattern until I saw it with fresh eyes.” She blinks a few times, takes a shaky breath. “I think it was because of Daniel. Whenever you got hurt, or sick, they’d make such a fuss over you. It was … it was the only time they ever really looked at you. And that was bad, but I maybe could have lived with that, but a few times, you. I don’t know if you just weren’t being careful, or if you were doing it on purpose, but you’d connected it. You knew if you got hurt you’d have parents for a little while.”

Buck stumbles into a chair. He can’t breathe, but he can remember it. His body remembers it. Cause, effect. Pain before gentleness, and no gentleness without pain. “I don’t know,” he says, and it comes out as a whisper. “I don’t know if I was doing it on purpose. I’m sorry.”

“Evan, hey, no. I’m glad you don’t remember. It means I did the right thing.” She puts down her mug, reaches to put her hand on his arm. “But I was thinking, after the other night, about—I tried to convince Doug we could parent you together.” She laughs, a short unhappy bark of it. “Really glad that didn’t work out now. But he asked why our parents couldn’t do it, and I didn’t say it, but the first thing I thought of to say was that they couldn’t love you.”

Somehow, the first thing he feels is relief. It’s true. It’s been true. Maddie saw it too, and Maddie did something about it. The anger follows, and the sadness, but he tries to cling to the relief. He can save the rest for later. Maddie’s already been in his blast radius once this week. “Thank you,” he manages. “For seeing it.”

“I wish I’d remembered.” She squeezes his arm gently. “I’m not—I don’t know if I can cut them off completely, but I’m not going to make you see them, okay? Not if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t want to be the one who makes you choose.”

Maddie’s mouth quirks. “That’s—I guess I said it once, and I don’t even remember saying it, it was in that same conversation, but it bothered Doug so much. He remembered it a decade later, and he kept saying it whenever I talked about you. ‘Every time it’s him.’ He was obsessed with it, but it’s true. There’s only one person in this world where it would be a hard choice between the two of you, and she’s not born yet.”

“Chim would be sad if he heard that.”

“He comes close,” she admits. “Way closer than Doug ever did. Ask me again in ten years, maybe. But maybe not. You’re always going to be my brother.”

“And your kid.”

“And my kid.” She lets his arm go and nods behind him. “Coffee’s ready.” And then, when his back is to her, “What do you want me to do about them?”

Selfishly, he wants it to not be his choice, but he’s not going to ask that of her. “I can go to your kid’s birthday parties and make polite conversation with them, if you want them at her parties. I think I’ve just proved that dinner parties aren’t in the cards. I just—can we maybe treat this like they’re distant relatives? Stuffy grandparents. Second cousins. Something like that.”

“I wish they were better.” She’s silent for long enough that he pours his coffee, doctors it up, and comes back to her. “I want—I wasn’t sure if I should tell you this. It’s just going to hurt. But in case it comes up, they brought a memory box, I guess you’d call it. Old pictures, baby clothes, things like that. Just for me. They didn’t—”

Buck breathes through it. “They didn’t make me one.”

“Evan—”

He shakes his head. He can’t be Evan for this. Has to have the distance of Buck, who’s got more family than his older sister. “It’s okay. If I’d known they had one for you, I wouldn’t have assumed they would have one for me. Even if things were better with us, their son was sick. They didn’t have time to put aside mementos. I’ve got the memories I need.”

“I don’t have any baby memories of yours, but I’ve got your postcards. A few other things Doug didn’t manage to throw out, report cards and essays. If you want them.” She touches his arm again. “There was—in the middle of all of it, there was a picture of Daniel. I didn’t bring it, I didn’t know if you’d want to see, but I’d never had one before.”

Daniel has been haunting him his whole life, even before Buck knew he existed. On his better days, Buck feels like he owes him, for the way his blood and bone marrow couldn’t save him, for the fact that he exists at all. On his worse days, he thinks maybe they’ve come up even, that Daniel’s ghost dogging his steps balances that out. “I want to see. And either way I’m glad you’ve got it.” He takes a breath. “I know you want them, Mads, and that’s cool, you should get to have parents, but they were shitty to you too, you know? I think it’s kind of worse that you did remember him but they never let you talk about him anyway.”

“I know.” She sips her tea. “I know. I don’t know exactly what I want from them, so I’m going to keep trying until I do. I just hope they try too.”

He’s never known them to try, but maybe they did before Buck was born. Maybe they will again. For Maddie’s sake, he hopes so.

When Buck sees his parents outside of the firehouse before his next shift, Chim shuffling next to them looking desperately uncomfortable, for a second he’s sure it’s an anxiety dream, and not even the creative kind. It’s about as stereotypical as forgetting to study for a test or showing up naked somewhere, the parents-where-they-shouldn’t-be thing.

Eddie, following him in from the parking lot, jogs to catch up and then to overtake him, putting himself in the way so Buck has to stop a little shorter of them than he means to. That’s what makes it feel real. Anxiety dreams don’t usually involve Eddie standing between him and the problem.

“Hi,” says Buck, and it doesn’t feel like enough, but he doesn’t know what to call them. “Mom and Dad” feels like a lie, and “Margaret and Phillip” seems somehow both too formal and disrespectful at the same time.

“They wanted to say hi while they’re still in town,” says Chim, “and I figured I’d escort them over, give them the dime tour before our shift starts and we have to focus on work.”

Buck’s shoulders relax. Eddie’s do too. Chim isn’t here to speak for his parents, or keep the peace, or anything like that. He’s here to give them a deadline. Buck owes him an apology for the horrible awkward dinner, but in the meantime, he’s still on Buck’s side. “Yeah, beautiful day, people tend to make stupid choices,” he says, mostly for something to say.

His dad frowns at Eddie, and then at Chim, even leaves a polite pause, but neither of them goes anywhere. “Evan, we thought we could speak to you quickly. Dinner didn’t go as any of us planned the other night.”

Buck sighs, and shoves gently at Eddie’s shoulder until he turns around. “Meet you inside, okay? Tell Bobby where I’m at.” He looks at Chim. “And you get ready to wow them with that tour, since you’re already changed.”

They both scowl, and Eddie looks like he might object, but after a few fraught seconds, they listen to him, and then it’s just Buck and his parents, standing outside the firehouse door, waiting to see who owes the apology.

It’s probably not Buck. He gives it anyway, mostly because he wants to finish this up as soon as he can, but he thinks of Maddie, who loves him, and he tries to apologize for what he actually regrets. “I shouldn’t have shouted the other night. I’m sorry about that, usually I don’t really yell.”

“Emotions were running high,” says his father, which is about as much of a peace offering as he’s ever going to get. “It was a sensitive subject, and we were all surprised.”

He’s probably supposed to apologize for bringing it up. He shoves his hands in his pockets and does his best to avoid doing that. “Yeah, I didn’t meant to bring that up, and definitely not that way.”

His mom and Maddie don’t look that much alike, except for the way their eyes get when they’re feeling a lot, the way their mouths twist. His mom steps forward, lifts her hand like she’s thinking about touching him and then drops it again. “You were our miracle baby, Evan. You were meant to save people. It makes sense that if you couldn’t do it for us, you wanted to try with someone else.”

The worst thing is that he thinks she means it well. She means it as absolution, or forgiveness, or something. It’s maybe the most maternal she’s ever been with him, and she’s smiling like she’s proud of herself for saying it, like it’s taken a lot of work to make herself be that okay with him donating his bone marrow to someone besides his dead brother. Buck takes a shaky breath and hopes it just seems like he’s overwhelmed, like he’s not being choked by grief and rage and thirty years of nothing that just led them here. “Thank you,” he says, and he hears it like he’s saying it from underwater. “It means a lot to hear you say that.”

His mother pats his arm. His father smiles faintly in a way that doesn’t touch his eyes. Buck doesn’t scream. He can be proud of himself for that. He manages to say the right words in the right combination to get them inside, introduces them to Bobby, hands them off to Chim and ducks away from Chim’s guilty, searching look. He goes to the locker room to change.

“Jesus, Buck,” says Eddie, angry like Buck almost never sees him. “I should have stayed. What did they say to you?”

“Doesn’t matter,” says Buck, underwater again. Eddie tries to grab him, tries to maneuver him into place, probably to say something serious and devastating like he’s so good at doing when Buck needs it most. He can’t hear it right now. His parents are in the firehouse, and he can’t lose his shit. “Just … later, okay? We’re going to have a normal shift. That’s all I need right now.”

“Bullshit.”

“Please.”

Eddie is stubborn. He’s especially stubborn with Buck, usually, doesn’t let him get away with shit, but today, he frowns, but he lets it go. “You’re following me home at the end of shift, though.”

“At this point I should be paying you rent,” he says, and tries out a smile he knows doesn’t work just in time for Chim’s tour to make its way upstairs, giving him the time to actually change.

They don’t stay long. Buck might feel warmed, any other day, about the way his friends maneuver them out the door, not exactly impolite but definitely not warm. The way Hen oh-so-casually wraps him up in a tight hug just a minute after his mother gives him an awkward one, maybe the first one she’s given him since high school graduation. The way Chim apologizes and the way Bobby makes him help with lunch and the way Eddie sticks to him like glue on every call.

Every call until an all-hands-on-deck fire at a hand sanitizer factory. It’s a nightmare, the smell of smoke and chemicals on the air, and Bobby isn’t IC, and Buck doesn’t want to be coddled anyway. He wants to do what he knows best. What he’s meant for, apparently. So he follows Hen’s lead, and then he breaks off, and he finds Saleh, the last staff member onsite, terrified and pinned and waiting to die, and he thinks of his mother’s voice saying “you couldn’t do it for us,” and he knows he’s not leaving.

He remembers it in flashes, later. Handing his mask over, the smoke in his lungs, the flames getting closer and closer. And then his friends, his team, not pulling him away but helping him, until he stumbles out of the factory and coughs so much Bobby has to drive him to the hospital for scans because all the ambulances are taken.

“Shift’s over for you,” says Bobby when Buck complains about having to wait in the ER. “I need to go back, but someone will pick you up when your scans are done.”

“As long as it’s not my parents,” Buck tries to joke, and doesn’t regret it when it means Bobby hugs him, holds on tight for a minute, and tells him to be safe a little too serious and choked up when he lets him go.

Buck expects a Diaz when the hospital discharges him with smoke detox instructions he probably has memorized at this point sometime around five in the morning, but he doesn’t expect the Diaz he gets.

“Yeah, Eddie’s driving home from shift, dipshit,” Shannon tells him when he blinks at her, stupid with exhaustion, as she arrives at the cubicle where the nurses have been stopping by to tell him to quit fidgeting every fifteen minutes. “He’s good?”

“He’s good,” says the nurse who escorted her over. “Discharge paperwork all taken care of, we were just waiting for his ride.” And then, face softening at the way Shannon’s holding tight onto the cubicle wall, “Your boyfriend’s going to be just fine.”

Shannon doesn’t bother saying anything about that, and neither does Buck. They’ve had people assume before. Shannon just makes polite conversation and asks about his care in a tight, tense voice while Buck sags more with every minute, ready to drop off as soon as he gets to her car, where she opens her passenger door and then stares pointedly at him until he gets in and buckles up.

“You’re going to make a great lawyer,” he mumbles, and shoves a manila folder that’s digging into his hip out of the way.

“Damn straight I am,” she says, and then it’s silent for a minute while she gets in and gets them out of the parking lot and out into the early morning LA traffic. Out of Cedars, it’s a right turn to Eddie’s place, a left turn to Buck’s. Shannon turns right. Buck, looking at her growing frown, doesn’t try to redirect her. He just waits her out until she finally speaks again. “I can’t believe I’ve had to have this conversation with both of you now.”

“We’re not really having a conversation yet,” Buck points out.

“You know the one I mean. The one where I tell you you can’t risk your life stupidly because you’ve got a kid to come home to.”

His lungs already hurt. What’s one more pang? “Shan, that’s not fair, he’s not—I love Chris. But I’m backup. He’s not mine.”

“Come on, Buck. We both know that’s bullshit.” She sounds almost amused, but she doesn’t look that way. She doesn’t look at him. “I really—sometimes I wish I didn’t like you so much. It would be way easier if I could resent you.”

Buck swallows. “Because I was your friend first but Eddie and I are closer?”

“No, that—I mean, your taste is questionable, but I’ve got other friends.” She drums her fingers on the steering wheel. Buck tries not to nod off. This seems important. “It’s Christopher. And Christopher and Eddie, I guess, and how you three are a family the way I never managed with them. How easy you find it, being with them. You don’t second-guess it, you don’t get scared.”

That wakes him up enough to sit up bolt upright. “Hey, no. I’m scared all the time. They terrify me. Chris terrifies me.”

“Not like he does me,” says Shannon. “I wasn’t—I love him more than life, but I don’t think I’ll ever be the kind of mom he deserves. If I’m being honest, I don’t think I want to be the kind of mom he deserves—I’d try, for him, like I did until Eddie came home, but it never felt like me. But it’s you. You’re not a backup. You’re a parent. At the very least a stepparent. And that means you’ve got a responsibility to come home.”

“It’s not like I did it on purpose.”

“Come on, Buck. I know what it’s like to run from something you can’t face. But I’m going to be selfish here: you run all you want from whatever’s going on with your parents, you can run from your feelings, but you can’t run from my son. You and Eddie, you two need to live and come home to him.”

In another world, Buck might be in love with Shannon, he thinks. In a lot of ways, it would be easier than being in love with Eddie. Here, he just watches her in the driver’s seat, thinks about fear and law school and Sacramento and how Maddie casually mentioned a few months back that Shannon asked her how she’d gone back to her maiden name. “He loves you,” he says. Not an excuse, a truth. “He’s always going to. You’re his mom.”

“I know. This isn’t me giving up on him. I’m going to have him up to Sacramento. A few weeks in the summers, any holiday the 118 is working. I’m not going to disappear on him again. This is just me telling you that you’re part of his home base, since you don’t seem to have figured it out yet. He loves you too, Buck.”

Buck tips his head back, mind swirling, eyes stinging. “Are you going to come back?”

“Yes,” she says, immediate and sure. “I’ve figured out a path where I think I can take the bar exam before he graduates high school. As soon as I’m qualified, I’m back. Or I guess if he decides to leave California for school, I can take another bar exam.”

Buck’s not a planner. He just takes a few things he knows he wants and walks towards them. It’s comforting, being let in on Shannon’s solid idea of the future, one that’s happy for her, one where she’s there for Chris, even if the thought of Christopher maybe leaving the state someday is bittersweet at best. Buck’s going to have to learn to let go, and he’s only just now learning how to hold on. “I’m really glad I volunteered on that ward,” he says quietly. “I’m glad I know all three of you.”

“Me too,” she says, smile unusually warm, and then she plucks the manila folder out from under his thigh and tosses it on his lap. “Speaking of the hospital in El Paso, that’s for you. Eddie told me you don’t know what ever happened with your bone marrow recipient, and I do a lot of research at work. It wasn’t too hard to find her. There’s not a lot, she’s still a minor, but whenever you want that information, it’s yours to keep.”

He wants to burn the folder. He wants to open it immediately. He has to swallow the lump in his throat. “Shannon.”

“Just don’t stalk her with it, I will get in so much trouble with my bosses.” She takes a hand off the wheel, pats his leg a few times. “Take a nap, even if it’s only a few minutes. You’re going to get yelled at again when you get home.”

Home, again. Eddie and Shannon both say it like it’s not in question, like it’s something he should know. He does, but he’s not sure why they do.

The thought of Eddie’s house is enough to let him loll his head into the window and fall asleep for the few minutes it’s going to take to get there. Somewhere faintly in the background, he hears Shannon singing badly along with the radio.

Eddie’s waiting on the porch again when Shannon pulls in and wakes him up, but he comes down this time, all but shovels Buck out of the passenger seat of Shannon’s sensible sedan, checking him unsubtly for holes the whole time. Chris comes out too, and hugs Buck hard around the waist before he turns to Shannon, who’s apparently taking him for the day so Buck can sleep, that arrangement made sometime behind the scenes.

It’s good, Buck thinks dimly, that he doesn’t cling on every time he sees her, that he trusts her to come back now, that her being around sometimes is just part of his routine. It’s good to see Shannon laughing with him while he does an impression of Carla getting scared by a spider on her wall over Zoom, not scared or resigned.

“Inside,” Eddie says, and Buck only barely remembers to grab the folder before Eddie shepherds him inside and into the kitchen, where he gets orange juice and slightly burnt eggs fed to him while Eddie talks about the rest of the shift, not that they could do much with it.

After breakfast, he heads for the couch, only to get herded right into Eddie’s bedroom, where he manages to wake himself up enough to stop being herded and scowl. “You just got off a shift too, Eddie, come on. One bad day doesn’t mean I’m incapable of taking the couch. I’m going to need one shift off for smoke inhalation, that’s it.”

“We’ve shared before,” says Eddie, which is fair and reasonable except that Buck hadn’t figured it out the last time they shared a bed and now sharing a bed without touching Eddie kind of sounds like torture. He’s about to come up with something, some excuse about snoring or coughing or his own comfort, when Eddie comes around him to look at him better. “Look, if you really don’t want to, say no. But both times I let you out of my sight yesterday, something shitty happened to you. Can you just stay?”

Buck would feel like a real asshole saying no to that, especially when he wants to say yes, so he nods and tries to pretend like it’s normal, letting Eddie hand him a change of clothes, washing off with a washcloth in the bathroom when he sees how bad a job he did with the wet wipes at the hospital, climbing into bed to the sound of Eddie drawing the blackout curtains shut for a day’s sleep.

Maybe he should say something, try to cut the tension or try to head Eddie off at the pass with whatever it is he needs to say, but it doesn’t end up mattering. He’s asleep almost as soon as his head hits the pillow.

When he wakes up, Buck comes up gasping, though he can’t remember why, what he was dreaming, if it was smoke or water or something else in his lungs. A weight lands on his chest, and it should make it worse, should spark up the panic until he’s coughing out the last of the smoke, but it calms him down instead. Eddie’s hand, he thinks, and turns his head until he can see for sure.

Eddie is sitting up against the headboard, eyes wide, hand outstretched, phone dropped in his lap. “Whoa, hey, you’re okay.”

Buck groans and pushes himself up on his elbows, which presses Eddie’s hand farther into his sternum. Eddie doesn’t seem inclined to move it. “What time is it?”

“It’s been five hours. You can go back to sleep. Nightmare?”

“Don’t remember, but probably.” He frowns at Eddie. “You didn’t have to stay. And you could be sleeping more too.”

Eddie shrugs. “I want to be able to sleep tonight so I can pick Chris up in the morning. Plus I didn’t inhale a shitton of smoke last night.”

“He’s off overnight? And I’m good, Eddie, I swear. I need to sleep tonight too.”

“Shannon thought we could use a little time, and she hadn’t had him in a bit. She’s fine. She promised.”

Buck sits the rest of the way up, and dislodges Eddie’s hand in the process. It hovers there for a second, and then Eddie withdraws, shifts until he’s mostly facing Buck. “I’m sorry you’re missing out on a night with him.”

“He deserves more time with her before she leaves.” Eddie meets his eyes, tired and so sincere it hurts a little. “Hey. You scared me.”

That’s kind of worse than yelling, on reflection. Buck winces and pulls a pillow into his lap like that’s going to protect him from Eddie’s disappointment. “I didn’t want to give up on him.”

“I know that. You’re Buck. You want everyone to come out okay. Just … please take someone with you next time? If not me, Hen or Chim. Someone.”

“It’s not like I wanted to be on my own in there. I just had to … I couldn’t leave someone in there.”

Eddie watches him for a long minute. Buck can’t hold the eye contact, just stares down at Eddie’s pillowcase, marked with some soot he hasn’t managed to get out of his hair yet. “Are you going to tell me what they said to you?” Eddie finally says.

He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to tell anyone, like saying it makes it true somehow. “They thought they were being nice.”

“Cool, seems like they weren’t, though.” And then, when Buck tries to think of how to say it in a way that makes it seem like the exact wording isn’t seared into him like a brand and is silent for a little too long, “The longer this takes, the worse I think it is and the more inclined I am to call Maddie and tell her to never let her kid near them. I’m sure not planning to let Christopher onto the same city block.”

“Come on, don’t punish Maddie’s kid like that, she deserves to have Chris at her birthday parties,” says Buck, and hates how raspy his voice comes out. “Mom told me she can see why I save other people even though I couldn’t save Daniel, which was a great way to feel like I failed them and like I’m doing this job for all the wrong reasons at the same time.”

Eddie closes his eyes and takes a breath through his nose and fuck, Buck is far gone, because he thinks of Chris and how he does just that when he starts getting wound up about things sometimes, something he got from Eddie, something Eddie made sure he knows how to do, the same way Eddie told Chris “You’re gonna be okay, kid” during a bout of the stomach flu and Buck’s whole body jolted at the words. Shannon told Buck he’s part of Christopher’s home base, but more than that, Eddie and Christopher are his.

“Wanting to save people is a good thing, Buck,” Eddie finally says, and when he opens his eyes he grabs Buck’s hand, which is definitely not something they usually do. “Do I wish you were safer doing it? Yeah. But you don’t do it because you’ve got some kind of destiny. It’s because you decided to do it. And Daniel—I wish, for you and Maddie, that he hadn’t died. But you aren’t a failure. And if he hadn’t been sick, you wouldn’t be here, and I’m glad you are. You hear me?”

Maybe waking up searching for air wasn’t because of a dream. Maybe it was because he knew, somehow, that he would need some extra, in a few minutes. Buck can’t take his eyes off Eddie’s hand wrapped around his, warm and strong. “Loud and clear,” he says, and winces at how frayed he sounds, what a mess his voice is. He’s not even sure he can blame the smoke. “I—I already told Maddie I don’t think they can be my parents anymore. I’m trying to go for the grandparents who send you money at Christmas thing. She wants to try but she’s cool with me not trying.”

“Good.” Eddie sighs. “Look, I know how this sounds, but I don’t think you should be alone with them if two minutes unsupervised makes things this bad. Can you not send me away next time?”

“You don’t have to put up with them.”

“Neither do you. But if you’re going to, I’m going to.” Eddie squeezes his hand. “Buck.”

Buck looks up. He doesn’t know how to look at Eddie without giving everything away, but if Eddie wants him to look, he’s going to do it anyway. Eddie is looking back, of course, and Buck knows how shitty things have been for him, how many bad nights he’s had, but somehow he’s the steadiest thing in the world anyway. “I don’t know what we’re doing here, Eddie.”

“I’m reminding you that I’ve got your back.”

Now that Buck knows, now that he’s kind of wondering how stupid he’s been not to see the direction he’s been going since the day Eddie walked back into his life, it sort of feels like everything he and Eddie say to each other is a love declaration of some kind. Well, he knows that it is from his side. It’s just that it feels that way from Eddie’s, too, and that’s making his lungs tighten in ways that have nothing to do with smoke inhalation or even nightmares.

“Buck?”

Eddie’s looking at him, open and concerned and eyes brown like the kind of dirt road Buck wants to spend his life getting lost on, and the thing is—the thing is, Buck’s only been in love once before this, and Abby didn’t love him back, so he doesn’t know what it feels like to be looked at by someone who’s in love with him, but he thinks maybe it should feel something like this. “I’m good,” he says, and has no idea if it’s true. “I’ve got yours too.”

Eddie furrows his brow. He sways forward a little, more into Buck’s space, hand flexing, bringing them closer in a thousand tiny ways like he has been for two years now. Closer, but never quite there. “Are you okay?”

Neither of us is brave enough to do it, Buck thinks, sudden and clear, and then right on the heels of that, Fuck that, we’re firefighters, and he leans forward and kisses Eddie.

There’s a split second of shock, neither of them quite sure what to do, and then Eddie makes a sound high in the back of his throat and uses his grip on Buck’s hand to pull him in, wrapping his arm around Eddie’s waist so firmly his body has to follow, until he’s halfway in Eddie’s lap and closer every second, pressing as much of their bodies together as he can manage while Eddie opens his mouth into the kiss, lets Buck in.

Buck feels like he can breathe for the first time since his parents landed in LA, but like he doesn’t need to. It doesn’t matter if there’s smoke in his lungs. Eddie’s sharing his oxygen.

Eddie is the one who pulls away, and Buck makes an embarrassing longing noise, but Eddie only goes far enough to kiss his jaw, his cheek, tilts Buck’s head to press his lips hard to Buck’s birthmark, less a kiss than something firmer, like he’s trying to leave something behind. Buck turns his head into Eddie’s neck and kisses there in return, a slow series of kisses with Eddie’s pulse like a drum under his lips.

“I love you,” says Buck, and it’s way too soon, he knows it is, but he also knows that if he’s going to scare Eddie off, it’s probably better to do it now, when they have a prayer of pretending this was a one-off moment, something they can never repeat.

Eddie’s pulse beats against Buck’s mouth, and then Eddie tilts his chin up for another kiss, or a chain of them, gentle and sweet except for the occasional nip to Buck’s lower lip. When Eddie speaks, it’s almost superfluous. “I love you,” he says, and then, after another kiss, “We’re so lucky to have you, Buck.”

“I’m luckier.” He tries to sound teasing, but he means it too much, and it chokes up in his throat, gets him one of Eddie’s serious and slightly annoyed looks from up close, and Buck wants to do any number of stupid things, like kiss his scowling eyebrows or smooth out the furrows in his forehead by hand. “I get it, I get it,” he says instead. “We’re going to have that fight a lot, I bet. Which one of us is luckier.”

“Me,” insists Eddie, and slides his hand around the back of Buck’s head to pull him in for another kiss, and another after that, until Buck is dizzier than smoke inhalation could ever make him.

Me, me, me, he thinks over and over again, and kisses Eddie every time.

Buck wakes in the night and can’t get back to sleep, a side effect of their work schedule that’s one of the few downsides to the job. Eddie is slung across him, a heavy, comforting weight, and Buck lives in it for a few minutes, lets himself feel it, all the joy he couldn’t have imagined a day ago.

When he’s awake, though, he tends to be restless in bed, to toss and turn. He knows it woke Eddie up more than once when they quarantined together, and that’s the last thing he wants now, so he presses a kiss to Eddie’s temple, a new movement that already feels so familiar it makes him ache, and he extricates himself as gently as he can to go to the kitchen for a drink of water.

Shannon’s folder is sitting on the table, innocuous, only a few sheets of paper inside, and Buck stares at it for a long time before he pulls it over and flips it open.

The first sheet of paper is a printout from a small paper in Dallas from last year, some feel-good story about a softball team going to states for the first time in twenty years. There, in the picture, is a girl it takes him a minute to recognize, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, standing in the outfield looking like she’s ready for anything. She’s not the primary subject of the photo, that’s the pitcher, but she’s identified as “Freshman Charlene ‘Charlie’ Castillo,” and Buck is stupidly proud of her, making varsity her freshman year.

The next two pages are photocopies from what appears to be some kind of corporate newsletter for a Texas bank, welcoming Paula Castillo as an executive for a new branch of the bank in Dallas and introducing her in a kind of hokey way with a biography and some pictures of her with her family. There she is, and her husband Adam, both of them so much lighter than when Buck met them and handed off his letter. He doesn’t know if they ever gave it to Charlie, when he stopped coming to the hospital.

There are pictures of Charlie too, school pictures showing off braces and a huge smile, another of her in her softball uniform. Paula says she’s enjoying high school, that she’s already planning on getting a softball scholarship, and that she wants to be a doctor someday or—or maybe a firefighter, and Buck doesn’t know what to do with that, how it feels like a legacy even though he’s pretty sure he never mentioned the fire academy around her.

One picture stops him short. Charlie, maybe twelve or thirteen, only a couple years older than when he knew her, with a wide smile on her face and a baby cradled in her arms. Then, on the next photocopied sheet, a family portrait that must have been taken for the article: Paula and Adam, arms around each other, Adam holding a dog’s leash. Charlie, probably around the same time the softball picture was taken, maybe fifteen, and a little girl, two or three, clinging to Charlie’s leg. The caption says “Paula, her husband Adam, and her two daughters Charlene (Charlie, left) and Evelyn (Evie, right).”

For a second, it’s a stab of terrible fear. His donation didn’t work, and they went down the same road his parents did, and she seems okay, this unknown child he suddenly cares about so much, she seems loved, but there’s always the danger. But the timing doesn’t work out. Charlie looks so healthy, she’s playing sports. They probably wouldn’t let her do that, if she’d been sick recently enough for her little sister to help her.

And—Evie. It’s probably not for him. Maybe there’s an Aunt Evelyn somewhere, or they just like the name, but maybe, maybe, his donation helped, and he left, and when their family grew, they made him part of it in some small way.

The last piece of paper in the folder is a small one, and it just has Adam’s Instagram handle on it, and Shannon’s crisp handwriting next to it saying Don’t abuse this privilege. Buck doesn’t look. Maybe another night, when he’s less raw. Maybe never, so he can imagine everything going perfectly for them all forever.

Eddie finds him there some unknowable stretch of time later, while Buck is staring at the family picture again, looking for answers, or maybe just looking at the way Charlie and Evie are both smiling and mugging for the camera. “I woke up and you weren’t there,” Eddie says, somewhere between accusation and worry. “What’s this?”

“Shannon found Charlie.” He shows Eddie the picture. “I think she’s okay. She’s got a baby sister.”

Eddie drops a kiss on Buck’s hair like Buck has seen him do for Christopher a thousand times. “I want to hear all about it, but in the morning, okay? We can tell Chris too. He asked about her, after you told him. He’ll want to know. But for now come to bed. Get some rest. I still promised Bobby I’d yell at you for being a dumbass so he doesn’t have to and we should do that in the morning.”

Me, I’m the lucky one, Buck thinks again, and looks at the picture one more time before he stands up. There’s Evie, clinging to her sister like Buck always clung to his, but there’s Paula’s hand on Charlie’s shoulder, there’s another picture of Evie on her father’s lap as part of the article. A better story than his, thanks in part to him. “I’m coming,” he says, and takes Eddie’s offered hand to go back to the bedroom.

A week after Buck’s parents get back in their RV and start driving east, Maddie and Chim host another family dinner. This time, in what neither of them calls an apology but definitely is one, it’s Buck’s family. Albert is there, because he’s Chim’s family and Chim is Maddie’s family, and so are all three Diazes.

It’s a good night, exactly what he needs. Christopher dominates the conversation and preens under all the adult attention. Shannon seems to feel awkward, out of place, but she smiles most of the night, and Albert starts stammering around her in a way Buck might try to rescue one of them from, knowing how soon Shannon is leaving, if it didn’t make him think of himself with Abby, how much better he was when he tried to live up to her. Shannon’s a great person to try to live up to.

Chim and Eddie make Buckley jokes, even though Chim complains that Eddie takes all the fun out of it by smiling besottedly at Buck after every one. Eddie and Shannon giggle over high school memories together, getting along easier than Buck has ever seen, like they’ve finally got a rhythm. Like maybe Eddie and Buck having each other has helped them find that rhythm.

Maddie smiles the whole dinner, rests her arm on her belly and looks down sometimes like she wants the baby the share her happiness, to be part of the family in-jokes.

Buck gets up with her at the end of the night, follows her to the kitchen to help with the dishes. Eddie and Chim both look up automatically when they stand, but Maddie shakes her head at Chim and Buck presses down on Eddie’s shoulder, encourages him to stay and listen to Christopher tell a story about a flamingo feeding they attended at the zoo one time.

“This is a good night,” Maddie says, quiet over the sound of the faucet as they fall into old habits, him washing, her drying. “We’ve made something good. I know I’ve said it, but I’m so glad you’ve got Eddie and Christopher now.”

They’re still figuring it out, how to love each other at the right pace, without it feeling too slow or terrifyingly fast, but Buck wakes up most mornings with Eddie in his bed, or in the bunk next to him at the 118. Most mornings, he makes Chris breakfast, and most evenings, he gets to ask him about his favorite part of the day, and Chris never blinks, never asks him to leave. Asks him to stay, instead, whenever Buck says maybe he should go to the loft. “Well, I’m glad you’ve got Chim and the baby.”

“We’ve come a long way from Harrisburg.” Maddie dries a plate. “I was so glad to be your family, I still am, but I’m so glad it’s not just us. I want us to have a big family like this, one that’s not complicated or conditional.”

Like their parents always will be, guilty as Buck feels knowing he makes her relationship with them harder. He puts an arm around her shoulders, and she’s kind enough to ignore his wet hand on her t-shirt. He says the words he and Eddie keep throwing at each other in a joke they both know isn’t one, really. “I’m so lucky I have you. I don’t know what my life would be like if you hadn’t raised me, but I’m so glad it turned out this way, no matter what else happened.”

Maddie tugs his head down to kiss him on the forehead, a familiar gesture. “I’m so proud of you. Of us. We’ve built something really good here.”

“Buck, come back,” Christopher demands at full volume from the table. “You can do the dishes later, you need to tell Albert the flamingo story, you tell it better.”

Buck goes, because he’ll always go when Chris calls him, and he tugs Maddie along with him, because Chris is right. The dishes can wait, but his family can’t. The Diaz boys both smile like it’s a reflex when he slides back into his seat, and Eddie leans into his side, a default position that isn’t new and should maybe have made them both think about trying something a little earlier.

Across the table, Maddie is smiling at them, she and Chim leaning into each other too, like she and Buck are mirroring each other. The two of them happy, finally letting each other go just enough to lean on someone else. Maddie catches his eye and her smile becomes a grin. “Well?” she asks. “Are you going to tell us?”

Buck looks around the table of people he loves, and thinks about hosting another one like it with Eddie, maybe with more people. Bobby and Athena, Hen and Karen, everyone’s kids, Carla. All of them family, in some way, and he’s lucky again, just thinking about them. He leans into Eddie’s side and starts telling the story.