“Better, thanks.” He glanced around. He’d expected to find Wade and Brody filling the other seats at the table, going over the paperwork from the prior shift, but they were nowhere to be seen. “Where is everyone?”
“Wade and Brody just took the ladder truck out to the elementary school for a fire drill.” Cap folded the newspaper into a neat square.
Jack couldn’t help catching a glimpse of his alter ego’s name above the fold. Readers were still writing letters filled with questions about him and Queen Bee. He wished everyone would just let it go. Maybe then he’d have a prayer of doing so himself.
“While it’s just the two of us, there’s something I need to say.” Cap leveled his gaze at Jack. “So long as your doctor says you’re good to go, you’re welcome to come back to work, but I want you to think about it—really think—is this where you want to be right now? Or is there something else you need to take care of first?”
Jack lowered himself into the chair opposite Cap. Clearly, he needed to be sitting down for this discussion. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
A lie. Of course he knew. He just wasn’t sure how Cap had managed to find out about him and Madison, unless Wade had said something. That didn’t sound like Wade, though. He was nosy as hell, but he was also a trustworthy friend.
“Don’t you?” Cap’s eyebrows rose, and he gave the Letters to the Editor section of the Bee a purposeful tap with his pointer finger.
Jack closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing in and out for a moment before opening them and facing the look of disapproval on his boss’s face. “How long have you known?”
“Since the very first letter from Fired Up in Lovestruck. It was rather obvious, don’t you think?”
The next time Jack took on a secret identity, he really needed to choose a more subtle name—except there wouldn’t be a next time. Ever.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” he asked.
Cap shrugged. “It was pretty clear you were working through something, and the letters seemed harmless enough at the time.”
Jack felt sick. He’d thought the same thing, and he’d been wrong. So very wrong.
“But that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore,” Cap said, sounding more like a concerned dad than his supervisor. Engine Company 24 was a family, after all.
“It’s not. I’ve hurt Queen Bee—Madison—quite deeply.” Jack swallowed around the sudden thickness in his throat. He kept thinking that moving on would get easier, but so far it hadn’t.
The longer he spent without seeing Madison, the more difficult it became.
“I’m sure that’s not an easy thing to admit, but I wasn’t talking about Madison. I was talking about you.” Cap gave Jack a sad smile. “I care about you, son. You’ve been part of this company and my life long enough for me to know when you’re hurting. If you care about Madison the way I suspect that you do, don’t you owe it to yourself and your girls to try and make things right?”
“I have—several times. Every day, if you want to know the truth.” Jack closed his eyes and pressed hard on his eyelids with his fingertips to try and erase the memory of Madison’s expression when she’d discovered the truth. The look on her face right then had nearly killed him, and he couldn’t seem to be able to shut his eyes without revisiting that moment again and again. “She doesn’t want to talk to me. Frankly, I don’t blame her.”
He felt like he’d wasted the last few minutes he’d spent with her. He hadn’t shut up about the stupid letters. He’d thought if he explained how lost and miserable he’d been back when he’d started writing them, he could somehow make her understand, but now he knew that had been a grave mistake. If only he could live those moments over again, he wouldn’t spend them talking about the Lovestruck Bee or Fired Up in Lovestruck or Queen Bee. Instead, he’d tell Madison exactly how he felt about her, because somehow he’d never gotten around to saying what mattered most of all—he was in love with her with his whole heart.
“She doesn’t want to talk to you,” Cap repeated. Then he snorted and said, “So?”
Jack opened his eyes and frowned at him. So? That was the sum total of his captain’s words of wisdom? “What’s that supposed to mean, exactly?”
“She might not want to talk to you, and I respect that. But there are other ways of making your feelings known.” Cap cast a meaningful glance at the paper. “You’ve managed to do a pretty good job of it thus far.”
Jack shook his head. He couldn’t write another letter to the paper. He was finished with that—100 percent done. “Somehow I don’t think writing to the Bee would get me back into Madison’s good graces. Even if I wanted to, she’d probably never see it. She’s gone back to New York.”
“Then it sounds like you need to think bigger,” Cap said.
Easier said than done.
Jack stood and headed for the coffeemaker. He was far too under-caffeinated for this particular conversation.
But as he made his way toward the kitchen counter, his attention snagged on the reflection in the darkened flat-screen television hanging above the kitchen table, just over Cap’s head. A wooden bowl of apples on the countertop glimmered in the screen as if it were a darkened mirror.
Jack stopped in his tracks as a tiny flicker of something stirred deep inside his gut—something that felt an awful lot like hope.
“What?” Cap said, gaze flitting from the bowl of fruit to the television and back.
“You’re a genius.” Jack smiled his first real smile in a week. He grabbed an apple from the bowl and pointed at Cap with it. “Also, I’m going to need the rest of the day off.”
Think bigger indeed.
Madison’s feet ached almost as much as her heart did.
When she’d lived in
