Chapter 1

For five years, my marriage had been a cold, empty room. I sat in the ER breakroom, the silence pressing in on me, a hollow echo of the silence at home. Five years with Mark Johnson, Captain of Engine 32, the city' s hero. My hero, once.

I remembered our wedding day. A storm had been an excuse for him to be at the station, a choice he made without a second thought. I walked down the aisle to an empty space beside me.

During my pregnancy, he was a ghost. He missed every doctor's appointment, every milestone. He was always on duty, always chasing the next fire, the next emergency. When I called him, breathless with the first kick from our daughter Lily, he was in the middle of a debriefing. "Sarah, I'm busy," he'd said, his voice distant.

When my father was dying, I begged him to come to the hospital. Just for an hour. He promised he would, but a call came in, a multi-car pile-up on the interstate. He never showed up. My father died holding my hand, his last words a question about the man I had married.

Now, Lily was gone too.

A fever had spiked, vicious and fast. I had rushed her to my own hospital, her little body burning up in my arms. She died in the pediatric ICU. Her last words were a whisper, "My daddy... he's a hero."

My phone was heavy in my hand, a brick of unanswered messages. "Mark, Lily's fever is 104." "Mark, please answer, the doctors are worried." "Mark, she's not responding. Please come."

Silence.

I was numb, a walking void. Then my phone rang, but it wasn't him. It was the fire department. A major building collapse downtown. Mark's unit was first on the scene. He was trapped. Injured. He was in the ICU, just a few floors below where our daughter had died.

I walked to his room like a machine. Outside the door, I heard shouting. It was David Chase, Mark' s best friend, his voice raw with anger.

"Mark, are you really going to die for her? For Emily Davis?"

I froze.

"All these years, every overtime shift, every missed holiday, every time you let Sarah and Lily down... wasn't it all just so you could hear her voice on the dispatch? Just to hear Emily say, 'Engine 32, you're cleared to return to base'?"

The words hit me, one by one.

David's voice dropped, filled with disgust. "She abandoned you the second your family's business went bankrupt. She disappeared. Sarah was the one who was there. Sarah was the one who held you together. How could you do this to her?"

The world tilted. It wasn't about the job. It was never about the job. It was about a woman. Emily Davis. His ex-girlfriend from before me.

My own secret history with Mark flashed through my mind. Sixteen years of loving him from afar. Choosing a career in medicine just to be in the same orbit, to understand his world of saving lives. I remembered him after his family lost everything, a broken man. I was the one who picked up the pieces, who paid his debts, who encouraged him to join the fire academy. I thought our marriage was a new beginning.

I realized it was all a lie. His love for her had never died. I was just a placeholder. Our daughter, a casualty of his obsession.

Something inside me, something that had been slowly dying for five years, finally broke.

I turned away from his hospital room door, my hand shaking as I pulled out my phone. I didn't call a lawyer. I called my old professor, Dr. Olivia Reed.

"Dr. Reed," I said, my voice surprisingly steady. "You once told me about a flight nurse program. Is it too late to apply?"