Chapter 4
“Why is Daddy sending our ladder over there?”
I looked at my daughter.
Because your father’s dead friend saved him.
Because Olivia knows how to make eleven-year-old guilt feel like something happening today.
Because your father trusts me to cope.
Because he believes the woman who screams needs him more than the woman who says she can keep going.
I couldn’t tell her any of that.
“He thinks somebody over there needs help first.”
“More than us?”
Smoke pushed around the mechanical housing.
“I don’t know.”
That was the last full conversation Lily and I had on that roof.
Ladder Seven reached Olivia’s balcony at 4:36.
She was too panicked to climb.
Daniel authorized a firefighter to ascend, fit her into a rescue harness and bring her down.
It took nearly six minutes.
While that happened, the wind shifted.
Smoke rolled across our roof.
I moved everyone behind a concrete wall.
Miguel and I attacked the roof door with his pry bar, but heat had warped the frame.
Lily’s coughing changed.
People think loud coughing is the frightening sound.
It isn’t.
The frightening sound is when coughing becomes weak.
I crouched beside her.
“Lily, look at me.”
She did.
“What did you eat for lunch?”
“Pizza.”
“What color is your dance ribbon?”
“Blue.”
“What are we doing Saturday?”
She stared at me.
“Lily?”
Nothing.
Her eyes were open, but they weren’t focused.
I grabbed the radio.
“North roof, child becoming altered. Repeat, child becoming altered. We need extraction now.”
Daniel didn’t answer.
Deputy Chief Harris did.
“Rachel, Rescue Four is making the east stair. Estimated three minutes.”
“We don’t have three minutes.”
I looked around the roof through smoke that was getting thicker every second.
And I remembered an old drawing.
Years earlier, during a renovation review, I had seen plans showing a maintenance hatch between the north roof and a narrow service platform above the neighboring building.
The later construction package marked it for closure.
But I also remembered a contractor photograph.
The panel had looked intact.
“Miguel!”
He crawled toward me.
“What?”
“North wall. There might be an old maintenance passage behind the metal cladding.”
“Where?”
“Near the exhaust duct.”
We searched.
I dragged my palm across hot metal until I found the outline.
“There!”
Miguel wedged the pry bar into the seam.
It wouldn’t move.
“Again!”
He pulled.
The metal screamed.
One corner lifted.
May you like
I grabbed it with both hands.
Heat burned through my palms.
