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an hour passed without Finney wrestling to understand what went wrong. Heat stress and carbon monoxide poisoning from that night had blanked out much of his memory, and what he did remember he didn’t trust to be true. He knew he’d been hallucinating in the hospital but couldn’t be certain whether he’d been hallucinating during the fire itself. It was impossible to know in the confusion caused by heat exhaustion and smoke inhalation whether he had imagined telling Reese and Kub that they had to go twenty-eight paces to find the hole in the wall, or whether he’d actually told them.
    Reese said Finney hadn’t told them anything. In dozens of interviews he’d implied that Finney’s primary concern was getting out of the building, not helping them find his partner. What Finney didn’t understand was how they’d missed Cordifis. Reese and Kub had been inside the building eleven minutes after Finney left them, plenty of time to find Bill, dig him out, and carry him to safety. Still, if they hadn’t known where to look . . .
    Nobody blamed Bill’s death on him, not directly, but even so, the indictment floated about in the ether. If he’d been coherent enough to get himself out of the fire, why hadn’t he done as much for his partner?
    Finney was beginning to believe it was not possible for a man to endure as many sleepless nights as he had without stepping over the precipice into madness. He had moods that nobody knew about, fugues that he hadn’t mentioned, even to the tight-lipped psychologist the department sent him to, a woman who gawked at him over the top of her tortoiseshell reading glasses and urged him to tell her what he was feeling. What did she think he was feeling? He and Bill Cordifis had gone into a burning building together. He’d come out alone. It didn’t get any simpler than that. He felt guilt. Grief. He felt incompetent. Dim-witted. Alienated. Evil, even.
    It was bad enough to lose a partner. It was untenable to be the cause of that loss, unconscionable, and, ultimately, unendurable.
    Leary Way was the sort of catastrophe that might happen to a firefighter at his first fire, yet Finney had been wading through smoke for eighteen years. Firefighting ran in the family blood. Finney’s brother had been in the department twenty-one years. And just a few months ago, after nearly forty-two years of service, their father had retired with the rank of battalion chief. Their grandfather had been a volunteer in his youth during the Depression in Michigan. Accounts of unexpected endings, ill-fated victims, and unimaginably bad luck had been ricocheting around the supper table since John Finney’s childhood, yet as far as he could tell, until now no one in the family had ever been the cause of one of those cataclysms.
    He knew there was usually some permanent damage that went along with something like this. So far, aside from the skin grafts on his neck and wrists, he’d been left with an ineluctable and sometimes incapacitating depression. The possibility that he could no longer trust his own skills on the fire ground—or anywhere else—plagued and horrified him. First and foremost he was a firefighter. Losing that, even in spirit, was more painful than anything he could imagine.
    Finney was, as always, obsessing on these thoughts in the officer’s room of Station 26 on a Tuesday morning in late October. He stared at his own reflection in the computer screen, trying to figure out who he’d become. The image he saw didn’t tell him anything new: dark brown hair, a relatively square face with only a few telltale lines to suggest his thirty-nine years, a blocky jaw. He saw a strong face, not quite handsome, with blue eyes his ex-wife had once called dreamy. Later, during the divorce, she’d decided they were vacant. Now they were underscored with dark circles.
    Situated near the southern city limits of Seattle, Station 26 was the kind of sleepy little firehouse that Finney had discovered attracted