It was smaller than she remembered. Everything from childhood is smaller, but she had not been prepared for this — the building she had carried in her mind for sixteen years had been enormous, a fortress, a cathedral, a mouth. This was just a firehouse. Just brick and paint and a bell tower with a pigeon sitting on it. The red doors needed touching up at the bottom where the salt had eaten them. Somebody had hung a paper turkey in one of the windows, the kind her second-graders made by tracing their hands.
To the right of the side door, on the brick, there was a bronze plaque. She could see it from where she stood. She could not read it from there, but she didn't need to.
She crossed the street. She went up to the plaque and took off one glove, and she put her fingers on the cold raised letters, the way she had seen people do on the news at the war memorials. FRANCIS X. HAVERTY. LINE OF DUTY. FEBRUARY 11, 1958. And underneath, a line she had never known was there, because she had never come close enough to read it: HE WENT BACK IN.
She stood there with her bare hand on the bronze until her fingers ached with cold.
She did not hear the side door open. She only heard a voice, close behind her, quiet and surprised and trying very hard not to sound glad, and failing.
"You brought pie," said Cal Dombrowski.
*