Nathan stood up slowly, the way you stand up near a frightened animal, and held the photograph out — picture side up, so that she had to see her sister laughing up at her from seven summers ago.
Her hand stopped in the air. For one second the anger fell off her, and Nathan saw what was underneath it: grief, fresh enough to still be a wound, and the terror of a young woman who has been holding a child and a secret together with both hands for four months and has just felt one of them slip.
"You're Emma," he said.
"Emma Collins." Her eyes came up to his face then, really up to it, for the first time, and he saw her do what Leo had done: the chin, the hairline, the eyes. "And you are — "
"Nathan Reed. I'm a captain here. Leo came and found me. He asked me — "
"I know what he asked you." The words came out fast and low, while she pulled Leo in against her side and held on. "He has been asking everybody. The man on the television — " She stopped. Took a breath. "I'm sorry he's troubled you with this. He lost his mother in January. He doesn't understand what he's saying."
"Aunt Emma, it is him," Leo said into her cardigan, muffled and mutinous. "You said Dad was gone. But he's here. He's right here. You said I could ask him."
"I said no such — Leo, sweetheart, I said we would talk about the photograph at home."
"You said when I was bigger!"
People were still watching. Nathan could feel the story assembling itself in the heads around them — fire captain, lost boy, a photograph — and felt a sudden, fierce protectiveness that startled him: not for himself. For the boy, and for this shaking woman, and for a dead woman in a yellow dress who had written those words as a shield.
A man at the edge of the crowd had his phone up, filming, with the unhurried shamelessness of a person who has mistaken other people's worst moments for weather. Nathan saw him over Emma's shoulder and something in him, trained and ugly, did a swift piece of arithmetic about sightlines. He shifted half a step, no more, and put his own body where the lens wanted Leo to be; six feet of fire captain in dress uniform, smiling the public smile, a wall with manners. The man lowered the phone, abashed, and found somewhere else to be. Derek, arriving at the edge of his vision, caught the whole transaction and said nothing, only widened his own stance beside the raffle table, so that between the two of them the little family in the middle of the fair had, for a moment, something like a fence around it. Nathan had no idea why he had done it. He would spend some time, later, not examining the fact that it had not felt like a decision at all.
"Miss Collins," he said. "Emma. There's a quiet room inside the station. Nobody will bother us there. I think — " He looked down at Leo, who looked back, daring him to lie. "I think Leo is owed a proper conversation. Not in the street. Will you come inside? Just to talk."
She looked at the station doors, at the crowd, at the photograph. She looked at Nathan's face once more, long and searching, and something in her own face changed — not trust, not yet, but the first unwilling admission that the resemblance was beyond coincidence, beyond anything she had prepared herself for that morning.
"Five minutes," she said at last. "And you will give him a proper answer, Captain Reed, whatever it is. He has had enough of people being kind instead of true."
"Yes," Nathan said. "I will."
He did not yet know what the proper answer was. He only knew the name written in faded blue ink, and that his hands, which had not shaken on a roof in a storm in fifteen years of fires, were shaking now.
Chapter 3: The Tattoo That Wasn't Mine
The quiet room at Station 14 was the crew room, with a kettle, a scarred table and a noticeboard thick with rotas, and through the wall came the muffled music of the fair. But the door shut, and that was enough.
Leo would not sit. He stood by the table with his small hands flat on it, as if to hold himself upright, bracing for adults to arrange the truth into something smaller.
"Sit down, love," Emma said.
"No."
"Leo."
"If I sit down you'll do the voices." His eyes stayed on Nathan. "Grown-ups do quiet voices and then the thing is gone. I'm not sitting down."
Nathan sat down himself, slowly, and put his own hands flat where Leo could see them. It was a thing you learned, with frightened people: show your hands, lower yourself, take the threat out of your size. He was not sure who, in this room, was the frightened one.
"All right," he said. "Nobody sits. But I'm going to show you something, Leo, and I need you to really look. Can you do that? Really look, even if you don't like it."
Leo nodded once.
"Show me the photograph again. Please."
Emma hesitated, then laid the photograph on the table between them and smoothed it flat with the side of her hand, gently, as you would smooth a crease out of something precious and damaged. The couple laughed up at the ceiling. Late light. The boat. Sarah's hand on her belly.
There was a knock at the crew room door, soft, two raps, a firefighter's knock, information rather than inquiry. Nathan did not move. After a moment Derek's voice came through the wood, pitched low. "Band's packing up, Cap. I've told the chief you've got a family matter. Nobody's coming through this door." Then the footsteps went away again, unhurried, and Nathan understood that his friend had stationed himself at the end of the corridor like a piece of furniture that could fight. The fair went on thinning outside the walls. Someone laughed, a long way off, at something that had nothing to do with any of them. Leo's eyes flicked to the door and back, checking his exits even now, and Nathan thought: this child has been the only adult in his own life for four months, and he is deciding whether I am a door or a wall. He made himself sit still and be examined.
"Look at his arm," Nathan said. "The one around your mum. Look at the inside of the wrist." He touched the print lightly with one fingertip, not on the faces. Never on the faces. "What do you see?"
Leo bent over it, his hair falling forward, with the fierce concentration of a child reading a text in a language he had only just learned was not his own.
"A picture," Leo said at last, uncertainly. "Drawn on him. A little — " He traced it in the air above the photograph. "A little boat thing."