Kayla O'Malley grew up in a family full of lifesavers. Her mom is the Chief of Police, and her dad is Fire Chief. She joined the Pinehaven Fire Department when she turned 18 and never looked back. At 23, she left Pinehaven to join the LAFD. Three ye...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The first thing Kayla notices when she wakes up is the silence.
Not the peaceful kind. Not the kind that comes after a good night's sleep and a lazy morning where the sun is warm and Delia is snoring at the foot of the bed. This silence feels wrong. Thick. Like the whole apartment is holding its breath with her.
Her head is pounding from too little sleep and too many thoughts. Vince's cologne still feels like it's sunk into the couch cushions and the front room, even though she cracked the balcony door before forcing herself into bed sometime after midnight. Eddie's missed call sits on her phone screen like a wound she keeps refusing to look at directly.
She had listened to exactly none of his voicemail.
Coward.
The word sits ugly in her chest as she pushes herself upright.
Delia is curled against her side, warm and stubbornly asleep, and for one stupid second Kayla envies her dog. No complicated exes. No accidentally overheard confessions. No surveillance reports sent by rich men who thought concern and control were interchangeable. No firefighters with soft eyes and wedding rings and hands that looked good doing impossible things.
Just naps.
"Lucky girl," Kayla mutters, scratching Delia behind the ears before she gets out of bed.
Her apartment is too bright once she opens the curtains. LA sunlight spills everywhere, making everything look cleaner than it feels. She moves through the space slowly, muscle memory doing the work while her brain drags behind. Shower. Skincare. Hair. Enough concealer to fake a decent night. The outfit she laid out in a fog before bed ends up on her body because choosing anything else would require thought.
The gray ruched tank hugs her just right. The cardigan is soft and oversized, slipping off one shoulder until she fixes it. Her jeans are ripped enough to feel broken in, her white sneakers clean enough to look like she has her life together. She twists the white headband into place, hooks the gold bracelet around her wrist, layers on the necklaces, and stares at herself in the mirror.
She looks cute.
She also looks like a woman one wrong word away from crying in Trader Joe's.
"Great," she tells her reflection. "Exactly the vibe we were going for."
Her phone starts ringing on the bathroom counter.
She reaches for it expecting Ava. Maybe Maddie. Maybe even Eddie being stupid enough to try again when she clearly ignored him the night before.
It's Buck.
And the second she answers, every sleepy, aching part of her body snaps awake.
"Buck?"
He's breathing too hard. The sound is rough and ragged and nothing like Buck's usual chaos. This is something worse. Something cracked open.
"Kay," he says, voice shaking. "I need you to meet me at the hospital."
