Ortega stared at me.
The room seemed to shrink.
Then he asked quietly,
“Nobody reached you?”
I stopped breathing.
“What are you talking about?”
He took the cake from my hands before I realized he was doing it.
“Megan, sit down.”
“No.”
“Please.”
“No.”
My voice came out sharper.
“Where is my husband?”
Ortega’s jaw tightened.
“He’s not at the station.”
I felt one of the balloon strings slipping between my fingers.
“Then where is he?”
Nobody moved.
Finally, Ortega said,
“He’s at Mercy General.”
For one second, I didn’t understand.
The words reached me, but my brain refused to assemble them.
“Why?”
“There was a call this morning.”
“What happened?”
“Megan—”
“Is Cole alive?”
My voice cracked on the word alive.
Ortega answered immediately.
“Yes.”
My knees almost gave out.
I grabbed the edge of a metal workbench.
“Yes?”
“Yes. He’s alive.”
I closed my eyes.
Air rushed back into my lungs.
Then another thought hit me.
“If he’s alive, why is he in the hospital?”
Ortega looked at the men behind him.
And that was when I knew whatever came next was going to change the entire day.
PART 2
The fire had started inside an old furniture warehouse on the east side.
According to Ortega, the building had been partially condemned months earlier, but several units in the back were still being used illegally for storage.
When the first crews arrived, smoke was already pouring through the roof.
Cole’s team entered with another unit to search the second floor.
Twenty minutes later, part of the interior structure failed.
A steel support came down.
Then a section of ceiling followed.
Most of the firefighters cleared the collapse zone.
Cole didn’t.
Something struck him hard enough to knock him to the floor.
“He was awake when EMS took him,” Ortega told me.
I stared at him.
“Was he talking?”
“Yes.”
“Could he move?”
“Megan—”
“Could he move?”
“He was talking. He knew where he was. That’s all I can tell you for certain.”
I grabbed my purse.
“Why didn’t anyone call me?”
“We did.”
“No, you didn’t.”
My phone was already in my hand.
I unlocked it so quickly I nearly dropped it.
No missed calls.
No voicemails.
No texts from the department.
Nothing.
Ortega frowned.
Then he walked into his office and returned with a clipboard.
He flipped through several pages.
When he found Cole’s personnel form, his face tightened.
“What?”
He turned the page toward me.
The emergency contact number beside my name ended in 7742.
I hadn’t used that number since we switched carriers nearly two years earlier.
