“Okay.”
“You need to go.”
Stepping back, I nod.The air between us feels like glass that survived a bomb.
She’s the one who cuts it first.“Don’t come to the window again, Jack.”
“I won’t,” I say, and it’s the first lie I’ve told in months.
Taking the corner, I lean on brick until my knees remember their job.Then I ride.Not far.Motel far.I listen to the radiators clank and the neighbors argue about something stupid and holy, like money and love and whose turn it is to suffer.I stare at the ceiling and see her hand on her belly and don’t breathe until it hurts.
Day five starts wrong.I wake before the alarm in that sliver of gray where men make bad decisions because silence feels like pressure.I don’t go to the bakery.I go to a store that sells things I don’t understand and say, “I need something that means I’ll stop lying and start building.”
The clerk blinks.
I end up with a blank leather journal and a copper gingerbread cookie cutter that looks like it could be hers.Don’t ask me why.It makes sense in my head.Carol has changed.She didn’t respond to the sparkly trinket.Words I’ll earn, and a shape that fits her new world but doesn’t forget her past.
Midday, I sit in a laundromat that’s hot as sin and write the first pages like penance, everything true and nothing pretty.Where I met her.Why I lied.What broke in me the first time she hummed and didn’t know I’d already decided to burn for the sound.I’m not good at writing.Good at bleeding, though.Paper doesn’t flinch.
I leave the journal by her back door with no note.I slide the cutter under the string.I walk away before the door opens.
Evening, I post up at the corner of Main where I can see her lock up without being a shadow on her shoes.I pocket both hands to keep from reaching as she goes back inside to close the store down.
Rain shifts to mist.The city blinks slow.A cruiser rolls by and doesn’t care about me.For once I’m grateful that the patch on my back is black-on-black tonight.
Then I smell it.
Smoke.Not winter smoke.Not someone’s dinner.This is dirty, chemical, quick.A wrong kind of heat.
My head snaps toward the far end of the block.Orange kisses the clouds, small at first, then licking up like a tongue that found something sweet.
The bakery.
It doesn’t make sense all at once.First comes the body, I’m already moving, already eating pavement, already gunning the bike from the curb before my brain can say words like wait or smart or help.The engine roars down empty lanes.My helmet hits my back.The wind is a fist trying to keep me from a door I’ll die to open.
By the time I get there, the back windows are coughing flame.Smoke muscles out of the vent hood like a monster finally allowed a face.Two volunteers are on scene, hoses snaking, yelling codes that don’t fix anything yet.Somebody’s shouting accelerant.
I don’t ask permission.I shoulder past a kid with a badge who tries to stop me and I’m inside, straight into hell’s mouth.Heat shoves me.The room breathes in and out like a beast.Glass cries.Metal pops.
“Humbug!”she screams, the sound punching through the bright roar.
I find her by voice, by gravity, by the string I’ve been pulling since Evervale.She’s near the counter, coughing, eyes streaming, a towel over her mouth, small and stubborn and alive.A rack goes over and claws for her ankles with hot teeth.I kick it off the path and wrap an arm under her, strong and careful.
She fights me, reaching for something on the wall, a photo, a clipped recipe, I don’t even see, because that’s who she is.I take the burn for it and drag us through the door anyway.
Outside, her knees go out.I go down with her, hands braced, body a wall.She shakes like I wired her to a battery.
“It’s gone,” she whispers.“Everything’s gone.”
“Not everything,” I say, and I mean it like a vow men carve into bone.
Behind us, the flames talk to the sky, real friendly.Sirens snowball into the block.Somebody throws a blanket over her shoulders, and somebody else tries to steer me away.I snarl because I am not leaving the only two pieces I have left right here on this curb.
She’s crying.My hands find her face, and I feel the ash grind under my thumbs.Her lashes clump.Her lips go blue and then red again.
“Breathe,” I tell her, low.“That’s your job now.You breathe.”
She nods like a soldier.Does it.
