His gaze shifted to the building behind me. I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want to see it yet.
“How long were you inside after it started?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Five minutes. Maybe less.” I looked down at my hands. They were black with soot, and there was a raw red patch on my right palm where I must have touched something hot without feeling it. “The extinguisher didn’t work. I mean, it worked, but it wasn’t enough.”
“Electrical fires usually aren’t.” He said it without judgment, just fact. “Is there anyone else inside?”
“No. Just me. I was prepping for the morning.”
He held my gaze for one more second—long enough that something registered, low and warm, that had nothing to do with the smoke—and then he stood.
“Stay here,” he said. “Paramedics are coming.”
I watched him pull his mask back on and walk toward my shop. The front door was gone—he’d kicked it in, I realized—and smoke was still pouring out, but it was lighter now, gray instead of black.
The rest of the crew was already inside. I could hear the hiss of water and more radio chatter and the sound of someone pulling down ceiling tiles.
He didn’t look back at me before he went in.
I sat on that curb, wrapped my arms around my knees, and watched the smoke thin, listening to my shop being taken apart from the inside. Everything I’d saved for. Everything I’d built with my own hands, in a town where no one knew my name when I arrived.
One year. I’d had it for one year.
The paramedics showed up and checked my oxygen levels and put a bandage on my palm and asked me questions I answered on autopilot. The whole time, I kept my eyes on the open doorway, waiting for the firefighter with the green eyes to come back out.
He didn’t. Not while I was sitting there.
Eventually, someone draped a blanket over my shoulders, and I pulled it tight and stared at the building that held everything I had in the world. I tried not to think about what I’d find when the smoke cleared.
One of the paramedics crouched next to me. “Is there somewhere you can stay tonight? We can’t clear the apartment until the building’s been inspected. Separate entrance or not, the smoke infiltration alone?—”
“I’ll figure it out,” I said.
I didn’t have anywhere to go. I’d been in Whispering Pines for a year and didn’t have a single person I could call at six in the morning and ask for a couch. That fact hit me harder than the fire.
A woman appeared at the edge of the scene—short curly hair, coffee cup in hand, a warm face I recognized from the diner up the block but had never spoken to beyond placing an order.
“I’m Bev,” she said, like I might not know. “You’re coming with me.”It wasn’t a question.
2
GABRIEL
I’d carried a lot of people out of burning buildings. It was the job. You go in, you find them, you get them out, and you move on to the next call.
Fourteen years on the job, and I’d learned how to compartmentalize. How to bury a face deep enough that it didn’t surface at two in the morning, when the house was quiet and my brain wanted to remind me of all the ways a call could have gone differently.
Brenna Mills refused to stay buried.
I’d been up since four. Not because my alarm went off—it didn’t—but because every time I closed my eyes, I saw her face in the smoke. The soot on her cheeks. The raw patch on her palm. The way she’d looked at me when I pulled my mask off, like I was the first solid thing she’d seen in hours.
And then her eyes. Brown, wide, still watering from the smoke, locked on mine like she was deciding whether I was real.
I’d told her she was okay. I’d checked her breathing. I’d handed her off to the paramedics and gone back inside to do my job. That was the protocol. That was how it worked.
So why was I standing in my kitchen at 5:30 in the morning, coffee going cold in my hand, still thinking about the way her voice sounded when she said her name?
Brenna. Brenna Mills. That’s my shop.
