“How bad is it inside?” she asked.
“Kitchen’s gutted. Back wall needs to be rebuilt. The front of the shop is mostly smoke damage—soot, smell. Structurally, you got lucky.”
“Lucky.” She almost smiled. Almost. “Yeah, that’s the word I keep hearing.”
I deserved that. I knew how it sounded—telling a woman who’d nearly died in her own kitchen and lost her livelihood in the process that she was lucky. But I also knew what the alternative looked like, and she didn’t, and I wasn’t going to describe it to her.
“The structure is sound,” I said instead. “That means it can be rebuilt.”
“With what?” The question came out sharp, and she immediately softened. “Sorry. I didn’t sleep much.”
“Don’t apologize.”
She looked at me then. Really looked at me, the way she had on the curb—like she was trying to figure out why I was still standing here. I didn’t have a good answer for that. The follow-up was legitimate. Dec was inside. I had a reason to be on this sidewalk.
But I would have been on this sidewalk anyway, and if I was being honest with myself, I’d known that since four in the morning.
“The insurance adjuster comes tomorrow,” I said. “Dec’s report will help your case. Faulty wiring, panel failure—that’s not negligence on your part. That’s the building.”
“I leased it as-is,” she said quietly. “I should have had the wiring inspected. I thought about it when I signed, but the inspection would have cost two thousand dollars I needed for the deposit on the ovens. So I checked the smoke detector batteries every six weeks and told myself that counted.”
She gave a small, bitter laugh.
“I’m careful about everything I can afford to be careful about. The wiring wasn’t on the list.”
Wiring mattered. But I wasn’t going to point that out on the sidewalk at seven in the morning.
“Have you eaten?” I asked.
The question surprised her. I could tell by the way her eyebrows lifted and her mouth opened and nothing came out for a second.
“I had coffee,” she said.
“That’s not eating.”
“It’s close enough when your kitchen is a crime scene.” She caught herself and glanced at the building. “Is it a crime scene? I don’t actually know how this works.”
“It’s not a crime scene. It’s a fire scene. Dec determines cause and origin, files his report, and then the space is released back to you and your landlord.”
“Okay.” She exhaled. “Okay, that’s good.”
We stood there for a moment, the morning quiet around us. Main Street wasn’t awake yet—most of the shops wouldn’t unlock their doors until nine. It was just the two of us and the faint sound of Dec moving around inside and the smell of charred wood that hung in the cold air.
“There’s a diner up the block,” I said. “Bev Holloway’s place. She’ll have something hot.”
Brenna looked toward The Pines Diner, then back at me. I could see her working through it—whether this was charity, whether I felt sorry for her, whether she wanted to sit across from a stranger and eat eggs while her bakery sat gutted across the street.
“You don’t have to babysit me,” she said. “I’m sure you have actual work to do.”
“I’m off shift.”
“Then you should go home and sleep.”
“I’m not tired.”
That wasn’t true. I’d been up for almost twenty-six hours.
But “tired” wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I was standing three feet from this woman and every instinct I had was telling me not to walk away from her. Not yet. Not until I knew she’d eaten something and had a plan and wasn’t going to stand on this sidewalk alone staring at a boarded-up door until someone made her stop.
