I kicked off my shoes by the door and padded into the kitchen in my socks. The coffee pot was still warm. I poured another cup I didn’t want, just to have something to hold. My fingers were cold. The mug was warm against my palms, but I barely felt it.
In the living room, I sank onto the couch, knees drawn up, arms wrapped tight around them as if I could keep myself from flying apart. I stared out the front window, willing Levi to show up soon. The glass was cold against my temple when I leaned closer to the window. My breath fogged it in uneven bursts—too fast, too shallow—leaving little clouds that shrank and vanished before the next one arrived.
The clock on the mantel ticked. Not steadily anymore, but in slow, deliberate stabs that counted the seconds between my heartbeats. Every tick felt like a small hammer behind my left eye. My pulse thrummed in my ears, loud enough to drown the fire for moments at a time, then receded so the room felt suddenly too quiet.
What if the fire had flared up again on the back roads? What if Whitaker or whoever had one last play? What if Levi—quiet, careful Levi—had finally pushed too far and something had gonewrong? The thoughts clawed up my throat, tasting like ash and copper. I swallowed hard, but the taste stayed.
Still no headlights. No crunch of gravel. No engine rumble cutting through the quiet.
I turned fully to the window, pressed both palms flat to the glass. The chill seeped into my skin, up my arms, into my chest, until it felt like ice was spreading under my ribs. My reflection stared back—eyes wide and glassy, mouth parted, hair still damp at the ends from the shower. I looked like someone who had been running for hours and still hadn’t found the finish line.
Outside, the day pressed against the pane, as if it wanted in. Wind rattled the porch screen, a soft, impatient sound. My breath hitched. I stayed there, forehead to the cold glass, palms flat, breath fogging and clearing in frantic little pulses.
Every sound—the tick of the clock, the distant creak of the house settling—felt like a promise or a warning. I couldn’t tell which.
Time stretched on until the tension in my chest felt like it might snap clean through.
Chapter 35
Levi
The fire in the tree line was the real problem.
Structure fire was manageable in its way—contained by geometry, by walls and materials, and the finite dimensions of a building. This was different. The dry grass and blackberry thicket behind the back lots had carried the fire straight into the pines with terrifying efficiency. The flames moved through the canopy in long reaching shapes, light shifting and jumping, throwing shadows that moved like living things through the smoke. The heat came in waves—you felt it on your face and hands even through the gear, rolling out from the tree line in pulses that told you what the fire was doing and where it was going next.
The smell was different here than in the Airstream—not the chemical burn of melting aluminum, but the deep, resinous scent of burning pine, thick and almost sweet underneath the smoke, the smell of something old and large being unmade.
The ground was uneven—roots and rocks under boots, footing shifting in ways you couldn’t always anticipate. You learned to keep your weight centered and your attention split between what was in front of you and what was underfoot. The smoke moved with the river wind, visibility shifting constantly—thirty seconds of relative clarity and then the smoke would thicken, and the world would reduce to the small lit circle of what the lights could reach. You worked in that circle and trusted your crew to be working in theirs.
Jude was on my left. He was always on my left on a fire line, had been since we were both rookies, and figured out by the second call that we worked better when we didn’t have to think about where the other one was. We didn’t talk. We moved through it with the rhythm of two people who shared a language without words—the slight shift in direction that communicated what a shout would have taken three seconds to say, the way one of us moved and the other adjusted without being asked.
The canopy crackled above us and threw embers in long arcs that landed in the darkness beyond the line—small orange pinpoints appearing in your eyeline. You watched for them, tracked them, moved to them before they became something you couldn’t move to anymore.
The wind was the problem. It came in gusts off the river, unpredictable, pushing the fire one direction and pulling it back. You worked with it rather than against it, giving it less to find in the direction you didn’t want it to go.
An hour in, the line was holding. An hour and twenty, the fire had found the edge of what it was going to get and was beginning—reluctantly and with significant complaint—to accept the fact. Two hours and change—the line cut back to something containable, the tree line damaged and black but stopped, the brush cleared in a wide band that hadn’t been there at nine forty-seven.
My shoulders ached from the sustained physical work, and my back was talking to me in a language I chose to ignore. I was damp through the turnout gear with sweat gone cold. I pulled my helmet off at the edge of the tree line and looked at what the last two hours had produced.
The campground was standing.
I looked at it for a moment—at the damage and the windows of the trailers that hadn’t burned, at the one strand of Christmas lights that had survived at the far end of the row, still blinking.
We rolled back to the station in silence. Jude drove. I stared out the window at the dark shapes of trees sliding past, the faint orange glow still visible in the distance. The adrenaline had drained out, leaving the familiar hollow ache behind my ribs, the one that always came after the job was done and the mind finally had room to remember what it had been afraid of.
I showered at the station—hot water, soap that smelled like nothing, the mechanical rhythm of getting clean after a call. Changed into jeans and a fresh hoodie. Jude was already in civvies when I came out, leaning against his locker.
“You heading to Matt’s?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
He pushed off the locker. “I’m going home. Call if you need anything.”
I nodded.
He left.
I drove to Matt’s house in the quiet dark, windows down, letting the cool air move through the cab. The road was empty. The river ran steadily beside me. Every mile felt longer than it should have.
