“Don’t scare me like that again,” I murmured, voice rough.
She kissed me again, pouring everything into it. All the fear, relief, the raw edge of almost lost. I kissed her back the same way—careful, desperate, hands sliding into her damp hair, holding her like she was the only thing keeping the ground under me.
“I’m here,” she whispered. “I’m right here. I’m okay.”
“I know.” I swallowed hard. “I just—don’t ever do that again. I’m the firefighter. I run into burning buildings, not you.”
She gave a small, watery laugh. “I won’t. I promise.”
Behind us, the porch light glowed soft and steady.
Aggie and Gerald were at Rosemary’s.
Matt was still out, coordinating with the sheriff.
The Airstream was gone.
But Becca was here—warm, breathing, and safe in my arms. And for the first time since the tones dropped, I let myself believe it was over.
Chapter 36
Levi
Afew months after the fire, Sweetbriar finally exhaled. The Carver Group’s empire had begun to crumble in slow, public pieces. The attorney general’s press conference had gone statewide. The words “systemic fraud” and “predatory acquisition” were now attached to their name in every major Oregon outlet. Court filings kept unsealing like dominoes—subsidiary after subsidiary. Aggie had given exactly one interview, called herself “retired and extremely motivated,” and the six o’clock news had replayed her no-nonsense smile for a week straight. The recall petition against Mayor Whitaker had quietly gathered enough signatures that he announced he wouldn’t seek re-election “for family reasons.” Nobody bought it, but nobody needed to. The town had already moved on.
Travis was gone too. The fire marshal’s report cited the cigarette butt thirty feet from the ignition point as the presumed cause of the fire. His attorney called it “careless disposal during a walk.” Matt just shook his head and said the rest was now a problem for prosecutors. Travis’s community-outreach job vanished with Whitaker’s political future, and without it, there was nothing left to hold him here. He packed up one weekend and left without a goodbye. The town gossip finally shifted tosomething softer—weddings, babies, who was bringing what to the next knitting night.
Becca and I had settled into something that felt permanent. We’d bought a new trailer together. It was nothing like her old one, which wasn’t saying much, considering the old one had leaked, listed to the left, and housed a coffee maker with a forty percent success rate. This one was solid and clean, with windows that actually sealed and a kitchen that didn’t require creative workarounds. My parents’ trailer was back at their place.
People had asked, when we’d made the decision, why we were staying at the park. We were both working, both saving. We could have looked at rentals in town, something with a proper foundation. Some people seemed to expect that. Like the campground was a temporary situation we’d naturally graduate out of once things got serious between us. But that wasn’t how either of us felt about it, and I didn’t know how to explain that to someone who hadn’t spent enough time here to understand what the place actually was.
This was where I’d come looking for her, that first night, when I’d driven down the gravel road not entirely sure what I was going to say. This was where she’d built something quiet and hers after finally leaving Travis for good. This was where Aggie had fed us both, and Gerald had decided I was tolerable, and the river had provided a kind of background constancy that I hadn’t known I needed until it was just always there. We’d fallen in love twenty feet from where we now slept. The ground here held that. I wasn’t ready to walk away from it, and neither was Becca.
And there was the community of it—the people who’d shown up the night of the fire, the way everyone here knew everyone else’s business and used that knowledge kindly. You didn’t find that in a rental on Birch Street. You couldn’t manufacture it. It had to grow over time, and it had grown here, and we were part of it now in a way that felt real and chosen and worth protecting.
So we stayed. We bought a new trailer, faced it toward the river, and made it ours. And we were saving—quietly, steadily, in a separate account we both put into each month—for a house someday. Something with a yard, maybe. A porch. Becca had mentioned a garden once, offhand, like she wasn’t sure she was allowed to want it yet, and I’d thought about that a lot since. We’d get there. We had time.
But for now, walking back from Aggie’s and seeing our light on inside. Waking up to the sound of the river and Becca’s weight on the mattress beside me was enough. It was everything, actually.
Aggie’s new Airstream was gleaming and unblemished, already decorated in a way that suggested she’d been planning the aesthetic before the insurance check cleared. Christmas lights along the awning. A new floral doormat. A ceramic planter with something purple and tenacious growing in it.
Gerald occupied the step with the same sovereign authority he’d maintained at the old one, as though the fire had been a minor inconvenience. The only difference in him was that he seemed to be almost as in love with Becca as I was.
Becca was still podcasting, but now she used her real name on it, her real voice. And I was beyond proud of her.
The evening I suggested a walk, I didn’t let myself overthink it. I’d carried the small velvet box in my jacket pocket for weeks. I’d been waiting for the perfect moment—after the town meeting, after the river at dusk, after every quiet night we’d shared—and finally realized there was no perfect moment. There was only this one, with her. She took the jacket I offered without question, the easy trust of someone who had already decided I was the one.
We walked the long loop around the campground, the way we used to when we were kids, and everything felt possible. The river ran low and clear, catching the last gold light and throwingit back in quiet sparks. When we reached the water’s edge, I stopped.
She turned to me, curious but calm, the wind lifting a strand of hair across her cheek.
I took both her hands in mine.
“Becca,” I said, voice low, “I’ve loved you for a long time. Longer than you know.”
Her eyes widened slightly, but she stayed quiet, letting me speak.
“I meant it the first time I asked you—drunk and clumsy in that parking lot. I meant it when we were twelve, eating peanut-butter sandwiches in the library. I meant it through every year we spent drifting apart, through every time you pushed me away because you thought you weren’t enough, through every night I lay awake wondering if I’d waited too long to try and get close to you again. I meant it through Travis, through the fire, through that first moment when you let me climb through your window and hold you until you could breathe again.”
