Page 11 of Sparked By the Mountain Man Hotshot

“You’re supposed to be in a fire camp,” she says. Her voice isn’t steady. Good. Neither am I.

“I handed the crew to Noah and turned around.” I stand up out of the dark. “Because you lied to me this morning, and I let you, and I’ve spent my whole life letting people leave so I’d never have to watch one of them choose to stay. I’m done being right about myself, Reagan. You are not a nice thing that happened once.”

“Reid—”

“You said it’s a list of one.” I take a step. “So’s mine. Eleven years, one name, and it’s yours. I don’t want the far detail or the long season anymore. I want to come home to a woman who put the whole gold town in her butter, and I want to be the thing she finally stops running from.”

She’s crying and grinning at once. “You were supposed to leave. That’s how it goes. Everybody leaves. I made it so easy for you.”

“I made it easy right back. We’re good at that.” I close half the distance. “Ask me the thing you didn’t ask me this morning.”

“People come back for a night.” Her chin’s up and shaking. “They don’t come back for a life. Not for me. You’ll be gone by leaf-drop, and I’ll have been the independent one one more⁠—”

“I gave my crew to Noah and drove north.” It stops her cold, because she knows what the job has always been to me. “I have never once picked staying over the job. Not in eleven years. I picked it today, on a canyon road, and I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. Now ask me.”

For a second she’s twenty-three years of practiced defeat, braced to lose. Then she takes the bravest breath I’ve ever watched anybody take.

“Stay,” she says. “Don’t you dare turn into one more person who leaves. Stay, be mine, let me be first for once in my⁠—”

I kiss her before she can talk herself out of it. She drops the trash bag, her hands come up into my jacket, and for the first time in eleven years, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

And it isn’t a fire.

When we stop kissing long enough to come up for air, I have to ask. “The spot. Did you get it?”

She laughs, surprised, like she forgot it was even a question. “I got it. Permanent sous. My name on the door and everything.”

“Course you did.” I feel the grin against her mouth. “I’d have bet the whole season on you. Turns out, I’d have won twice today.”

EPILOGUE

REAGAN: 5 YEARS LATER

The aspens are turning again, and my daughter is up on a step stool at the counter, explaining September to the trout I’m breaking down for dinner.

“It’s gold,” Riley tells the fish, her expression grave but confident. She’s four years old and never once wrong in her life. “It has to go in the butter, Mama. The whole gold town.”

She learned that from me. I don’t remember teaching it to her, which means she learned it the only way that sticks, by watching—the same as I learned to brace for loss by watching my own mother agree every time I asked for less.

Except my girl isn’t learning that one. My girl is learning that when something’s beautiful, you put it in the butter, and you don’t apologize for how much you love it.

Reid comes in through the back door with leaf-mulch on his boots and the last of the daylight on his shoulders. Home by six—the hours he’s kept for five years now.

Riley abandons the fish to launch herself at his knees. He scoops her up one-armed, already asking the day’s important questions. Whether she jumped in the leaf pile. Whether Mama let her have sugar before dinner. If there’s a soft touch in this house, he wants it on record, and our daughter snitches on both of us without mercy.

I watch the two of them from behind the counter. Five years ago, Marchetti retired and handed me his whole kitchen instead of just a slot, and there’s a brass plate with my name on it down at Prospect House now. My turn came, and then it kept coming, which is the part nobody warned me about back when I was sure the bus stopped one block early on purpose. It doesn’t. It never did—it was only ever late, and I was the one who decided late meant never.

Reid catches me not-working and crosses the kitchen with Riley still clamped to his side. He kisses me over her head.

“You’re doing the thing,” he says against my temple. “Where you look at us and can’t believe it.”

“I’m checking the trout.”

“The trout’s raw. You’re counting your winnings.” He pulls back enough to see my face, and there it is, five years of him reading straight through every efficient word I own. “I told you I’d have bet the whole season on you.”

“You did bet the season on me. You lost the season and won anyway.”

“Won twice that day.” He says it into my hair. “Been winning ever since.”

Riley, who has no patience for grown-ups going soft when there’s cooking to supervise, decides to reclaim the room. “The butter, Mama. The gold town goes in.”

So I set her on the stool between us, and I show my daughter how you take the whole ridiculous gold-drenched town and fold it into something warm on purpose. It’s beautiful, and she’s allowed to want beautiful things.

Reid’s hand settles at the small of my back. The trees burn gold outside the window. And I stand in the middle of the life I was so sure would go to somebody else and let myself have every last second of it.

I’m not efficient anymore.

Turns out I was never any good at it.