Page 79 of Stuck With the Smokejumper

“Yeah.”

I don't elaborate, and he doesn't push, which is one of the better things about Reid. Somewhere over the summer I started liking things I never used to think twice about. Knowing people well enough that a Sunday dinner isn't a special event. It’s just a Sunday. Having a crew that knows my habits, my jokes, and how I like my eggs. A district I could probably navigate half-blind by now. After a childhood spent moving and an adulthood spent choosing to keep moving, I've started wondering, for the first time, what it might be like to stay somewhere.

“So what are you going to do?” Reid asks.

“Working on it.” That's honest, even if it's not much of an answer. “I want to stop and see Russ before we head to the house,” I say, a while later, when we're close enough the scenery starts looking familiar.

Reid glances over. “Why?”

“Want to ask him something.” I don't explain further, and Reid, to his credit, doesn't ask a second time.

Once we drive into the Blackpine district, I catch a stretch of blackened hillside through the trees, scorched and bare where fire got close enough to leave a mark. I don't slow down for it. I already know what it means. Two homes. Some barns. Ivy told me on the phone. Seeing the evidence firsthand, even just a glimpse of it, makes it real in a way her voice on a bad connection couldn't quite manage.

She was that close to this.

Timber Creek comes into view a few minutes later, and I slow down. It's here. Whole. Businesses open, people on the sidewalks, a couple of fire vehicles still rolling through but nothing urgent about the pace. Someone's put up a hand-painted sign outside the diner thanking the crews who protected the town, and there's cleanup work still visible here and there. But the town is still standing and functioning.

At the district office, I go in alone, telling Reid I'll be quick. It takes longer than quick. Twenty minutes, maybe more. When I climb back into the truck, Reid's waiting with the kind of patient curiosity he's been sitting on the whole time.

“Get what you needed?”

“Got somewhere to start.”

He doesn't press for more, which I appreciate, because I'm not ready to explain yet, mostly because I don't fully know myself. It's early. It's a maybe, not a promise. But it's a real maybe, the kind with an actual next step attached to it. That's more than I've considered in a long time.

By the time we turn onto the road toward the crew house, my attention's narrowed down to only one thing. I haven't seen her since the morning I left. Since then, she fought to protect an entire town, and somewhere in the middle of that I didn’t know whether she was okay. Then I heard her voice. I'm okay. But that's not the same as seeing her.

We're barely out of the truck when something honks, low and absurd. The Bigfoot caller. Nolan's standing on the porch holding it like a trophy.

“I’m starting to think giving you that was a mistake,” I say.

“Still no confirmed sightings,” Nolan says, entirely serious. “But I'm close.”

“Don't,” I say to him, catching the Bigfoot caller rising toward his mouth out of the corner of my eye.

He lowers it, mildly offended.

The screen door opens, interrupting the conversation. Ivy steps out. Everything else stops mattering. She's here. Safe. Her face changes the second she sees me the same way mine probably does. She's across the porch and down the steps, and I've got my arms around her before I've even processed moving.

I hold her longer than a normal hello requires. She doesn't seem to mind. I press my face into her hair, just breathing her in, warm and solid and real. The physical proof matters more than I have words for. Strawberries. Her hair smells like strawberries. When I finally pull back enough to kiss her, it's slow, warm, and she curls her fingers into the front of my shirt.

Mabel appears from somewhere and winds around my ankles like she's been personally waiting for this reunion. The rest of the crew crowds in, Tessa hugging Reid, Dani asking a dozen questions at once, Cassidy and Trevor somewhere in the mix. It's loud and warm and the kind of chaos I missed.

Later, Ivy and I drive into town, just the two of us. She shows me where the crew worked, points out the road they cleared, the properties they protected, the spot where they were standing when Russ finally told them Timber Creek would probably be okay. She talks about it plainly, no drama in her voice, just facts, the way someone talks about a job well done.

I listen, and I understand something I hadn't quite grasped from three hundred miles away. She wasn't just near danger. She was doing what she's trained to do, protecting people and places she loves, competent and steady the entire time I was imagining the worst.

I still hate that she was in that position at all. But I don't wish she'd been somewhere safer, doing nothing, while people she cares about needed help. That's not who she is, and some part of me has known that about her since the day I watched her handle a burn assessment better than half the crews I've worked fires with.

We eat dinner with everyone that evening, nothing elaborate, just crew-house normal, Dani eventually confiscating the Bigfoot caller before it can interrupt the meal again. It's ordinary in every way, and I realize, watching Ivy laugh at something Tessa says, that I missed this too. Not just her. All of it.

Later, we make our way onto the porch.

Last time we sat here, dry lightning flickered silent over the ridge, and we both knew I was leaving the next morning without a return date. Tonight the sky's quiet. No storm building. Just stars and crickets, and Ivy beside me.

“Those twenty-four hours,” I say eventually. “That was the hardest thing I've done all summer. And I spent part of it jumping into an active fire.”

“I know,” she says. “I hated knowing you were probably hearing about Timber Creek and couldn't reach me. I kept thinking about what that must have been doing to you.”