Page 37 of Reluctant Bride

“Basement archive,” Eli says when I reach him, soot already streaking one side of his face. “That’s where it started. West is trying to get the old photo collection out of the second floor before the smoke does. I told him he’s an idiot.”

“Is he wrong to try?”

“Completely. Doesn’t mean he’s stopping.”

A firefighter comes out crouched and fast with a man slung over one shoulder, boots scrabbling for purchase on the wet pavement, and the crowd surges forward before the second truck’s crew pushes them back. Somebody’s screaming a name. Somebody else is already on their knees with a phone to their ear giving an address they don’t need to give, because half this valley already knows exactly where the records office is.

I feel Sage beside me before I see her, close enough that her shoulder finds mine without either of us deciding it, and I get one hand flat against her back and press her half a step behind me, out of the path of the next crew coming through with a hose line.

“I can see fine from back here,” she says, already reading the move for what it is.

“I know.”

“You don’t have to manage me.”

“I’m not managing you. I’m keeping a burning building off my wife.” I don’t take my hand off her back. She doesn’t ask me to. “There’s a difference.”

“That’s my line.”

“I learned from the best.”

One corner of her mouth lifts under all that smoke and noise, almost, and it’s the only steady thing in the whole street for about two seconds.

By the time the last hose line goes from a roar to a hiss, the fire chief’s crew has the roof smoldering instead of burning and our town does the thing Rimrock always does the second the worst of a crisis passes: it feeds people. Nell’s out there in her apron with a folding table and a coffee urn like she keeps one loaded in the trunk for exactly this. Tessa’s directing two teenagers unloading pizza boxes from the back of a hatchback, feeding soot-streaked firefighters before they’ve even peeled their gear off.

Then I see Ashley.

She’s standing at the edge of the crowd in a blazer already ruined by soot, watching her own building burn, and her face has gone bloodless in a way I’ve only seen once before, a long time ago, right before I walked away from her and never asked what it did to her.

I leave Sage with Tessa before Sage can argue about it, and I cross the street.

“Ashley.”

She turns, and for one second, before the county-official mask slides back into place, I catch something underneath it. Fear. Real fear, not performed for an audience, and it isn’t aimed at me or at the building. Her eyes go past my shoulder first, out to the street, to the cars, to nothing I can see, and only then do they come back to my face. Whatever she’s afraid of this morning isn’t standing in front of her.

“Terrible morning,” she says, already reaching for bright and civic and composed. “I don’t know how this happened. The wiring in that basement’s been a liability for years, I’ve said so at every commission meeting.”

“Basement archive,” I say. “Land and survey records. That’s a targeted fire, Ashley, not bad wiring.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know what I know.” I keep my voice where I kept it with Curtis two nights before my own wedding, level, even, the kind of calm that takes more out of a man than shouting would. “When’s the last time you were in that basement?”

Her chin comes up. “I don’t keep a log of every time I visit my own building, Dawson.”

That’s a lie. I watch it leave her mouth and I know it’s a lie because I’ve read people my whole adult life, a skill my father drilled into me before I ever needed it, and one I never lost with this woman, even after all this time of not letting myself use it.

“Who else has access to that archive?”

“Staff. Contractors. Half the commission’s had a key at one point or another.” Her eyes cut past me, toward Sage, toward the crowd, toward anywhere that isn’t my face. “I really don’t see what you’re implying.”

“I’m not implying anything yet.” I let that word sit exactly as long as it needs to. “I’m asking questions.”

“You sound like you’re interrogating me.”

“I sound like a man who watched a federal informant get murdered with my own credentials this week and isn’t in the mood to be lied to twice in one morning.” I keep my voice steady through the whole sentence, and I watch it land somewhere behind her eyes that the composed county-clerk mask can’t quite cover fast enough. “One more. Did you know what was in that basement before this morning?”

“Everyone knows what’s in a records basement, Dawson. That’s what a records basement is for.”