“It feels…right. Like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.” This past month or so with Aaron had been honestly wonderful. I didn’t itch anymore. Wasn’t worried that I had zero job prospects and my meager savings were dwindling right alongside the money for house renovations. And that had to be worth something. Was I all better? No. I still couldn’t face the idea of working at the middle school, and I was still coming to grips with knowing Jason had died with our argument in his head, without me ever letting him fully in, and never truly knowing him in return. But the guilt about it was easing. And that was amazing.
Jodi’s eyes shone bright as she clapped. “That makes me so happy!” She turned to grab my coffee and pushed it forward with a wink. “Wish we could talk more, but…” She gestured to the line of people behind me. “Enjoy!”
I made my way to my favorite overstuffed chair, took a sip of the delicious brew, and opened my laptop to pull up the minutes of the Town Council’s last few meetings. After learning about the residency requirement from Miss Betty at the birthday party, I’d done some digging and finally gotten my hands on the minutes. They weren’t hanging out on the website, ready to be read by the public. Never mind that they were supposed to be.
A few pages in, I saw something. The date of the meeting was on the 10th, and they’d enacted the resolution on the 14th, but they were supposed to enact it on the 15th. Would that be enough? Would twenty-four hours be the loophole that I needed? I wasn’t sure. But maybe? I scribbled down some notes.
It shouldn’t have been this way. The house I loved had turned into a too-expensive weight around my neck. Instead of memories everywhere I looked, I saw repair bills. Couple that with this rule that if I didn’t live there, the house could be automatically donated to the historical society, and I was beginning to wonder why I was fighting this in the first place.
I took a sip of coffee and sighed. I wanted to stay now. But I wanted it to be on my terms. This kind of force by the Council didn’t sit right with me. It was one thing for Gigi to have concocted a way to make me to face her and Jason’s death. I understood that now, and yeah, point for Gigi, taking care of me from beyond. The thing was, the more I stayed here and worked on this house, the more I realized that I really didn’t want to stay in the house. Stay in town? I didn’t know yet. But stay at Gigi’s? No. It was too big.
Still, I couldn’t let Mrs. Withers win. It was petty. I knew it, but I absolutely would not let it happen. Let a decades-old feud go up in flames after mere months? Not on my watch.
But maybe it was time to stop being petty. Or try a different tactic: pretend to go belly-up and let Mrs. Withers get her hands on it, have the society dump money into the house to fix it, and once they were done, swoop in with this surprise about them enacting the rule one day too soon, and voila! Take that, Mrs. Withers!
Yeah, right.
The door jingled and I looked up to see a firefighter come in, clearly fresh from dropping his turnout gear at the station. His face and hands were streaked and dirty, and he walked straight to the counter without bothering to stand in line. “Four alarm,” he said.
Jodi nodded and got to work without another word. The line stood back, and Lon, a woman I went to school with, piped up. “Everything okay, Mack?”
The firefighter turned to her and nodded wearily. “Nearly lost one of our own, but yeah, we’re all okay.”
My heart thudded and I sat up straight.
Mack continued. “Craziest thing, too. Will was right behind us, until he wasn’t. We’d been on the second floor and gotten the fire out, so we headed down the stairs, which we’d checked for integrity. But Will fell through, and the oxygen rushed the hole.” He shook his head. “His damn brother ran in like a godforsaken idiot.”
“Price?” Lon asked.
“Aaron.”
My world narrowed into tight pinpoints of near-black. Aaron had run into a burning building to save his brother? He was the fucking paramedic. There were a million regulations that should have kept him from doing what he did.
I jumped up from my chair, papers flying everywhere, my hands shaking. I looked around, caught Jodi’s eye, and fled.
Out the front door I went, heading straight for the firehouse. I couldn’t hear anything over the roar in my ears. He had to be okay. I needed him to be okay. There was no choice.
“Please please please,” I whispered, my feet eating up the block of concrete.
The two trucks weren’t packed away neatly like I was used to seeing them. Instead, they were pulled out of the bays, blocking the sidewalk ahead of me, being tended to by a handful of firemen I knew by sight but not name.
The smell hit me and I drew up short. Fire. Smoke. The particular scent of a life demolished. I choked back a sob and stood, rooted to the ground, unable to walk any farther. My heart kicked into high gear and I breathed shallowly, clenching my fists.
A dingy yellow fur ball raced past me and headed straight into the station. Samson. He’d not showed up this morning, and I’d wondered about him, but maybe he’d been taking care of these guys instead.
I forced a deep breath into my lungs, but all it did was push the odor of destruction farther into me. I’d never be okay with this. It was too much. Not today. Not ever.
I unglued my feet from the sidewalk and pushed forward, twin furies of anger and worry spurring me on. I swept into the engine bay and looked around, focusing on my breathing and not on the way it seemed nothing had changed in the bay.
“Devon?”
His familiar voice cut through my haze and I snapped my eyes up, meeting the very pair of warm gray-blue eyes I’d been searching for. “Aaron,” I breathed.
Thank fuck. He was here. Whole. Alive.
He walked to me, his face streaked with black, and pulled me into a tight embrace before I knew what was happening. For the briefest of moments, I let myself melt into him, feeling the strength of his arms and banishing the memory of Chief telling me about the last person I’d loved and lost.
Then I pulled away and shakily wiped at the traitorous tear that ran down my cheek. “How could you?”
Aaron’s look of concern was immediately replaced by one of understanding. “Sweetheart, I’m okay. Look, not a scratch on me.” He held his arms out for my inspection.
I wasn’t having it.
“No.” I pushed at his chest, but of course he didn’t move. “It’s bad enough you’re a paramedic with the fire department. But now you’re running into burning buildings? No.” I pushed at him again. “You don’t get to do that.”
He grabbed my arms as I pushed at him again, aware we had an audience and not caring. “It was my brother, Devon,” he said gently. “I had to.”
“No, you didn’t,” I growled, still shoving against him even as he held my arms. “There were other firefighters! That’s their job, not yours.”
He sighed. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand there. Not when I could hear what was going on.” His voice broke and my heart stuttered. “He’s my brother, Devon,” he repeated.
“I lost the love of my life in a fire, Aaron!” The words tore out of my throat as I shoved him again.
He blanched.
“You don’t get to say it wasn’t a big deal. It’s a goddamn miracle nothing happened. Do you understand?”
He searched my eyes and nodded tightly.
