Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
“And you told me to hold still,” I say, hearing the echo of her sixteen-year-old voice in the shape of my name. “And I did.”
We look at each other for a long time. A cable draws taut between us, a line we step onto every time we get this close. Memory isn’t a soft blanket here; it’s a fault line. One shift and everything breaks open.
She looks away first, toward the river cutting a dark ribbon through the snow in the distance. “Sometimes I try to picture a version where the fire doesn’t happen.”
“Don’t,” I say immediately. “It’s a trap.”
Her eyes come back, curious. “How?”
“You build a house in your head. Different rooms, different paint. You walk it at night and memorize where the light falls. Then you wake up and you’re still standing in the ash.”
She studies me like she wants to open my chest to read the truth carved on the inside.
“What’s in your house?” she asks softly.
“You,” I say before I can stop it.
Wind lifts my words and flings them across the yard. I can’t take them back. I don’t try.
Color touches her cheeks that isn’t from the cold. She holds my stare like she’s scared of what happens if she lets it go.
“Axel,” she says, quiet warning.
“I know,” I say, the two words packed with ten years. I exhale into the cold until I see the shape of it. “We were kids. We didn’t know what we were doing. We don’t have to pretend a different timeline fixes anything.”
“Doesn’t stop me from wondering,” she murmurs.
“Me either.” I glance down at the snow between our boots, then back at her. “But the version where the fire doesn’t happen doesn’t change what we are right now.”
“And what are we?” she asks, steadier than I am.
“Two people who remember too much,” I say. “Two people who keep running into each other. Two people who can’t stop feeling like the ground’s about to move.”
She swallows, looks at my mouth, looks away. “I hate that you’re right.”
“You always did.”
She flicks a glance at the yard where Torres is still swearing at the gasket. “You should go save their pride.”
“They lost it in ’19.”
“Then save the truck.”
“That I can do.” I take a step back because I have to, because standing this close to her on a morning like this is how men make mistakes they spend months paying for. “You want to watch training or pretend paperwork is urgent?”
She tips her head. “If I watch training, I’ll critique your hat situation.”
“I won’t wear it out of spite.”
She fights a smile. “Paperwork it is.”
I start to turn, then stop. “Savannah.”
She waits.
“I’m glad you remember the good parts,” I say.
“I try to,” she says. “Some days they’re loud enough.”
“Stay loud,” I say, and she nods like she’ll put that on a list and keep it.
I walk away, but every step pulls at something strung between us. Torres hands me the offending coupling like it personally betrayed him. I reseat the gasket, lock the cam, and toss it back. He mutters thanks, eyes flicking over my shoulder toward the stairs where Savannah lingers another heartbeat before she goes inside.
“Man,” he says, not unkind. “You are cooked.”
“Shut up and get the cones,” I say.
Training takes up our next hour as we hook and unhook, flake and charge, run evolutions until my shoulders complain. We coil hose. Stow. Wipe. Cole dismisses us and barks at Torres about something he broke in ’19. The guys scatter. I walk toward the door like I’m not counting the steps.
She meets me halfway, which is the cruelest, kindest thing.
“Your form’s better,” she says, dry.
“Yours always was.” I gesture at the clipboard. “Productive paperwork?”
“Absolutely none.”
“Thought so.”
She looks past me to the yard. “When I was nine, your mom braided garland with me and pretended it was important so I wouldn’t hear the adults whispering.”
“Yeah.”
“When I was sixteen,” she says, voice thinning a little, “you stole the keys and took me to the overlook so I could cry where no one had to see.”
I remember the weight of those keys in my palm. I remember the way she pressed her forehead to the cold window and said nothing for twenty minutes and then said everything in five. “We don’t talk about my record,” I say.
She huffs. “Statute of limitations.”
I lean one shoulder to the jamb opposite her, the space between us a magnetic field. “When we were eight, you smacked Brandon with a snow shovel because he called me poor.”
“He deserved worse.”
“I deserved the shovel.”
“You deserved pie.”
I swallow. Something opens behind my breastbone and I don’t have a name for it that doesn’t sound like begging.
“We were good,” she says, almost to herself.
“We were,” I say, and it lands like a promise.
Her eyes lift to mine, and for a heartbeat the sun, the snow, the entire town—everything—drops away. There’s just this. The fault line. The heat rising. The rock about to shift.