The heat of the fire lapped at her cheeks, and she watched it through the trees. Five more seconds, five, and she would’ve been caught in that blaze. The house was quickly engulfed in flames, the fire a deeper red than she remembered fire being, the heat so strong that the leaves closest to the house were starting to wilt.
Ellie thought she should feel panic, that she should want to run away, but instead she started to sink into the moist earth beneath her. The tears she’d been holding back since she first saw her sister, lifeless, covered in blood, started to pour out in hot streams. As she stood, crying, the mud took on a life of its own, pulling her down into the muck. When it hit the bare skin under her pant leg, a deep shiver vibrated through her already racked body.
The wind blew through the trees, sending goose bumps across Ellie’s arms and making her bones ache despite the intense heat from the home. She tried to find the energy to get up, to pull herself out of the dirt and get help, but it seemed impossible to move any farther. She’d been trapped by Caleb, Steve, Broadlands, and her love for her father, but this was the first time she’d trapped herself. Ellie felt heavy, weighed down, not just with mud but also with despair. There had to be an explanation.
No answers came. Just silence and trees and her sister’s house burning brightly in front of her. Sirens sounded in the distance. The Broadlands Fire Department, no doubt. They’d help. They’d fix things.
The wind picked up again, this time grabbing at the branches and sending the half-burned leaves from the trees near the house, along with a gust of hot ash and wind, down around Ellie. The ash used to be a home that her sister’s family lived in. It used to be a safe place to visit and play and grow closer to the people she loved. It was one of the only reasons Broadlands was even bearable. And now it was gone, along with the image of the family that used to live inside.
The cooling ash brushed her face, cheeks wet with tears, and for one moment, reality and the questions that accompanied it floated away, and she enjoyed the beauty of the fire and the dancing embers around her. Fire was the same everywhere whether devastating a house, a city, or an open prairie. If so much trauma and danger could lurk here in Broadlands, was it really safer than anywhere else?
The sirens grew louder, so loud her already tender ears ached, but the closer they came, the more they warbled in her ears, the light around her going from red to black over and over again like someone was flashing the lights. Just before they went dark, she heard a familiar voice, and arms picked her up out of the seemingly inescapable mud. Moments later, she awoke to Travis kneeling over her, checking her pulse.
“Ellie, thank God you’re okay.” He touched her hand gently and then her forehead. “Did he hurt you anywhere?”
Ellie wasn’t sure who Travis was talking about at first, but then she remembered Steve with a gun pointed at her. She spoke in a gravelly whisper. “Not really.”
“Do you know where he went?” he asked.
“Inside,” she said simply. Travis glanced over his shoulder and took in the ball of flames behind them, smoke leaving a towering trail into the sky.
“Inside?” he asked. “Are you sure?”
Ellie nodded and then closed her eyes again, her body forcing her to escape from the nightmare around her. Travis placed his balled-up sweatshirt under her head and ran off to a cluster of police cars. The world started to fade, and she remembered one more important thing about fire. Sometimes in nature, fire caused pinecones to open and prairies to bloom. Sometimes it cleared out old dead trees to make way for new life. Sometimes fire wasn’t about destruction—sometimes it was about renewal. Sometimes fire was necessary.
CHAPTER 40
ELLIE
Friday, November 4
Eighteen months later
The sound of an e-mail coming through on her phone made Ellie wake with a start. It was dark, and the chill in the air was distinctly fall-like. She didn’t know how to define the difference between the cold in the spring and the cold in the autumn, but they were opposite in their basic nature—one filled with promises of the future, the other filled with good-byes.
She actually liked both kinds of cold. Both were cool enough to make you want to curl under a blanket but not so cold you felt like your bones were going to break if you took too hard a step.
The clock read 4:45 a.m. It was still too early to be up officially, but sometimes when you’d been working twenty-four-hour shifts for so long, it was hard to get back to a normal schedule. Most mornings she’d just roll over and try to go back to sleep, but today she had class.
Ellie rolled over, rubbed Travis’s back, and placed a quick kiss on the nape of his neck. She still loved the way he smelled. She sat up and adjusted her ring. It was a little oversize, and the modest diamond kept slipping around her finger toward the palm of her hand. It was strange wearing an engagement ring again. After breaking things off with Collin, Ellie thought she’d never get married, especially to someone from Broadlands.
But on dark mornings like this, when she wrapped herself in the pink fluffy robe she got when she was thirteen, she had this overwhelming sense of relief that she’d gotten out of that place. She might live in a tiny studio apartment in a slightly questionable neighborhood, but she was in New York and a full-time med student again, so it felt like a palace.
A lot had changed since Amelia woke up. After the house fire and the search for Steve’s body, Ellie felt more trapped in Broadlands than she ever had. For a while she was full-time caregiver to not just her father but also her sister. She was also her family’s only source of income. Amelia woke up as a single parent faced with bankruptcy, conspiracy, and potential fraud charges. It took a while for her recollection about what happened in the Broadlands Roofing office to fall into place. Caleb helped fill in his part of the narrative, but Randy’s death and Amelia’s actual shooting remained fuzzy, a common response to trauma and extreme blood loss. The only person who could fill in the blanks would be Steve, but no one knew for sure whether he had survived the blast. If he had, he’d left no trace of his escape.