Page 6

The bell rings again and this time it’s Cassia, my former employee and new firefighter.

“I was thinking about you,” she says. “Hey, Helen. Here to order the chamber flowers?”

“You know it. Like clockwork.”

Helen tells me what she wants this year. “Same as last year. Fall stuff. The leaves. The pumpkin. But this year make it a little bigger.”

“I’m on it.”

She heads toward the door. “Enjoy the forearms,” she says with a wink.

“What was that about?” Cassia asks, grinning.

“Oh nothing.”

“I know someone who has really good forearms, and he happens to live upstairs.”

Cassia will see a lie a mile away. “Okay. Busted. He’s got nice arms. I told Helen. It was a mistake.”

She pulls her phone out of her back pocket, thumbs something open and props it against the register.

Static fills the air first until Susan’s voice reads out the time.

“Is that the scanner?” I ask.

“It’s an app. Rob put it on there so I’d quit calling the station on my days off.” She turns the volume up. “I’m off till Sunday. But if they call a second alarm, I’m gone.”

A man’s voice cuts in, breathing hard. “Command, Wallace. Raines and I are anchored at the county road. Starting up the left flank.”

My entire body turns electric at the mention of Travis’s last name.

“Copy, Wallace,” Caleb, the fire chief, says. I know his voice. Everybody in town does.

“Holy crap, Cassia, is it good?”

“That’s boring.” Cassia plucks a petal off the floor. “Which is good. That means they’re cutting line and nobody’s doing anything stupid. The flank’s the side of the fire. The wind pushes the head. Caleb put the new guy where he can learn something without getting cooked.”

“Cooked?” I choke out.

“Bad word choice.” She winces. “Sorry. He’s fine, Linds. He’s with Rob. Rob’s annoying as hell, but he’s careful.”

We listen as I fiddle with a pipe cleaner. Engine 1 calls in structure protection on the barns. Somebody asks for hose. Devin Mathews comes on and asks where he’s supposed to park the brush truck.

Travis doesn’t say a word on the radio. I don’t know why I expected him to.

“You’re doing the thing,” Cassia says.

“What thing?”

She nods at my hand. I’m holding my necklace again, my half of the little gold heart, rubbing my thumb over the jagged edge where it breaks.

With an exhale, I let go of it.

Above the register, Danielle grins at me out of our senior prom picture that we took before the guys showed up. She’s got dark curls and a purple satin dress, with her arm hooked around my neck so tight I look like I’m being strangled.

We were seventeen. Of course we thought we had it figured out.

I don’t let my eyes tear up.