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“Ten minutes,” I told the van. “We look, we leave.”
The van didn’t argue. It never does. It’s the most supportive relationship I’ve ever been in, not counting the current one, which is going to kill me when he finds out where I am.
Then he’s going to make me dinner. Then he’s going to kill me again.
But I couldn’t call her from my couch. I tried to picture it, me and a throw pillow and a seventeen-year silence, and I couldn’t do it. I needed to stand in the one place where we were still seventeen and brave, and put my hand on the proof, and then I could pick up the phone like a grown-up.
So here I am. God, it’s windy.
I sent Travis a text. I typed love you at the end of it without thinking, the way you type it to your mom, and I didn’t realize what I’d done until after I hit send. And then I stood in the barn and stared at it.
Love you.
In a text message. Like a teenager. After all that waiting for the right moment.
He hasn’t written back. He’s on shift. He’s busy. It’s a red flag day. That’s fine.
I’m still staring at the screen when the light changes.
It’s subtle. The barn is full of light in stripes, from the gaps in the boards, and the stripes go from white to yellow. Then to orange. And the wind brings something through the gaps that wasn’t there a minute ago. Smoke.
With my heart racing, I go to the barn door.
The sky to the west is brown and boiling, a wall of it rising off the ridge behind the county road, a mile away, maybe less. And along the bottom of it, a line of orange.
Running toward the lane. My lane. The only road out.
I stand in the doorway of the barn with my mouth open.
Oh, shit. Oh, shit, shit, shit. Then my brain catches up and I run for the van.
Shaking, I put it in gear, and I drive about two hundred yards down the lane before I stop.
The fire is already across it.
The flames aren’t big yet. Grass fire. Knee-high, flickering, eating its way across the gravel lane between me and North Fork Road, and the smoke behind it so thick I can’t see the road at all. Fifty feet of fire. A hundred. I don’t know. I can’t tell. The wind is blowing ash against my windshield like snow.
I can’t drive through that. I know I can’t. Grandma North taught me to drive in the van, and the first thing she ever told me about fire was don’t drive into what you can’t see through.
Hurrying, I back up to the barn, crooked.
Then I sit with the engine running and the smoke getting thicker, and I call him.
He answers before it rings.
“Lindsey.”
His voice is calm but under it is something I’ve never heard in Travis Raines’s voice before. Fear.
“I’m at the barn,” I blurt. My voice is high and shaking. “Travis. I’m at the Hollister barn. The fire is across the lane. I tried. I can’t get out.”
“I know, honey. I know where you are. I’m coming.”
“How do you—”
“Your text. And the reporting party saw your van go in.” Behind him, the engine rumbles. The siren wails. Rob’s voice is saying something.
Travis says, “Listen to me. Are you in the van?”
