Chapter 1
Monica woke from a dream of fire and darkness. She sat up straight in bed, gasping for breath, and reached for the glass of water sitting on her bedside table. She gulped it down as sweat bloomed across her heated skin.
Looking at the clock on her bedside table, Monica realized the vision had come to her just past midnight in the small hot hours of the Glimmer Lake summer. Some women in their late forties woke in the middle of the night sweating from a hot flash. Monica woke up sweating from the visions that had tormented her dreams since a near-death experience three years before.
The doctors told her she’d died for a few minutes, but what did that mean? There had been no bright lights or visions of peaceful tunnels. She hadn’t seen Gilbert, her husband of twenty-five years, who had died the year before the wreck.
Monica didn’t remember much of anything from the car accident and near drowning. What she did remember was the first time a vision had come true.
At first it felt like déjà vu. She thought she’d imagined it. Just a little thing, a phone call that came exactly when she knew it would.
Then another thing happened.
And another.
Soon visions of places she’d never seen invaded her thoughts. Violent acts and secret pain became as clear to her as a movie. Instead of having the normal worrisome dreams of a widow and mother of four, Monica was haunted by everything from premonitions of everyday mundane encounters to visions of murder, death, and destruction.
She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and sat up straight, holding the sweating water glass against her cheek. Drops of condensation ran down her neck, over her collarbone, and between her breasts, trailing the drops of sweat brought on by the oppressive summer heat. She reached for the journal she kept by her bed.
Though her heart was still racing, she mentally reconstructed the dream she knew was far more than a dream. Her ceiling fan beat a steady rhythm overhead, wafting air onto the sweat-soaked sheets as she closed her eyes to examine the memory before it faded.
Fire and destruction.
She’d been walking down Main Street, walking past shops and storefronts she knew well, walking calmly despite the ash and sparks that rained around her. She was alone in the dream. The only sounds had been the crack of burning branches and the wind as the town of Glimmer Lake burned around her.
Monica scribbled down everything. She’d been wearing a sundress, the same dress she’d worn the day before, a light cotton outfit that kept her cool but still professional-looking while she was working at Russell House.
She wrote down what she’d heard—the crackle of the fire, breaking branches, the wind. She wrote down everything she had seen—which shops were burning, which cars were on the road, which cars she saw in the lots, and how far she could see in the distance before the smoke swallowed her sight.
She knew the town of Glimmer Lake intimately. She knew who drove each car she’d seen. She knew who owned the shops she’d seen burning. She also knew which firefighters would respond to the scene, risking their lives to save the small town in the heart of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
She knew because her late husband Gilbert Velasquez had been one of those firefighters. But though she was a widow, Monica hadn’t lost Gil to the ravages of a fire. She’d lost him to the mundane, everyday tragedy of heart disease.
Gilbert had been gone for nearly four years, struck down by a heart condition that had crouched silently until the morning it took his life.
She slept alone and she woke alone. Her four children, the children she and Gil had raised, were all out in the world, living their lives. Only Jake, her oldest, remained in Glimmer Lake, working as a handyman, boat captain, and sometime ski bum during the winter.
Until the year before, Jake been living at home. But once he gained a measure of independence by working at Russell House—along with a much more generous salary than he’d been earning at Max’s Pontoon Rentals—he’d moved out of Monica’s house and into an apartment with a friend.
Monica glanced at the clock again, noted the time, and realized she wouldn’t be able to return to sleep. She finished writing as many details of the vision as possible; then she put her journal down, finished the last of her water, and stood up to go to the kitchen.
She couldn’t deny that she missed having Jake around. Sylvia, her second oldest and her only daughter, was working on her master’s degree in psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. Her two youngest boys, Caleb and Sam, were working in their own business, a construction company they’d started just after their father passed. They were only in Bridger City, and Monica got to see them every few weeks when they came home for Sunday dinner.
But day to day, night to night, Monica remained alone. Her two best friends both had men in their lives. Robin had repaired her relationship with her husband Mark, and Val had started a new relationship with the local sheriff, Sully.
She wandered through the three-bedroom, two-bath house she and Gil had bought so many years before. It was a good house, the first and only one she’d owned as a married woman. She’d been a teenage bride and mother, and she and Gil hadn’t been able to afford their own house for years.
But once Gil was hired on full time at the local fire department, they bought it and then remained there for the next twenty years. It wasn’t fancy, but it had been enough. They were happy.
They were so happy.
Monica walked into the kitchen and put on water for tea. She reached into the cupboard and took down a bag of chamomile along with a jar of honey.
She’d spent years listening to friends complain about inattentive husbands or neglectful boyfriends. But though she and Gilbert had hardly been more than children when they married, she couldn’t have asked for a better man. He was funny and romantic. He put her needs above everyone else, even above his own family. They’d had rough times, but those rough times had never even come close to a fraction of the good.
They had struggled, but just when life seemed to be smoothing out—when they’d raised their kids and sent them out into the world as successful adults—the rug hadn’t just been pulled out from under Monica…
The rug up and disappeared.
Gil died, and Monica had been left alone. All the dreams of a joyful retirement—of the adventures they’d been waiting to take together—were gone.
Poof.
It was as if Life had said to her: “Oh, did you think you had a plan? How cute. That’s gone now. Figure it out.”
As the water came to a boil, she measured out the tea and her mind returned to the vision of fire and destruction from which she’d woken.
It wasn’t the first time she’d dreamed of fire. Monica didn’t know a firefighter’s partner who didn’t have nightmares about what their loved one might walk into.
But there were nightmares, and then there was this.
She poured hot water over the chamomile leaves, stirred in a bit of honey, and took her tea to the living room. She sat in Gil’s big old recliner that she’d hated from the moment he bought it. She hated the fake leather upholstery and the massive size. It took up too much space, she’d said, and it didn’t match anything else in the room.
Nevertheless, Gilbert had loved that chair, and now that he was gone, Monica couldn’t bear to part with it. She sat in it and looked over the wooded yard. Monica knew that she didn’t need a big house anymore, but parting with it felt like losing another part of Gilbert, and she wasn’t ready for that.