“Eason,” she croaked in my arms.
My feet were still moving as I sprinted away, but time stopped as her voice permeated my senses.
No.
It wasn’t possible.
She was covered in soot, and my eyes were caked with ash and what I would later learn to be blood, but I could still make out the large flowers on her yellow—
“Uh, no. It’s my dress that Jessica borrowed and I had to do an entire Tom Cruise Mission Impossible thing to get it back last week.”
Oh, God.
I kept running until the wind changed direction, clearing the smoke. With my heart in my throat, I prayed that my still ringing ears had deceived me. Then I set her down and used the inside of my shirt to clear my face.
“Eason,” she croaked.
But once again, she wasn’t my wife.
“Oh, God,” I breathed, watching as she rose on unsteady legs. Tears carved twin riverbeds through the ash on her cheeks.
“What happened?” Bree asked, her green eyes focused on the blazing inferno behind me.
Acrid guilt devoured me. “I…”
I saved the wrong woman.
I left the mother of my child in a burning building.
My final broken promise to the woman I’d vowed forever to was, “I’ll be right back.”
Bile crawled up my throat. “I don’t know.”
I glanced back at the house, the heat of the roaring fire scorching me even from yards away. Overwhelming grief hit me as I realized there was no way I could get back through those flames.
Oh, God. Jessica.
In the middle of tragedy, it’s strange the things that become engrained into your memories. Years later, I wouldn’t be able to tell you how long it took the firetrucks to get there. I couldn’t tell you what time it was or what I had been wearing. But I would never be able to forget the absolute devastation on Bree’s face when she realized we were the only two standing outside the burning house.
“Where’s Rob?” she rasped, her voice sounding like it had traveled over a mile of gravel before exiting her throat. “And Jessica. Where are they?” She took an urgent stride toward me.
“I tried…” I doubled over into a fit of coughing. It was probably for the best. There was no way I could have finished that thought.
Grabbing the front of my shirt, she shoved me back upright and gave me a hard shake. “Are they in there?”
“I don’t know!” I shouted, fear and failure mingling into one soul-crushing emotion.
There was a pause. Neither of us breathed. We desperately tried to rationalize our way out. She’d been unconscious when I found her. She hadn’t seen the inside of that house.
The destruction.
The carnage.
The hell we’d both narrowly escaped.
No. Bree hadn’t experienced any of that.
And it showed, because she still had hope.
“Rob!” she cried, darting past me. She slipped on the grass and fell, the brutal heat like a forcefield stopping her in her tracks. “Help me!” she screamed, giving up on standing altogether. She began crawling one inch at a time. “Eason, help me. We have to get them out.”
It took every ounce of strength I had left to hook her around the hips. “Bree, stop.”
She tore at my arms, kicking and flailing. “Let me go! I have to get them.” Her voice echoed off the trees, each reverberation slicing me to the core.
“You can’t go in there!” I barked. “You won’t make it out.”
“Then you go.” Her chest shook with broken exhales. “You did this. You did all of this. Now you go in there and get my husband and you fucking fix it.”
I was in a state of shock, running on nothing more than adrenaline. I couldn’t feel the third-degree burns on my hands or the six-inch gash on my head, but her verbal jab hit me like a TKO. “What?”
“Get him!” she screamed, her face vibrating with a pain so visceral it rattled my bones. Her anger broke into sobs, but her words were no less venomous. “You left him in there. You have to go get him. He never would have done that to you.”
I drew in a deep breath, desperate for oxygen I couldn’t seem to absorb. My mind spun in a million different directions, a frantic sprint of my neurons to make sense of the world on fire around me. “I didn’t do this,” I gasped, glancing over my shoulder at the towering inferno, the weight of gravity suddenly more than I could carry. “I barely got you out. I thought you were Jessica. I was going to go back for—”
That was all I got out before our entire lives exploded all over again.
Maybe she was right and this was somehow my fault.
Maybe I’d failed them both.
But as blinding orange and red flames shot high into the sky, there was only one person left that I could save.
“No!” Bree screamed as I dove on top of her, pinning her to the Earth. Fiery fragments of my life rained down over us, each one feeling like a rusty blade slicing the heart from my chest.
She fought beneath me, biting and clawing at me.
She cried his name and cussed mine.
As sirens screamed in the distance, she had air in her lungs and a beat in her chest.
And through it all, no matter how hard I prayed, she never magically became Jessica.
BREE
Numb, alone, and utterly lost, I stared at his side of the bed. With my hands under the pillow, I angled my legs to where only three days ago he would have let out a playful hiss when my cold feet touched his calves. He would have grabbed my hip and dragged me toward him with a growled, “Get over here, woman.”
And then he would have held me.
Talked to me.
Grown old with me.
“Come back,” I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut, desperate to feel him again. I could still smell his signature scent of crisp lemon and cedarwood on the sheets. His dirty clothes were still in the hamper. A bag of his dry cleaning had been delivered since he’d taken his last breath. Yet my husband, the father of my children—my Rob. He was gone. “Please just come back,” I choked out around the inescapable sadness that had defined my every waking hour since the fire.
It’s going to be okay. I heard his voice in my head. You and the kids. You’re going to be fine. Let’s be honest, you were always the four-hundred-horsepower engine behind this family. I was just the hood ornament.
A sob bubbled in my throat. It was such a Rob thing to say. I swear the man could have convinced a mud puddle it was an ocean. He had a way about him that was so calm and rational it soothed my insecurities and left me with a smile in the process.
God, I needed a smile.
But most of all, I needed him.
“How?” I begged. “How am I supposed to do this without you?”
That was where our imaginary conversations always ended. The ghost in my head never had any answers. I couldn’t wrap my mind around how I’d ended up in this situation in the first place, much less how to carry on in the aftermath.
Everything immediately before and after I’d woken up in Eason’s arms was splotchy. I remembered the panic and confusion. The anger and resentment. The absolute frustration that the world kept spinning and it was all I could do to hold on. But I’d never forget the earth-shattering pain as a police officer stood in my hospital room, informing me that Rob and Jessica’s bodies had both been recovered—or at least what was left of them. He’d asked me a dozen questions. I’d answered them as best I could, but nothing felt real anymore.