realized they weren’t out there...” It was all around him, even now. Like he was there. “You know how ash flies through the air. It’s like pieces of a broken world. And that’s what it felt like to me.”
He was lost right then. In that moment when he’d been on the ground, on his knees, watching that ash float through the night sky. “Like it was my life broken in pieces. My life...burned to nothing. It was. It wasn’t just like that. It was.”
He could see himself in the memory. Screaming like a wounded animal, cut from trying to get through the glass. He could even see...he’d hit one of the firefighters. Punched him. The man who’d been holding him back. He hadn’t decided to do that, not in the moment. It was just... He’d been a man possessed of a supernatural level of rage and strength, wanting to fight the flames that had consumed his world.
And there just... Hadn’t been anything he could do.
He had been a rich man. An important man. A man with all this supposed power and influence the world required. And he’d realized that night that it meant nothing. Nothing at all.
He was less than nothing.
Because he couldn’t put out a blaze with his money and his influence. He couldn’t turn back time. He hadn’t even been able to throw himself into the fire, and God knew he’d tried.
He’d been stopped even then.
Five years, and it didn’t make sense. It didn’t make it easier to breathe around.
“Everything was gone,” he said, rough. “Just like that. Everything.”
She still didn’t speak. Instead, she moved toward him, put her hand over his.
“I stayed,” he said. “I lived at an apartment near my office building. I didn’t sell the property the house was on. It just didn’t seem... I didn’t want anyone else to have it. Because it was a memorial. But I did never want to go there either. And people wanted me to get back to normal. Do who I was... I think even before I married Mel. You know, there were guys I’ve known since college, and they figured I was single again.” He laughed, and it sounded so bitter even to his own ears. “Isn’t that the stupidest damn thing? Like... Like I would just go back to who I was before. Like I just wasn’t a husband or father anymore. Like I’d never been those things. I’m not, is the thing. I get that. I can’t hold my daughter. I can’t take care of her. I don’t have school drop-off and pickup, or artwork on my fridge. I don’t have a wedding ring, or an anniversary to remember. I’m not that. But I can never be the man I was.”
She pressed herself against his back, her bare breasts flush against him. And she wrapped her arms around his waist. He felt her cheek pushed up against his shoulder blade. Felt wetness there.
She was crying. For him. He’d made her cry, and he truly felt bad about that. Or maybe just felt bad.
“Mel loved horses,” he said. “That’s something we both enjoyed. I run an equine facility in the Bay Area. For at risk kids. And there’s another program for sick kids. It just... It seems like the thing to do? But basically it’s the only thing I need money for. Except the house.”
She didn’t ask any questions. So he just kept talking. “We drove up here before Emma was born. Mel fell in love with it. She wanted to get out of San Francisco. She didn’t like it anymore. And we had the money and we knew I could work remotely. I could fly to San Francisco if I needed to for meetings and things like that. But she wanted a different life. Slower. And we bought this place. We spent months working on the house. The design. But I had a few things to wrap up down there. So we weren’t going to start building just yet. And then it was too late. It was just too late. But...”
He didn’t finish, because he didn’t need to, and he knew it. He knew that Iris understood. That he had to build Mel’s house. Because it was the last thing she’d wanted. Because he couldn’t go back and rescue her from that house that had burned down around her.
“I’ve been over and over that night,” he said. “And I wish I had been there. So that I could’ve saved them. Or...”
“No,” she said. It was