Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The baseboard was on fire and I was beating it with my jacket.
Not my proudest moment. The accelerant had caught with a sound like ripping canvas—a whoosh that sucked the air out of the room and replaced it with a wall of orange heat—and my first instinct, my lizard-brain, fifty-two-years-of-being-a-normal-person instinct, was to yank off my coat and slap at the flames like I was killing a spider.
It didn’t work. Obviously it didn’t work. The fire ate through my jacket in seconds, licking up the wall in bright hungry tongues, and I stumbled backward with singed fingers and the sudden, absolute understanding that Claudia had planned this down to the last detail.
Stop fighting it.
Lori’s voice. Not here, not real—a memory from training. From the scorched table and the exploded mug and the napkin that caught fire three feet from where I’d been aiming.
You’ve been running hot your whole life. That’s energy. It has to go somewhere.
The flames were everywhere now. My lungs burned. My eyes streamed. The heat pressed against my skin, my clothes, my face—
But I’d felt heat before. Every hot flash for the past three months had been a furnace inside my chest. Every surge of power had been fire looking for a way out.
I’d spent my whole life swallowing heat—rage, passion, every argument I’d never had, every word I’d never said. Thirty years of compressed flame.
Take up more space.
My own words. From a table at Bayberry House, with margarita salt on my lips and three women who saw me.
I closed my eyes.
Felt the fire. Not as an attack—as recognition. The same heat that lit napkins and boiled tea and radiated from my skin during hot flashes. The same energy Lori had been teaching me to control.
Mine, I thought. This is mine.
The flames shuddered.
I reached out—not with my hands but with that thing behind my sternum, the muscle I’d been learning to flex—and I pushed. The fire resisted, wild and hungry, and for a second I thought I’d lose it the way I always lost it, the heat surging past me toward everything combustible—
But I held on. I pictured the dimmer switch. Not down this time. Sideways.
The flames bent.
They pulled back from me like a tide retreating from shore. The air around me cooled—not cold, but breathable. The fire didn’t go out. It moved. Away from me, pressing toward the walls, the ceiling, clearing a pocket of space around me like a bubble in boiling water.
Not perfect. Not controlled. But mine.
Sirens. Red and blue lights through the smoke-blackened windows. The crash of a door—the side entrance—and voices, shouting, boots on hardwood.
Tony came through first, arm over his face, and behind him Jill with both hands outstretched. Her telekinesis ripped a fire extinguisher off the wall bracket and sent it arcing through the smoke. Lori and Tammy pushed in behind them. Chemical foam hissed against the walls.
“I’ve got this,” I said. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. Someone who controlled fire.
I focused. Pictured the dimmer switch. Turned it down.
The flames died. Not all at once—they shrank, retreated, guttered out section by section until the room was dark and smoking and ruined but no longer burning. The walls were scorched black. The ceiling had collapsed in one corner. The solvent still stank.
But the fire was out. And I’d done it.
Tony scanned the room. Me, untouched, standing in the center. The scorch patterns curving around my feet like water around a stone. His jaw worked once. Twice. He filed it—whatever it was he’d just seen—and the cop took over.
“Where is she?”
“Claudia. She ran. Through the front—“
He was already moving, radio in hand, barking instructions. Then he stopped. Turned back. His eyes found mine through the haze, and the look on his face wasn’t shock or confusion or any of the things I expected.
It was belief.
Three seconds. Then he was gone, boots hammering down the hallway, and Jill caught my arm as the adrenaline drained and my knees decided they were done for the evening.
“The lighter,” I managed. “She planted George’s lighter. We have to find it.”
Jill didn’t ask questions. She turned slowly with her hand up—the lighter rose from the floor, and floated gently to the windowsill.
“Chain of custody,” she said. “Maintained.”
Despite everything—the smoke in my lungs, the shaking in my hands, the fact that I’d almost died for the second time in a month—I almost laughed.
They caught Claudia at the end of Marsh Road.
She’d made it two hundred yards on foot before Tony’s car cut her off, blue lights painting the scrub pines.
I didn’t see the arrest. I was sitting on the bumper of an ambulance with a blanket around my shoulders and a cup of tea Tammy had produced from the void—the woman defied the laws of physics when beverages were concerned.
Lori was beside me, one hand on my wrist, that healing warmth seeping into my pulse. She hadn’t said a word since they’d pulled me out. She didn’t need to. Her hand said everything.
Jill paced in a tight circle near the ambulance, phone pressed to her ear, already talking to someone about evidence preservation protocols and crime scene integrity.
She was shaking. Her pacing left a trail of small objects floating in her wake—a pebble, a pen cap, someone’s dropped gum wrapper—all drifting six inches off the ground behind her like anxious satellites.
“Jill,” Tammy said gently. “You’re doing it again.”
Jill glanced back at the floating debris. “Oh. Sorry.” Everything dropped. “Sorry. I’m just—from a procedural standpoint, the lighter is critical because it demonstrates premeditation to frame a third party, which elevates the charge from—“
“Jill.”
“Right. Breathing.” She breathed.
Tony walked back twenty minutes later. He’d handed Claudia off to two officers from the county sheriff’s department, and now he stood in front of me, hands in his coat pockets, face lit by the ambulance lights. Soot on his collar. Smoke in his hair.
“She’s talking,” he said. “Already. Hasn’t shut up since I put the cuffs on.”
“Talking about what?”
“George. How he did it. How she was trying to protect the family. How she only came here tonight because she was afraid of what he might do to you.” His voice was flat.
Disgusted. “She’s still performing. She’ll perform through booking, through arraignment, probably through the trial.
But the lighter—” one of the crime scene techs had found it, bagged it and showed it to Tony.
“That’s her mistake. She planted his evidence at her own crime scene.
Hard to claim you’re the scared wife when you’re carrying your husband’s lighter to an arson and murder. ”
He sat down on the bumper next to me. The ambulance creaked. His shoulder was against mine, solid and warm and smelling like smoke and coffee and the rumpled-suit exhaustion of a man who’d just run into a burning building.
“How’d you know?” I asked.
“Jill called. Said you were meeting Claudia alone and she had a bad feeling.” He paused. “I’ve learned not to ignore bad feelings lately.”
He didn’t ask about the fire. About the scorch patterns on the floor. About how I was sitting here without a single burn while the room I’d been in was gutted.
Not yet. But he would. And I’d tell him. Somehow.
“Lock your door tonight,” he said.
“You say that every time.”
“You need to hear it every time.”
His hand was on the bumper between us. An inch from mine. Neither of us moved it closer. Neither of us moved it away.
From the dark window of the ambulance, Rosaria’s reflection watched the officers load Claudia into a squad car. Her expression was something I’d never seen from her before—not satisfaction, not triumph, not even relief.
Grief. For the family she’d built, and the woman who’d dismantled it from the inside, one perfect smile at a time.
“She fooled me,” Rosaria said quietly. “Thirty years in my family and I did not see what she was.” A pause. “I suppose we are not so different in that regard, Gina. We both trusted women who were performing.”
I didn’t answer. Not out loud. But I wrapped the blanket tighter around my shoulders and watched the squad car’s taillights disappear down Marsh Road, and something between us—me and the ghost in the glass, the two women Claudia had fooled—felt less like a truce and more like an understanding.
The kind you earn by surviving the same thing.