My Husband Burned Everything (Burn It Down #4)

Chapter 1

THE FLOOR JOIST UNDER my left boot has eight percent of its original cross-section left, and the homeowner standing in his own driveway wants me to tell him the house can be saved.

I crouch at the edge of what used to be the dining room and press the tip of my pen against the charred beam.

It gives. Not the surface char that flakes off black and means nothing, but the structural wood underneath, the part that’s supposed to hold weight.

The pen sinks a quarter inch before it stops.

I make a note on my tablet and move my weight back toward the doorway where the subfloor is still rated to hold me.

“That bad?” Dale Adams has his arms folded over a Carhartt jacket two sizes too big. He already knows the answer and wants me to be wrong anyway. His wife is in the truck at the curb with the heater running. They’ve been in a motel for nine days.

“The front third I can work with. This room and the kitchen behind it, no.” I straighten and step out onto the porch, which is concrete and doesn’t care that it burned.

“The fire got into the floor system. What you’re looking at isn’t repair.

It’s a rebuild of everything from the dining room back, and once we’re rebuilding that much, the math changes. ”

“The adjuster said it was a total loss. The whole house.”

“The adjuster wasn’t under the house. The front third has damage I can work with.

The back half, no.” I keep my voice level as I say the same thing again.

Dale isn’t the problem, and I’m not going to make him feel like one.

“I’ll have the full assessment to your carrier by Friday.

You’ll want a copy for yourself, separate from theirs. Email, not just the portal.”

He nods slowly. Behind him, a county truck pulls up to the curb, and I know the door that opens before I see who steps out of it, because I’ve worked four of these scenes this month and she’s been at three of them.

Shanna Ross crosses the lawn in boots that have never been anywhere a building actually burned.

She’s a senior field adjuster for Cascade Mutual, which means she shows up at the worst day of someone’s life carrying a clipboard and a number she decided on before she got out of the truck.

She and I have been disagreeing in writing for two years. We’ve never disagreed pleasantly.

“Tilly.” She says my name like a box she’s checking. “You’re not on the Adams file.”

“I’m the structural engineer. I’m on every file with a structure.” I tuck the tablet under my arm. “Dale, this is Shanna Ross from Cascade. Shanna, the floor system’s compromised from the dining room back. I’ll have it documented Friday.”

“It’s a total loss.” Shanna doesn’t look at Dale when she talks about Dale’s house.

She looks at me. “Grease fire spread to the structure. Damage through the floor system, the joists, and the subfloor. Full demolition.” She lets the word land.

“We can have Trentham out here by Friday and this family into a new build before winter if nobody slows it down.”

I shake my head. “The front third of this house is repairable, which will shave weeks off a full gut and rebuild. The joists forward of the dining room line are sound. The back half needs to come out, but you don’t demolish a whole house because the kitchen burned.

I can show you with a moisture meter and a drill, or you can read it Friday, but it’s going to say the same thing either way. ”

Something moves at the corner of her mouth that isn’t a smile. “Your reports always slow everything down.”

“My reports say what’s actually there. If the front third is sound, I’m not condemning it.

” I turn back to Dale, who’s watching the two of us like a man at a tennis match he didn’t buy tickets for.

“Friday. Email and portal both. Don’t let anybody bulldozer anything until you have my assessment in your hand. ”

I walk to my truck before Shanna can wrap it in something that sounds reasonable.

My hands are steady on the tailgate while I strip off my gloves.

They always are. I learned a long time ago that the engineer who looks rattled is the engineer nobody trusts to sign off, and signing off is the whole job.

I drop the gloves in the bed, and that’s when Rick’s truck comes into view across the street, two houses down, where I didn’t notice it pull in.

My husband is a fire investigator. Origin and cause, the question of where a fire started and why, which is a different job than mine and a different agency than the county, so usually a different scene.

Rick works the fires somebody has questions about.

A grease fire in a rental that an adjuster’s already calling a total loss isn’t supposed to need an origin investigation.

He’s not in the truck. He’s at the side of the Adams house, near the gas meter, talking to a man in a Cascade Mutual polo I don’t recognize, and his body is angled toward him, working him, making him comfortable.

Rick is good at making people comfortable.

It’s the thing I married him for, partly, the way a room loosened when he walked into it.

Seventeen years I’ve watched him do it and I still can’t always tell when it’s real.

Shanna comes around the front of the house and stops next to him. She doesn’t say anything I can hear. She just stands closer than two people from two different agencies stand at a scene they’re supposed to be assessing independently. Rick doesn’t put the colleague’s distance back between them.

Then he laughs at something, and his hand comes up to settle on the small of her back briefly. The hand of a man who’s done it a hundred times and stopped thinking about it.

I’ve watched Rick touch a thousand people at a thousand scenes. Shoulders, elbows, and the brief two-handed handshake he uses on county commissioners. I’ve catalogued every version of how he touches people he’s working.

He’s never touched any of them there.

I should get in the truck, but I don’t yet.

Shanna says something to him I can’t hear, her chin tipped up, close enough that the man in the polo has drifted off to give them room, looking vaguely uncomfortable.

They don’t seem to realize how blatant they’re being.

She reaches up and straightens Rick’s collar where it’s folded under itself at the back of his neck, smoothing it flat with two fingers.

She lets her hand rest a second at his throat before it drops.

You don’t fix a colleague’s collar. You fix a collar for a man whose neck you’ve had your hands on before, in the dark, when fixing it wasn’t the point.

I get in the truck. I don’t slam the door. I back out carefully, signal at the corner I don’t need to signal at and drive three blocks before I pull over next to a field that hasn’t been anything but weeds since the development money dried up.

I sit with both hands on the wheel and make myself replay it without deciding what it means yet, because deciding is the part I’m good at and the part that gets me in trouble.

A hand on the lower back. The man who didn’t step away from it.

A grease fire two agencies showed up to that doesn’t need either of them.

Shanna at three scenes this month where Rick’s truck was also parked, which I dismissed as coincidence because she works fire losses and he investigates fires and of course, their paths cross.

I’m a person who measures things. I put a number on damage every day, and I’m right about it.

The carriers sometimes hate me because I’m right about it but other times love me when I decide at least part of a building can be salvaged.

Right now, every measurement I have is pointing at one conclusion that I’m not ready to accept yet.

My phone buzzes in the cupholder. The screen shows Rick. I let it ring twice before deciding to answer because not answering is information too.

“Hey.” His voice is easy and normal, the voice from the kitchen on a Sunday. “You still out at the Adams place? I’m in the area and thought I’d grab lunch with you if you’ve got twenty minutes.”

He was ninety feet from me with his hand on another woman.

“Already left.” A crow drops onto a fencepost in the weeds beside me. “I’ve got the Pearson assessment to finish. Rain check.”

“Yeah, of course. You okay? You sound off.”

“I’m fine. Long morning.” I’m very good at this voice. I didn’t know until right now how much practice I’d had. “What were you doing out here? It’s a Cascade kitchen fire, so nothing for origin and cause.”

There’s the smallest pause for a quarter-second. If I weren’t already listening for the spaces between his words, I’d never catch it.

“Buddy at the carrier asked me to eyeball it. Off the books as a favor.” Easy again. Smooth as poured concrete. “I’ll be home by six. You want me to grab something from Marisol’s?”

“Sure. Surprise me.” I hang up before he can hear that I already have the surprise, and it’s sitting heavily where my lunch was supposed to go. I spent the drive over here believing I was married to a man who didn’t lie to me about small things because what would be the point.

A favor for a buddy. Off the books. A grease fire that needs a structural engineer, a fire investigator, and a senior adjuster all standing in one driveway. I remember his hand on the small of her back.

I pull back onto the road toward the Pearson house, where there’s a real fire with a real question in it. I drive the speed limit, and I don’t cry, because I’m not done measuring yet.