Chapter 31
WALKING THROUGH FIRE
NORA
The orange glow cuts through the night like a wound in the sky, and I know—God, I know—before Jay even fully stops the car that something is wrong. The house is burning.
Actually burning.
Flames claw at the shattered windows, smoke billowing into the dark like the house is exhaling its last, scorched breath.
But the moment my feet hit the ground, I’m still half in the car—half in the phone call that started all of this.
Jay’s voice had been low, ragged, threaded with a fear I wasn’t used to hearing from him.
“Do you know where Nate is?”
I’d tried to answer, but my brain had short-circuited—static, useless. I remembered Nate mentioning he was meeting Jake at some house but he should’ve been back an hour ago.
My stomach had twisted even before Jay spoke again.
“Nora, I don’t have a good feeling about this. We have to find him.”
Hearing those words from him—steady, unshakeable Jay—sent the same cold dread through me that I felt the day I found Dad lying still on our living room floor.
Then the call ended, and Jay was suddenly on my doorstep, barely breathing.
“We have to go. Now.”
The drive was a blur—headlights streaking past, my pulse too loud, Jay’s hands gripping the wheel hard enough to turn his knuckles white. The air smelled like panic long before the smoke reached us. One thought kept looping through my mind the entire way here, pulsing in time with my heartbeat:
Please. Please don’t let it be too late.
And now, standing in front of the burning building, heat licking my face, that thought is still echoing—louder, sharper, impossible to swallow.
“Nora, wait for the fire department!” Jay’s voice cracks as he grabs my arm, but I’m already running.
Nate’s in there and the building’s burning and my pulse is a drumbeat of pure terror.
The heat hits first, then the smoke—thick and choking, clawing at my lungs.
“Nate! Nate!” My voice disappears into the roar.
The hallway stretches endlessly ahead, walls painted orange by the fire. I stumble forward, one hand dragging along the wall, the other over my mouth.
Everything is chaos—the crackle of flames, the groan of metal, sirens screaming somewhere too far away. My eyes sting, vision blurs, but I keep going because stopping means losing him.
But then I see what I fear the most. They’re here., both of them.
Nate’s sprawled on one side of the room, his skin gray in the firelight, lips blue and he’s barely breathing. Jake’s on the other side—blood pooling beneath him, dark and endless. His eyes are open but empty.
“No, no, no—”
The words rip out of me as I fall to my knees beside Nate, shaking. I grab his wrist, his pulse is weak but still there.
“NATE!”
I shake him—gentle, then harder.
“Wake up! Please, you have to wake up!”
Jay appears through the smoke like a ghost, face pale, eyes wide.
“Oh my God…” He keeps saying it over and over, uselessly.
I want to scream help me, but I can’t speak.
Jay kneels beside Jake, checks for a pulse but his expression tells me everything.
“We need to get them out—now. The building’s going to come down.”
He hauls Jake up, dragging him toward the door, and I should move, but I can’t. I’m staring at Nate’s face, peaceful in the firelight, still and wrong and gone.
“Nora!” Jay’s shout snaps me out of it.
I cradle Nate’s head in my lap. His skin is slick with soot and sweat. I brush his hair from his forehead, whispering, “Stay with me.”
His pulse flutters weakly beneath my fingertips. I bend over Nate, shielding him from falling embers.
“Please,” I whisper, rocking him like that could keep him tethered. “Please don’t leave me too.”
The world is burning, and I’m just a heartbeat caught inside it. It shouldn’t feel familiar—fire licking at the sky, smoke clawing at my lungs—but somehow it does. Not because I’ve lived this before, but because my body remembers the shape of panic, the way grief tilts the world off its axis.
It’s the same as that day with Dad—not the scene, not the details, but the feeling. That sharp, unreal slipping—like the edges of the world are warping and I’m watching myself from somewhere outside my own skin.
I remember the carpet under my knees, my breath sawing in and out, too loud, too fast. Time thick and slow and then suddenly rushing. And now… it’s happening again.
My hands don’t feel like mine.
My voice is a ghost in my throat.
I’m here, standing in a burning house, but it’s as if some part of me has gone quiet and far away.
Different moment. Different loss.
Same terror curling through my bones.
And through the roar and the smoke, one thought keeps looping—familiar, sickening, inevitable: Not again. Not again.
The rest blurs—just slightly at first, like a camera slipping out of focus—and my thoughts scatter into the smoke. I’m still trying to breathe, trying to understand what I’m seeing, when everything around me erupts into motion.
Voices shout.
Boots pound against gravel.
Steady hands close around my arms and Nate’s at the same time. I don’t even register being moved until the cool night air hits my face.
The smoke is thick in my lungs.
My knees buckle.
Someone catches me.
Then the chaos rushes in all at once.
Firefighters pulling us back and paramedics swarming.
Nate being lifted from my grip and laid onto a stretcher, silhouettes bending over him, calling numbers I can’t decipher.
A blanket drops over my shoulders like a sudden weight, and I let them guide me, my feet barely tracking the ground.
Everything is happening at once, fast and loud and blinding—and I’m drifting somewhere just behind it all, consciousness slipping, the world narrowing to fire and sirens and the fear that I’m losing him.
“I’m going with him,” I manage, breath shaky, fingers already reaching for the stretcher.
“Ma’am, we need to get you checked out—”
“I said I’m going with him.” I try to take a step, but my knees give out again. The paramedic catches me—again.
A second paramedic steps in.
“Let her ride with him. We’ll check her at the hospital.”
I don’t wait for permission. I’m moving before my body is ready, stumbling into the back of the ambulance.
When I finally reach Nate’s side, I take his hand—ice cold, limp, terrifyingly still—and hold on like it’s the only thing keeping me conscious.
“Stay with me,” I whisper. “You told me to hold on, so I am. But you have to hold on too, please.”
The paramedic’s voice is clipped, urgent.
“His breathing’s shallow. Possible overdose. We’ve got naloxone going, but his vitals are weak.”
I squeeze his hand harder. I can’t lose them both.
The town rushes past in streaks of light. I talk to Nate the whole way—about books I’ll read to him, places we’ll go, the life we still have waiting. I tell him I love him again and again, like repetition might anchor him here.
The ER is chaos—bright lights, sharp voices, antiseptic.
They wheel Nate away, and I’m left standing there, covered in ash, feeling like a ghost whose body hasn’t caught up yet. Nick, Danny, Lydia, Kat, Ollie—they’re all there, faces hollow with grief. Somehow word travels faster than fire.
I collapse into a chair.
Jay sits beside me, soot-streaked, silent. We just hold hands because there’s nothing to say.
Time folds in on itself—minutes, hours, I can’t tell.
Then a doctor appears, face grave.
“He’s alive,” she says, and my knees almost give out. “But it’s touch and go. With the amount of fentanyl in his system, there could be liver or kidney damage. The next twenty-four hours are critical.”
She pauses, softer now.
“But his brother…” She exhales, eyes shining. “I’m sorry, but there really was nothing we could do.”
That tone says everything.
For a moment, no one breathes.
Then—Lydia’s cry cuts through the sterile air.
It's raw, broken, animal like.
The kind of sound that makes the world tilt, that makes everyone else go still. She folds in on herself, sobbing like something inside her has torn open.
Across the room, I hear another cry and Mom’s arms are around Lydia, trying to hold her up as she collapses.
Two women—best friends, mothers—clinging to each other as their worlds fall apart.
And watching them, I feel it—grief ricocheting through generations, echoing through me like something ancestral.
Jake is gone and Nate might not wake up.
I fold forward, ugly, shaking sobs tearing through me. Jay pulls me into his chest and holds on while I fall apart. The others are crying too, but it feels distant, muffled, like I’m underwater and the world’s happening somewhere far away.
Eventually, they let me sit with Nate in the ICU.
Machines beep and hum, keeping him alive. He looks so small in the bed, pale under harsh fluorescent light. I take his hand—the same hand that once traced constellations on my skin—and it’s warm now.
I lean close.
“I’m here,” I whisper. “I’m holding on, but you have to, too.”
The words come easier now, spilling out like truth.
“You terrify me, you know that?” I whisper, my forehead pressed to the back of his hand, “because you make me feel everything. Every hope, every fear, every version of myself I thought I’d buried.
You pull it all to the surface without even trying.
And I don’t know how to exist in a world where you aren’t here to feel it with me. ”
The machines keep their steady rhythm.
His chest rises, falls, rises again.
“Come back to me,” I whisper into the antiseptic air. “Please come back to me.”
And in the silence that follows—broken only by the hum of machines keeping him alive—I hold on.