Chapter Six - Holt #2
Questions. Timelines. Access points. Origin speculation without commitment. Lark answers everything with clean precision, her voice steady even when they walk her through the probable path of the fire and the likelihood that it started in the carriage house lean-to before traveling up and inward.
“Could’ve been electrical?” she asks.
The older of the two men, Harris according to the stitched patch on his shirt, crouches near the remains of the side wall and shakes his head.
“Not likely. No service back there. Not enough current to do this, even before the condition it was in.”
Lark’s mouth tightens. I see it. The way she braces before the next question, before the answer she already knows she doesn’t want.
“Could someone have done it on purpose?” she asks.
Harris straightens slowly. “Could’ve.”
That’s all he gives her.
Could’ve.
I don’t miss the way her fingers tighten around the notebook in her hand.
The other inspector walks the yard line again, checking spread patterns, crouching near the section of burned brush, saying very little. Eventually, he returns, exchanges one look with Harris, and they step toward us together.
“Property’s not condemned,” Harris says. “Main structure’s standing. You’ll need repairs, and you’ll need to board that broken window before tonight. We want the rear yard kept clear until we finish the report.”
Lark nods once. “Can I stay in the house?”
I look at her, but she doesn’t look back.
Harris tips his head slightly. “Ground floor only until we get somebody up to check the stair load and smoke path. I’d recommend you don’t stay alone.”
“I can,” I say before she can answer.
Both inspectors look at me. Lark turns slowly, and I can feel the question in that movement. I don’t take it back.
Harris nods once like that solves whatever concern he had and scribbles something on the clipboard.
They leave twenty minutes later with promises of calls, reports, follow-up contractors, and all the other practical pieces disaster drags in behind it.
The silence after they go feels louder than the whole inspection did.
Lark stands in the foyer, notebook pressed against her stomach, staring toward the rear of the house like she can still see the carriage house through walls and hallways and all the hurt this place is carrying.
Then she says, “I need supplies.”
Her voice is steady. Too steady.
“Okay.”
“Boards for the window. More contractor bags. Bleach. Probably a pry bar I don’t hate.”
The list comes quick, clipped, efficient. Something to hold on to. I know the instinct. Fix what you can. Move before feeling catches up.
“You eat more than half an egg this morning?” I ask.
She turns toward me, irritation flashing instantly. “That has nothing to do with anything.”
“It does if you’re about to spend six hours breathing bleach and hauling debris.”
“I’m fine.”
The words bounce off me without landing. “Yeah. You keep saying that.”
Her jaw sets. “And you keep acting like I’m one strong breeze away from collapse.”
“No.” I push off the doorframe and step farther into the foyer. “I’m acting like someone who watched you hold a hose against a fire that could’ve gotten to the house in under two minutes and then sleep maybe three hours afterward.”
Her face stills. For one second, I think she’s going to fight me harder. Instead, she looks away. Toward the staircase. Toward the windows. Toward anywhere but me.
“I don’t have time to fall apart,” she says quietly.
Her words don’t surprise me, because I know exactly what she means.
I move closer before I think better of it, stopping a few feet away so it doesn’t feel like pressure.
“You don’t have to,” I say.
Her eyes lift to mine.
“That’s the thing,” she says. “Everybody keeps acting like if I let go for five minutes, I’ll recover. That’s not how this works. Things don’t stop because I’m tired.”
No, they don’t. That’s another truth I know too well.
The room sits quiet around us. Dust moves in the sunlight. Somewhere outside, a truck rolls past on the road without slowing. The whole world keeps going.
Lark drags a hand back over her hair, loose pieces slipping free again around her face.
“We need to board the window today,” she says. “And I need to clear enough of the rear hall to get the contractors in tomorrow if Nolan’s crew frees up on time.”
There’s a whole lot in that sentence I could ask about.
I catch on one part.
“Nolan?”
“My contractor.”
The way she says it tells me there’s more history there than the word contractor covers.
I keep my expression flat. “He local?”
“No.”
“Coming in.”
“Yes.”
Something settles low in my chest that I refuse to examine.
“Fine,” I say. “Then we get the place ready.”
Her brows pull together. “We.”
I look at the front hall, the contractor bags, the damage I can already see and the rest I’m sure is hiding.
“You think I’m going to let you drag boards and scrub smoke by yourself after last night?”
“Yes.”
“Then your judgment’s worse than I thought.”
That almost gets another one of those real smiles.
Almost.
Instead, she turns toward the back bedroom. “There are gloves in the bathroom cabinet. If you’re staying, I’m putting you to work.”
I follow her down the hall before the part of my brain that still values self-preservation can object.
The next several hours turn into labor. The kind that burns through thought if you let it.
We board the broken window first. I drive the fasteners while she measures and holds the panel in place, the two of us bracing it together from opposite sides.
The space is too tight for comfort. Her shoulder brushes my arm more than once.
Each time, awareness moves through me fast and low before I lock it down again.
It’s just proximity. It means nothing. Still, I notice. The smell of her shampoo lingering under smoke. The way she bites the inside of her cheek when she concentrates. The faint line between her brows when something doesn’t fit the way she wants it to.
By noon, the front room is hotter than it should be, with the open windows doing nothing but circulating warm air. Sweat darkens the back of my shirt. Lark has pulled the borrowed sweatshirt off and knotted it around her waist over a worn tank top that leaves her arms bare.
I make the mistake of noticing the strength in them. Not delicate. Not soft. Built by use.
I drag my attention back to the pry bar in my hand and wedge it under a warped section of trim.
Rook trails us through every room, still anxious but less frantic now.
He startles at loud noises. Shadows make him pause.
Sudden movement sends him back toward Lark’s legs, but every now and then, he ventures a little farther from her.
Sniffs around my boots. Watches me work with open suspicion instead of immediate distrust.
That’s progress, apparently.
At one point, he steals one of my gloves and takes off down the hall.
Lark hears me swear and turns just in time to see me follow a twenty-pound dog through a soot-streaked dining room with half a contractor bag in one hand and zero dignity left.
Her laugh catches me mid-stride. She stands in a shaft of dusty light near the parlor doorway with one hand pressed to her stomach and the other over her mouth, laughing hard enough that her shoulders shake.
And there it is. A different version of her than the one I’ve seen so far.
Not the woman with a hose pointed at a fire. Not the one standing rigid in my kitchen insisting she’s fine. Not the daughter carrying an old dream like it weighs more than a whole building.
Just… her.
Alive in the moment.
Unarmored for half a second.
I feel something in my chest shift hard enough to be uncomfortable.
Rook drops the glove, barks once, then trots back to her like he orchestrated the whole thing for morale.
I bend, pick it up, and look at both of them.
“You two are exhausting.”
Lark wipes at her eyes and takes a breath that still holds the tail end of laughter. “You chased him.”
“He stole from me.”
“He’s barely twenty pounds.”
“He has criminal intent.”
That gets me another laugh. Smaller this time. Softer. Worse in some ways because the second it fades, the room feels too aware again.
The air between us tightens. Somewhere down the hall, a board in the old floor pops as the house shifts around us, reminding me where we are and why.
I force my attention back to the work.
“Drink water,” I say.
Her brow lifts. “Was that an order?”
“That was common sense.”
“Sounds exactly like an order.”
“Maybe your hearing got damaged in the fire.”
She narrows her eyes. “Maybe your personality did.”
There she is. The sharp edge. The quick answer. The version of her that doesn’t let a thing land without giving one back.
It should make this easier.
We break for lunch because I make us.
That fight looks exactly like the others—her insisting she doesn’t need a break, me ignoring her and walking to the truck anyway.
Fifteen minutes later, I come back with two sandwiches from the deli near Main, chips, bottled water, and one of those peanut butter cracker packages. The same ones I keep at home that I noticed her eyeing this morning.
I hand them over on the back porch steps while Rook hovers between us, suspicious but hopeful. She takes the sandwich. Then the crackers. Looks at them. Looks at me.
“You’re irritatingly observant.”
I sit one step below her and unwrap my own lunch. “I get that a lot.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
That earns me the smallest smile.
We eat in the heat and the smell of old smoke and wet wood, looking out over a yard still scarred from the fire line.
For a while, neither of us talks.
Then she says, “My father used to pack me sandwiches exactly like this when he took me to jobs with him.”
I turn slightly toward her.
She doesn’t look at me when she says it. Her eyes stay fixed on the far fence line, on the blackened edge of grass near the carriage house, on something that isn’t here anymore.