Chapter One
One year later
“I’m Grace Schule,” said a woman holding a microphone while smoke billowed behind her, and sirens wailed like hungry babies in the distance. “Reporting live from Morro Bay, California, where a catastrophic fire has begun to engulf the region.”
The camera panned out to bright red flames licking an area of chaparral and then quickly diverted to another scene, where fiery flames inched closer and closer to the town.
Josie’s stomach lurched. The pesto-drizzled gnocchi and sundried tomatoes she had shoveled down minutes earlier were coming back up. Tiny prickles of panic, which would later be converted into adrenaline and thereafter leave her exhausted, tingled along her feet and up to her legs.
“Local authorities have described the situation as unprecedented,” continued the reporter. “With flames threatening not just the town of Morro Bay, but also the surrounding communities and wildlife habitats…”
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” asked Kelsey, bopping baby Noah up and down while he sucked on his little thumb, completely unaware of the cruelty of life.
Josie envied him—she loved him to bits, would die for him, would even eat snails for her nephew and godson, but she did envy him.
How wonderful it must be to be so small, to know nothing about love and longing, and fire and destruction.
Outside, the wind was picking up. Josie could hear it whistle through the half-open window in the kitchen and when she glanced back, she could see a smoky haze settle in the sky.
Morro Bay was prone to wildfires. The Mediterranean climate with its hot, dry summers and dense chaparral and coastal sage scrub was beautiful, if not deadly.
“Very bad,” spoke Josie, her eyes glued to the television screen and the reporter marking areas that had already been destroyed. “Fire season sucks.”
“Of course, there’s a natural disaster that starts on the first day of your leave,” added Kelsey, placing Noah onto one of those alphabet play mats.
He wriggled his fat dimpled fists and made incoherent noises that every parent thought was ridiculously cute.
Including Josie, who could eat him up like a Noah sized cookie.
He babbled on, talking happily to himself.
Josie believed baby babble was just another form of language, like Spanish or German, except only those new to life could understand it.
She also believed in love at first sight, and that the threads of fate weaved souls together, and that dinosaurs were destined to roam the earth once again.
And a part of her, a tiny part of her, believed that she had met her soulmate back in Costa Rica and that she should never have let that woman go.
She should never have let Peyton leave that hotel room without a number or email address.
No matter how hard Josie had tried to find Peyton again—all the internet searches and Instagram stalking—she had come up empty-handed every time.
It was as if that brief, magical encounter in that hotel room, with the yellow mombin tree tapping against the window and the rain finally dissipating after five gloomy days, was just a beautiful, bittersweet memory.
Nothing more.
“I’m cursed,” snorted Josie. “Like poor Odette, cursed by the evil sorcerer Rothbart to live as a swan by day and a human by night. A lonely life.”
“Going back to work sounds a lot better than being turned into a swan,” pointed out Kelsey.
She was far more logical than Josie. “And both a holiday and a swooning romance will find you once again, dear sister. And it will break you right out of this insufferable curse of constant work and no play.”
“If you say so.”
Kelsey laughed as she pressed her hand to her mouth. “Sorry, this is not a laughing matter. Do you think you’ll get your tickets refunded?”
“Probably not.” Josie hadn’t bothered to pay the extra insurance that allowed for refunds since she had been absolutely sure, extremely positive, that she was destined to go on holiday, especially after the year she had endured.
Work was busy. Her social life was nonexistent, and she had spent a great deal of her free time searching the crowds in coffee shops and bookshops, scrutinizing every passerby on the way to work for the woman with the sandy brown waves.
She wanted just one glimpse of the woman who had made her feel a hundred different ways in a single moment.
Messages streamed onto her phone. She could feel it vibrate against her hip, yet she made no effort to read any of them.
Surely, they all said the same thing, to get out of town and enjoy her holiday.
But there was no way in hell Josie could lounge on a sandy white beach, sipping Pi?a Coladas until the sun turned lavender and silver without feeling intensely guilty.
Nope. Josie had a conscience… and she was also dating her work. Ha. At least she was dating something—if not a beautiful woman with fiercely blue eyes, then a job that saved lives.
“I should go,” said Josie, looking around the very clean house for her car keys. She intended to leave her car at her sister’s house and use Mark, Kelsey’s husband, as an Uber to the San Luis Obispo Airport, but plans had changed. “They’ll need all the help they can get.”
Kelsey stepped forward, her arm out, finding Josie’s wrist before she squeezed. “Be careful, alright? I can’t imagine losing my twin sister. My kids need a godmother that looks just like me.”
“Give or take a few shades of blonde,” teased Josie, “But don’t worry about me, Kels. You remember what dad used to say?”
“You’ve got a guardian angel hugging you.”
“Exactly.” Josie kissed her sister on the cheek and basically jogged to the door.
She waved to Noah as he babbled something unintelligible and pointed a thumb over her shoulder to the closed office door.
“Tell Mark he dodged a bullet and when Charlie wakes up from her nap, tell her I love her more than I love the sun.” Josie walked out the door onto the porch, stopped, and called back, “And if things go well, I’ll be back tonight to fetch my bag. ”
“Bye!” called Kelsey. “Try not to get fried. Love you.”
When Josie pulled into the station’s parking lot ten minutes later, her body buzzing, she leaped out of the car, only momentarily gazing at the sky.
A thin veil of smoke sat in the air. Everything felt hotter, and edgier, as if the world was staggering over the edge of a cliff and even the slightest wind would knock it over, killing them all.
She shivered at the thought.
The fire station was a single-story building with a utilitarian fa?ade and white and red bricks. Inside, firefighters were suiting up, while others were checking their equipment. Some received last-minute briefings, all the while the shrill ring of the station’s alarm acted as a constant backdrop.
“Lieutenant Anderson,” called James, his voice cutting sharp through the noise. He stood with his palms flat on a table, a makeshift setup of maps and radios spread across it.
James, or more so Captain Hendriks, was her superior and the no-nonsense-taking boss who called the shots like a seasoned general on a battlefield.
But away from the four walls of Station 26, and his responsibilities as captain, he was one of Josie’s closest friends and an all-around goofball.
Balance, he had said once when Josie asked why he walked into the fire station every single day as Mr. Hyde and walked out of it as Dr. Jekyll.
“I thought you were on a plane to Hawaii already. What are you doing here?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
His brows narrowed, and his already thin lips disappeared. “Fine. Since you’re here, the fire’s jumped the containment lines, heading straight for the residential areas. We need all hands-on deck for evacuations and structure protections.”
“Got it.”
“And, Josie.” James’ tight expression loosened and something unfamiliar flickered across his face. “We’ve got three stations helping out from Cambria and Los Osos. I need you to be a team player, alright?”
But Josie stopped listening. Her entire body suddenly froze. The muscles of her throat contracted painfully. Her throat closed up, and a heavy weight settled in her chest, right there where her heart was supposed to be.
In the sea of frantic people in blue, all running about, all oblivious to the rapid pace of Josie’s beating heart, was a woman. A vision. An angel. A woman Josie had nearly lost herself to on a weekend in Costa Rica. A woman she had subconsciously been looking for the last year.
Josie blinked twice and when she was sure the woman was real, and not a figment of her somewhat desperate imagination, she took a step forward. “Peyton?”