28. Declan
DECLAN
The first engine blocks the road before I reach the house, and the deputy at the barricade recognizes my truck quickly enough to look sorry before he makes me stop.
Flames climb through the back half of the roof behind him, bright against a dawn that hasn’t finished arriving, while black smoke rolls across the bare trees and hides the chimney Avery chose because she said every home deserved one useless thing.
We used it twice. I complained about hauling wood, she called me lazy, and the third winter she put candles inside the cold fireplace because she liked how they looked against the brick.
I can see none of it through the smoke now.
“Truck stays here,” the deputy says as I open the door. He points toward the ditch where two county vehicles sit crooked in the dead grass. “Fire chief knows you’re an owner. Don’t cross his line.”
“My wife’s on her way to court.” The word leaves before the judge can take it from me, and I grip the door hard enough to feel the metal bite my fingers. “Is anybody inside?”
“House was cleared before we got here. No victims found.” He raises his voice when part of the back roof drops and sends sparks above the trees. “Sir, stay behind the tape!”
I leave the truck where he ordered and walk until the heat reaches my face.
The garage door hangs open beneath a blackened frame even though Avery’s attorney holds the only loose key.
Firefighters drag a hose across the driveway where I taught Avery to change a tire after she accused me of inventing emergencies so she’d spend a Saturday in the garage with me.
She had been right. I wanted her there, laughing every time the jack slipped from her hand and smearing grease across my shirt on purpose.
I wanted a whole life full of her inside that house, then behaved as if wanting it meant I could do whatever I pleased and find it waiting when I came home.
Gage steps around the fire engine with his left arm held close to his side beneath his jacket, the shoulder he was shot through moving better than it did in November but not well enough to hide what my mistakes cost him.
He shoves his phone toward me rather than asking whether I can bear to watch.
“Our pole camera on the drive went black at three twenty. She cut the feed out at the road before she ever came up it, and county’s last all-clear is logged at three forty, so the only picture anybody has comes from the neighbor across the field and his doorbell camera.
Van came from the south before four. White cargo body, black rack, scrape where Avery said.
Plate is washed out by the headlights, but it’s the same damned shape. ”
The clip catches the van rolling past, slowing at our drive, then disappearing beyond the camera. A second recording shows it returning less than an hour later without its magnetic signs. I replay the flash of white until Gage takes the phone from my hand.
“County found a melted fuel can near the garage and pry marks at the side door,” he says, turning the screen off. “She searched before she lit it. Fire crew found drawers dumped in the office and the workbench cabinet open. Burner and route copy weren’t here, so she burned what was.”
“Which direction did she go?” I look toward the road, already placing the intersections she could use before daylight gives every patrol a clean view.
The south route reaches the highway; the east route passes the abandoned feed store; a dirt turn behind it joins the county line.
“If she lost the signs, somebody can catch the scrape. Put Trigger at the highway and Bones?—”
“No.” Gage tucks the phone into his cut. “Cruz has the plate out. County has the clip. I’m running the scene, and you’re due at court.”
“She was here.” I point at the open garage as if he has somehow missed the burning house behind him. “She could be ten minutes down the road with the family file and a rifle, and you want me sitting in front of a judge?”
“I want you doing the one thing Avery has spent five months expecting you to avoid.” Gage shifts when the hose jerks across the drive, his bad arm tightening against his body before he steps out of its path.
“You aren’t Enforcer. You don’t send Trigger anywhere, and you don’t use this fire to keep Avery married another day. ”
I want to tell him I need to stay for Avery’s safety.
Sasha burned our house on the morning of the divorce, and hunting her feels like the only useful thing a man could do.
The courthouse isn’t moving. The judge could grant another date.
Mia already told me the fire gives us a property reason to ask, and a burning house is the kind of excuse no one would call selfish until Avery had to stand in court another month with my name attached to hers.
Tires grind against gravel behind the barricade.
June’s car stops beside my truck, and Avery gets out before June kills the engine.
She wears the charcoal suit she bought for work, a long coat open over the curve of our child and black boots instead of the heels she once kept in the bedroom closet.
Her court bag hangs from one shoulder. She looks past me at the house, and the fire reaches the front windows while she watches.
I move toward her before I remember I lost the right to meet her halfway.
The deputy lifts the tape for Avery and June after Gage clears the diversion with Cruz, both ends of the road blocked and two club cars sitting on it, then points out the safe boundary.
June stays at Avery’s shoulder with one hand hovering an inch off her elbow the whole way.
Avery walks to the line, looks at the garage, the roof, and the upstairs window that belonged to the room we planned to turn into a nursery.
Her face doesn’t give the fire anything.
“They cleared it,” I tell her. “Nobody was inside. The van was recorded. Gage has the scene.”
“And where are you supposed to be?” She keeps her attention on the upstairs window as the glass breaks inward.
“Court.” Smoke scratches the word out of my throat. “Avery, she was just here. If I stay long enough to give Gage the roads she uses?—”
“Are you coming to end our marriage,” she asks, turning toward me with soot already settling on one shoulder of the suit, “or are you making me do that alone too?”
The house cracks behind me. For five months, I’ve told her I’ll accept what I lose, and now the place where I made those promises is burning at the exact moment keeping them requires me to walk away from the hunt.
Sasha knows me well enough to expect the fire to pull me away from Avery.
She learned that certainty in every safehouse morning when I chose what I wanted and trusted my wife to wait.
I turn to Gage. “The workbench has a false bottom beneath the vise. Avery emptied it in January, but Sasha may have cut her hand opening the latch. The east road reaches the county line behind the feed store. Everything else goes through Cruz, and you call Avery and me together if you find something.”
“Already planned,” Gage says, offering no approval. He gestures toward Mia’s car arriving behind June’s. “Go.”
I follow Avery beneath the tape with my hands at my sides and my eyes on the road ahead of her.
Mia brings the property stipulation and a spare shirt in a garment bag.
The shirt smells like the clubhouse laundry soap when I change beside my truck, but smoke has settled into my skin and hair.
Avery waits inside June’s car with the heater running.
She keeps her eyes on the windshield while I change, and whatever she thinks about giving me another minute with the house stays inside that car.
We arrive at the courthouse through different doors.
Mia takes me through the security line while Avery walks ahead with June and her attorney.
I surrender my pocketknife to Mia before the deputy can ask, empty my keys into the tray, and watch Avery place her court bag on the belt.
She lifts it off the far end one-handed, the coat pulling tight across her middle.
My hand remembers the one ultrasound photograph she let me keep, and memory is a poor kind of claim, so I collect my keys and walk the aisle she leaves me.
The hearing room smells like damp coats and old paper.
Avery sits at one table with her attorney; I take the other with Mia.
A dark fleck of ash clings near the cuff of her jacket across the aisle.
Six years of marriage, and the last thing I carry into the room with her is part of the house burning without us.
The judge reviews the property agreement, asks about the insurance claim, and makes both attorneys explain that the lost house is a marital asset even though there is no longer a building to divide.
Avery receives her share of the restored money, the accounts we already separated, and the insurance proceeds after the mortgage and approved costs.
I keep the truck, my personal debts, and nothing that lets me pretend restitution was a gift.
The affair money returned to the estate before today.
I don’t get credit for putting back what I stole.
The judge looks over the papers at me. “Do you understand the agreement and enter it voluntarily?”
The print swims for a moment, but Mia has read every page with me twice. Avery used to sit at our kitchen table and make contracts safe; today I hold the sense of the paper myself. “Yes, Your Honor. I understand it, and I’m not contesting any part.”
“The petition states that the wife is pregnant.” The judge turns a page and looks at both tables.
“The court reserves custody, parenting time, support, and paternity for a separate order to be entered after the birth. With that reservation on the record, and with this morning’s fire and the pending investigation, either party may ask me to continue the matter. Is anyone asking?”