Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Keri
I’m groggy as birdsongs fill the lush, humid air.
The golden morning light stretches shadows across the meadow.
The scent of damp earth and lingering fire smoke tickles my senses.
I reach for Adam, but he’s gone. I vaguely remember him mumbling something about feeding Molly up at the house while I was still half-asleep.
I sit up on the mattress in the back end of his camper and hold the blanket against my bare chest and smile.
My messy hair falls across my eyes, and I push it back.
The vain part of me rears its ugly head, and I’m suddenly wondering what I look like in the light of a new day, especially after the insanely perfect night of passion I experienced with Adam.
I look around for my clothes and spot his shirt crumpled nearby. I slip into the warm, faded flannel. It’s the same shirt he was wearing when I first saw him at Jenny’s café. I lift the fabric up to my nose and inhale deeply. It smells like him. He’s never getting it back.
I slip on my jeans and crawl over the back of the bed into the interior of the van, looking for a mirror. When I don’t find one, I get an idea.
“The vanity mirror,” I say out loud.
I sit in the passenger seat up front and lower the sun visor.
A slew of photographs falls and scatters across my lap.
At first, I feel bad for disrupting a photographer’s private space.
But as I pick up each of the photos and take a look, my breath backs up into my lungs.
I gather the pictures like a deck of cards and shuffle through them several times, my eyes pricking with tears.
“I can’t believe it,” I whisper under my breath. “He’s married. And… and he has a child.”
My hands are shaking so badly that I drop a few of the photos and struggle to pick them up.
I swallow hard, and stare at an image of Adam dressed in a suit, kissing a dark-haired woman wearing a wedding dress.
And another with him holding a tiny baby wrapped like a burrito in a pink blanket.
The three of them, several years later, are posing in front of a sandcastle on the beach.
A birthday party with a little girl in pigtails, blowing out candles.
A gorgeous woman wearing overalls, watering her plants.
Each picture tells a story about a family—a family Adam forgot to tell me about.
“Keri?”
I hear my name and hastily shove the photos back above the sun visor. I open the van’s side door, stepping out onto the grass. My knees shake with fury as I move away.
“There you are,” Adam says. He’s shirtless, the morning sun highlighting his muscular chest and arms.
How could I have been so foolish? I should’ve known a man like Adam would have someone waiting for him. And to have a child without telling me? Unforgivable. I can hardly process this on the fly.
I can’t even glance at him. My chest burns with betrayal as I break into a trot toward the house. Every step pulses with the desperate need to flee, to outrun the ache clawing at my heart. There’s only room in my thoughts for an escape, swift and final.
“Keri? What’s wrong? Where are you going? Keri!”
I won’t wait. I run faster. Adam, with his California physique and love of the outdoors, catches up to me quickly. He grabs my arm, stopping me. I suddenly realize I’m crying. The tears streaming down my face make him hesitate.
“What is it? What happened?”
I choke on a sob. “You know what’s happened.”
“No, I don’t.” He grips me by my arms, and I’m too weak to struggle free. “Please. Tell me what’s wrong.” His expression is frantic, his eyes scanning my face, searching for answers.
I swallow hard, the memories of last night filling me with dread.
We had such a great evening. The laughter.
The romantic vibe among the fairy lights and babbling creek.
Dancing under the trees and how he swayed to the song’s old-fashioned rhythm, turning us in a slow circle in front of the fire.
His expensive camera on a tripod with a self-timer, capturing our image with arms playfully around each other, smiles vibrant.
And later, the moonlight caressing our bare skin in the heat of our first passionate night together.
I press my eyes shut, causing a torrent of tears to slip down my cheeks.
“I saw the photos… you’re… you’re a married man.
I slept with a married man.” I collapse to my knees and press the heels of my hands against my eyes.
I cried just as hard after my father died, when I realized for the first time in my life that I was all alone in the world.
And now, here it is, happening all over again.
Adam’s hand is on my back as he kneels next to me. “You’ve got it all wrong,” he insists, his voice croaking with emotion.
I look up at him through the veil of my disheveled hair, my eyes swollen and my nose snotty. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Then how do you explain the photos tucked in the visor of your van, huh?” I can hear him take a deep breath, the warmth of his hand disappearing from my back.
“I was going to tell you about them.”
“When?” I scream.
Molly barks from the back deck of the house and canters to where we’re planted in the meadow. She licks my tear-stained face, her tail wagging.
“Molly, back!” Adam commands. The big dog whines and sits on her hind legs right next to him.
I wipe my nose on the flannel sleeve, keeping my head bowed. Facing Adam feels impossible.
His voice is low and even. “We never received alerts from the county. No evacuation order. Nothing.”
I scowl. “What are you even talking about?” I say through gritted teeth.
“Eighty-five people died that day. Out of the seventy-five bodies that were identified, the oldest was ninety-nine, and the youngest was only eight.”
“I don’t understand.” I sniffle, the words “died” and “bodies” causing me to shiver. “Please, start over and explain yourself like I’m a child.”
His pained expression surprises me as he meets my eyes. His words shock me.
“I’m a widower, Keri. I lost my wife, Mia, and my eight-year-old daughter, Evie. They died two years ago in the nation’s deadliest and most destructive California wildfire on record.”
I’m sick, the turmoil of emotions swirling through my head causing me to break down into a crying heap.
Adam helps me up from the ground and guides me to the house, settling me on the velvet sofa.
He fetches me a glass of water and a damp washcloth.
He’s tender in his actions, gently wiping my tears away.
“I’m the one who should be comforting you,” I mourn. I can’t stop the tears.
“Shhh. It’s okay. I understand. This is heavy.”
Once I’ve calmed down, I listen, my chest tightening as he recounts the nightmare of losing his wife and daughter.
He is unnervingly composed, but I hear his voice splinter as he describes the agony.
He looks as if he’s steeled himself for this confession.
The weight of his grief crushes me, and I can hardly bear it.
Adam was in Los Angeles working on a photo project when the tragedy happened.
The fire started early, in a small town near his home.
But this was no ordinary fire. Wind gusts of fifty miles an hour blew hot embers ahead, sparking new blazes.
Areas the size of football fields ignited every few seconds.
He told me how he and his wife knew the risk of wildfires where they lived.
The little house they bought after they married had been burned down and rebuilt a decade earlier by the former owners.
But this was their dream property nestled in the Sierra Nevada foothills, far away from the big city.
It’s where they gathered with Roxy and his Uncle Chip for Easter egg hunts, for Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners, and pretty much every weekend of the year.
Their internet and cell reception were often sketchy and unreliable because they were so far removed from town.
They mainly depended on their landline in the remote area while he was away for work.
Adam explained that he and Mia wanted their focus to always be on family, not the outside world.
While working in LA, he saw the news alert and sensed the fire was dangerously close.
Panicking, he reached Mia, who assured him the car was packed and they were heading to safety.
Relieved, he told her to call once she, Evie, and the dog arrived at a secure location.
There wasn’t time for him to drive several hours back from LA to his hillside bungalow to help them.
By mid-morning, the fire surged across a canyon into their town, torching twenty square miles and sparking a separate fire miles away.
By noon, flames overtook the center. Several fires merged into a thirty-two-square-mile inferno, walls of flame and smoke the size of Manhattan.
Cars filled with people and pets clogged the only road out.
They were trapped, including Adam’s family.
“There were no alerts. No evacuation orders. It happened so fast.”
“Oh, Adam. I’m so sorry.”
He pulls me into his arms and holds me tightly against his chest, his entire body trembling. “I know you are. I know,” he whispers into my hair.
He tells me how he made a tearful drive dozens of times to the ruins of his home, not able to fully absorb his staggering loss.
He drove past burned-out vehicles and unrecognizable neighborhoods reduced to rubble.
Forests of blackened trees stood in permanent silhouette.
It looked like hell on earth. Sometimes, he could only stop and stare. Everything was gone.
A makeshift memorial of splintered crosses with names of the deceased along the main road into town was especially overwhelming and compounded the reality of the fire’s ferocity.
Standing in front of his wife and daughter’s side-by-side crosses, he said a silent prayer, hoping their deaths were quick and painless.
The blaze that blitzed across the Sierra Nevada foothills took everything he had.
Everything that he ever loved. He and Roxy sifted through the ash among remnants of the pine and oak forest, digging for keepsakes in the foundation of his house while he contemplated what lay ahead for him.
He tried to stay for the long recovery at first and even considered rebuilding.
The town came alive with the buzz of chainsaws and the din of heavy equipment tearing up foundations and dumping the rubble into trucks that hauled it away.
But the heavy smell of smoke lingered, and the ash turned to sludge from the steady rains that began falling two weeks later. Adam couldn’t handle it, so he made the heartbreaking decision to leave…
And he never looked back.