26. Bree
— ? —
Bree
We drove back to Texas holding hands.
The flight had been easy. The car ride from the airport was easier. Rafael kept glancing at me with the slightly dazed expression of a man who didn’t trust his own luck, and I kept catching myself smiling at nothing.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’re smiling.”
“I’m allowed to smile.”
He was watching me from the corner of his eye with a full, unhurried attention that still, after everything, made me want to squirm.
“You are. I just want to know what’s causing it so I can make sure it happens again.”
“Flattery will get you everywhere.”
“I’m counting on that.”
The Texas landscape rolled past the windows. Red dirt. Blue sky. The familiar road that led to Marigold, to home, to the life I’d built from nothing.
We passed the water tower with its faded letters, then the turnoff to the Henderson feed store, then the spot where I’d pulled over four years ago, pregnant and terrified, to cry until I couldn’t cry anymore.
Then I saw the smoke.
A column of black rising against the afternoon sky, billowing and thick, coming from the direction of my farm.
“No.”
Rafael saw it too. His foot pressed down on the accelerator.
We came over the last hill and I saw it. My barn. My house. Everything I’d built, everything I’d worked for, wreathed in flames.
“NO!”
The car was still moving when I threw open the door. I hit the ground running, stumbling, my lungs already burning from the smoke in the air.
“ROSIE!”
Rafael was behind me, his voice joining mine, both of us screaming our daughter’s name as we ran toward the inferno.
People were everywhere. Neighbors. The volunteer fire department. Half the town, it seemed, fighting the blaze with hoses and buckets and stubbornness. Faces turned toward me as I arrived, soot-streaked and exhausted.
The heat hit me first. A wall of it, pushing back against my skin, making my eyes water. The roar of the flames filled my ears. Sparks swirled in the air.
“ROSIE!” I screamed again. “WHERE’S ROSIE?”
No one answered fast enough. I spun through the crowd, searching every soot-streaked face for the one that mattered, and she wasn’t there.
Not by the trucks, not anywhere the firelight reached.
A window on the second floor blew out with a crack I felt in my teeth, and glass came down across the grass, and my mind did the arithmetic no mother should ever have to do.
Rosie’s room was up there. Her bed, the duck-shaped nightlight she couldn’t sleep without. Up there, behind all that fire.
I went past fear and out the other side, into a flat, roaring calm.
I was going to go in. I was going to run into that burning building and find my daughter if it killed me.
Someone caught me.
Arms clamped around my waist and hauled me off my feet, and I fought them, clawing, kicking, making a sound I didn’t recognize as mine.
“She’s at the hospital!” The voice was Dot’s, strong and steady. “She’s at the hospital with Molly! They’re both okay! Bree, stop, she’s okay!”
I stopped fighting.
“Hospital?”
“Smoke inhalation. They’re being treated. But they’re okay. Both of them.”
I turned. Ran.
The hospital was ten miles of county road, and Rafael took them fast, both hands white on the wheel, the engine screaming on the straights.
I sat forward against the seatbelt the whole way, willing the distance shorter.
I said Dot’s words to myself on a loop, and they refused to sink in, because I’d heard the fire and smelled it in my own hair, and okay didn’t belong in this night.
Rafael reached over once, without looking, and laid his hand flat on my knee. He didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. I put my hand over his and held on, and neither of us let go until he pulled up under the emergency-room lights and I was already shoving the door open.
I hit the front desk at a run.
“Rosie Salazar,” I said to the nurse at the desk. “She’s four. She was brought in from the fire. Where is she?”
The nurse checked her computer. “Room twelve. Down the hall, through the double doors.”
A nurse buzzed us through and walked us back, and the hallway was the longest thing I had ever crossed.
Too bright. Too clean. The squeak of my ruined boots on the linoleum, a child crying somewhere behind a curtain that wasn’t mine.
I counted the door numbers because it gave my body a job that wasn’t running. Ten. Eleven.
Twelve.
And there she was.
Rosie was sitting up in a hospital bed, an oxygen mask over her face, looking small and scared but alive. So wonderfully, miraculously alive.
“Mommy!”
I fell to my knees beside the bed. Pulled her into my arms. Held her so tight I was probably hurting her, but I couldn’t let go, couldn’t bear to release her even for a second.
“I’m okay, Mommy.” Her voice was muffled against my shoulder. “I’m okay.”
Rafael was there. His arms wrapped around both of us, his face pressed to Rosie’s hair. I could feel him shaking.
“What happened?” My voice was raw. “Molly, what happened?”
Molly was in the next bed, looking exhausted but whole. Her arm was bandaged, and there was a cut on her forehead, but she was smiling.
“We were making cookies,” she said. “Rosie and I. Chocolate chip, her favorite. Then we smelled smoke. By the time I got to the kitchen, the back of the house was already on fire.”
“The animals-”
“We got them out. All of them. Rosie helped me open the chicken coop while I released the goats. Butterbean was the hardest. He didn’t want to leave.” She smiled tiredly. “We prioritized the animals over the property. I hope that was okay.”
“It was perfect.” I was crying. “Thank you. Thank you.”
“Butterbean screamed the whole time,” Rosie added. “He was really scared. But I told him it would be okay.”
“You were so brave, baby.”
“The blond lady was there too.”
Rosie’s voice. Small and matter-of-fact.
I went still.
“What blond lady, baby?”
“The one who came to our farm before. The mean one.” Rosie pulled back from my hug, her eyes wide. “She was outside when the fire started. I saw her through the window.”
Rafael was already reaching for his phone.
“Peter.” His voice was hard. “Rosie saw Camille at the farm before the fire started. We need to find her.”
I couldn’t hear the response, but I could see Rafael’s expression. Grim. Determined.
“She was supposed to be in New York. She was supposed to be fired and finished.” He listened. “The rental car. Check with the rental companies. She’d have needed transportation.”
He hung up.
“Peter’s on it. He’s coordinating with the state police.”
We waited.
An hour passed. Two. Rosie fell asleep in my arms, exhausted from the trauma of the day. Rafael paced the hospital room, checking his phone every thirty seconds.
I watched my daughter breathe. In and out. The oxygen mask fogging with each exhale. The steady beep of the monitor tracking her heartbeat.
She was alive and she was safe. Everything else could be replaced.
Then Peter arrived.
“We found her.” His expression was grim. “Rental lot in Henderson. She was literally returning the car when we got there.”
“Is she in custody?”
“Not yet. Henderson PD is holding her for questioning, but they don’t have grounds for arrest without more evidence.”
I stood up.
“Bree-” Rafael started.
“I’m going.”
“Let me-”
“I’m going, Rafael.”
He looked at me. Nodded.
We drove to Henderson. Peter led the way, lights flashing.
The rental lot was a small operation, a handful of cars and a portable office. Camille stood near the entrance between two local officers, and the second she saw our car she started moving toward the row of vehicles, fast, keys already in her hand.
She still wore the same clothes she’d had on at the diner, but the polish was gone. Her hair had come loose, and her makeup had run down her face. And the look she gave me when she clocked me climbing out of the car told me she’d decided a long time ago that the rules had never once applied to her.
“That’s her,” Peter said. “Don’t let her-”
Camille bolted for the nearest car.
I was faster.
My father put me in martial arts when I was eight, and I’d never once stopped.
Not in Manhattan, and not across the years I’d spent teaching farm wives in a community center how to drop a man twice their size.
My body moved before my brain caught up to it.
I caught her wrist as she grabbed for the door, turned my hip into her, and put her down on the gravel, controlled and clean.
She hit the ground hard, the breath knocked out of her, and I went down with her, one knee settled in her back, her wrist bent up between her shoulder blades just far enough to keep her still and no further.
I wasn’t angry. The lack of it surprised me.
I was calm. I was the calmest I’d been in days.
“You burned my house down,” I said, quiet, right against her ear. “With my daughter inside it.”
“Get off me!” She bucked, and I let her feel how little that got her. “She assaulted me! You all saw it! Officers, arrest her!”
The Henderson sheriff came over, thumbs hooked in his belt, in no hurry at all. He looked down at the woman face-down in his gravel, then at me holding her there without breaking a sweat.
“Way I saw it,” he said, “the suspect tried to flee, and a concerned citizen assisted in her detention. That sound right to you, Deputy?”
“Textbook,” the deputy said.
Camille screamed, and I didn’t bother to listen to any of it.
They took her away. The charge sheet was long, arson and attempted murder sitting at the top of it, enough to keep the Grant lawyers busy for a year.
I didn’t care about the legal details. I only cared that she’d reached for my daughter’s life and missed, and that I’d been the one to put her down in the dirt.
Rafael’s arms came around me from behind.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This is my fault. I brought her into your life. I should’ve seen what she was.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“If I’d been paying attention-”
“It’s not your fault.” I turned in his arms. “She made her choices. She’s responsible for them. Not you.”
Rosie was back at the hospital with Molly, asleep, spared all of this.
I leaned into him. Let myself be held.
“All my work,” I said quietly. “Four years of building. Gone.”
“Not all of it.” His voice was gentle. “The animals are safe. The land is still there. The people who love you are still here.”
“But the house-”
“We’ll rebuild. Together. Better than before.”
“We?” I pulled back far enough to see his face.
“Our work, Bree. Not yours. Ours.”
I pulled back to look at him. At this man who’d walked away from a billion-dollar acquisition to fix chicken coops. Who’d stood up to his father for me. Who’d held our daughter in that hospital room with the tenderness of someone who’d finally learned what mattered.
“You’re staying.”
“Of course I’m staying.” His voice cracked. “You’re my life, Bree. You and Rosie. If you’ll have me, I have no desire to be anywhere but here.”
The words settled over me, and I let their weight sit.
“Yes,” I said.
He kissed my forehead. My temple. The corner of my mouth.
“Then let’s go home,” he said. “Whatever’s left of it. Let’s go home and figure out what comes next.”
We collected Rosie from the hospital and drove back to Marigold in the dark. She slept between us. The smoke had cleared from the sky, leaving only stars.
Home was waiting for us. Burned and broken, but ours.
We’d rebuild.
Together.