2. Gabriel
GAbrIEL
I’d carried a lot of people out of burning buildings. It was the job. You go in, you find them, you get them out, and you move on to the next call.
Fourteen years on the job, and I’d learned how to compartmentalize. How to bury a face deep enough that it didn’t surface at two in the morning, when the house was quiet and my brain wanted to remind me of all the ways a call could have gone differently.
Brenna Mills refused to stay buried.
I’d been up since four. Not because my alarm went off—it didn’t—but because every time I closed my eyes, I saw her face in the smoke. The soot on her cheeks. The raw patch on her palm. The way she’d looked at me when I pulled my mask off, like I was the first solid thing she’d seen in hours.
And then her eyes. Brown, wide, still watering from the smoke, locked on mine like she was deciding whether I was real.
I’d told her she was okay. I’d checked her breathing. I’d handed her off to the paramedics and gone back inside to do my job. That was the protocol. That was how it worked.
So why was I standing in my kitchen at 5:30 in the morning, coffee going cold in my hand, still thinking about the way her voice sounded when she said her name?
Brenna. Brenna Mills. That’s my shop.
Not “that’s my business” or “that’s where I work.” My shop. Like it was an extension of her body. Like watching it burn was the same as watching a part of herself catch fire.
I set the coffee down and grabbed my keys.
The drive from my place to Main Street took four minutes.
Whispering Pines wasn’t the kind of town where anything was far from anywhere else.
I’d bought the house eight years ago—a fixer-upper on a quarter acre that backed up to the tree line—and spent the first two years gutting it down to studs and rebuilding it with my own hands.
It was the first place I’d ever lived that felt like mine. The first place I didn’t want to leave.
I parked across the street from Sugar & Pine and sat in the truck for a minute.
The front door was boarded up—my crew had secured it after we cleared the scene.
The windows on the right side were intact.
The left side, closer to the kitchen, had one window blown out that was covered in plastic sheeting.
From the outside, it didn’t look catastrophic. The building was standing. The roof was solid. The structural damage was contained to the kitchen and the back wall.
But I knew what the inside looked like. I’d seen it.
Dec Moreau’s truck was already there. The investigator was thorough—he’d probably been on site since dawn. I spotted him through the gap in the boarded door, crouched near the electrical panel with a flashlight and a camera, cataloging the origin point.
I got out and crossed the street. Fourteen years on the job, eight as captain, and I’d never gotten used to walking back into a fire scene in daylight—the way the smell hit you different when the adrenaline was gone.
“Electrical?” I asked from the doorway.
Dec didn’t look up. “Panel’s thirty years old, minimum. Wiring’s original to the building. Breaker failed.” He took a photo, the flash bouncing off the blackened wall. “She’s lucky the whole place didn’t go.”
“Detector?” I asked.
“Original to the building, same as the wiring. Sensor chamber’s full of grease and flour dust. Could’ve had a fresh battery in it and it still wouldn’t have tripped in time.” He glanced up at the blackened ceiling mount. “Apartment unit upstairs is the same model. I’d tell her to replace both.”
I knew that. I’d known it last night when I saw how fast the fire had moved through the ceiling. If she’d been in that kitchen another two minutes, the smoke alone would have put her down.
“Insurance adjuster coming today?” I asked.
“Tomorrow. I’ll have my report done by then.” Dec stood and turned, brushing ash off his knees. He looked at me with those sharp gray eyes that didn’t miss much. “She was in here alone?”
“Prepping for the morning. She runs the place by herself.”
He nodded once and went back to his work. Dec wasn’t a talker, which I appreciated. He did his job and he did it right and he didn’t waste time with conversation that didn’t serve a purpose.
I moved through the front of the shop. The display case was intact but coated in a film of soot.
The tables and chairs were pushed around from where my crew had moved through.
The counter where she’d been—where I’d found her—still had the mixing bowls on the floor behind it.
Her apron was draped over the register. A chalkboard menu on the wall listed the day’s specials in neat handwriting.
Blueberry scones. Brown butter banana bread. Cinnamon rolls.
She’d written that the night before, probably. Planning for a morning that never happened.
I heard a car door shut outside and turned.
Brenna was standing on the sidewalk across the street, keys in one hand, the other hand shoved in her jacket pocket. Her eyes were fixed on the boarded-up door. She blinked hard, twice, and her gaze dropped to the blown-out window, then back to the door. Her throat moved on a swallow.
She didn’t step forward. She didn’t leave.
She looked different in daylight, without the smoke and the panic. Smaller, somehow. Her hair was down—dark curls past her shoulders—and she was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that was too big for her. The bandage on her right palm was fresh. She’d changed it this morning.
I stepped out through the gap in the boarded door, and her eyes found me immediately.
Something moved across her face—recognition, surprise, something else I couldn’t name—and then she squared her shoulders and crossed the street.
“You’re here,” she said.
“Follow-up.” I gestured toward the building. “Our investigator’s inside documenting the cause. Electrical panel failure. The wiring in this building is old.”
She nodded slowly, her gaze drifting past me to the door. “Can I go in?”
“Not yet. Dec needs to finish his work first. Shouldn’t be long.”
She stood there looking at the boarded-up door, and I watched her jaw tighten. She wasn’t going to cry. I could see that decision being made in real time—the way her chin lifted and her shoulders pulled back and her fingers curled into the sleeve of her jacket.
“How bad is it inside?” she asked.
“Kitchen’s gutted. Back wall needs to be rebuilt. The front of the shop is mostly smoke damage—soot, smell. Structurally, you got lucky.”
“Lucky.” She almost smiled. Almost. “Yeah, that’s the word I keep hearing.”
I deserved that. I knew how it sounded—telling a woman who’d nearly died in her own kitchen and lost her livelihood in the process that she was lucky. But I also knew what the alternative looked like, and she didn’t, and I wasn’t going to describe it to her.
“The structure is sound,” I said instead. “That means it can be rebuilt.”
“With what?” The question came out sharp, and she immediately softened. “Sorry. I didn’t sleep much.”
“Don’t apologize.”
She looked at me then. Really looked at me, the way she had on the curb—like she was trying to figure out why I was still standing here. I didn’t have a good answer for that. The follow-up was legitimate. Dec was inside. I had a reason to be on this sidewalk.
But I would have been on this sidewalk anyway, and if I was being honest with myself, I’d known that since four in the morning.
“The insurance adjuster comes tomorrow,” I said. “Dec’s report will help your case. Faulty wiring, panel failure—that’s not negligence on your part. That’s the building.”
“I leased it as-is,” she said quietly. “I should have had the wiring inspected. I thought about it when I signed, but the inspection would have cost two thousand dollars I needed for the deposit on the ovens. So I checked the smoke detector batteries every six weeks and told myself that counted.”
She gave a small, bitter laugh.
“I’m careful about everything I can afford to be careful about. The wiring wasn’t on the list.”
Wiring mattered. But I wasn’t going to point that out on the sidewalk at seven in the morning.
“Have you eaten?” I asked.
The question surprised her. I could tell by the way her eyebrows lifted and her mouth opened and nothing came out for a second.
“I had coffee,” she said.
“That’s not eating.”
“It’s close enough when your kitchen is a crime scene.” She caught herself and glanced at the building. “Is it a crime scene? I don’t actually know how this works.”
“It’s not a crime scene. It’s a fire scene. Dec determines cause and origin, files his report, and then the space is released back to you and your landlord.”
“Okay.” She exhaled. “Okay, that’s good.”
We stood there for a moment, the morning quiet around us. Main Street wasn’t awake yet—most of the shops wouldn’t unlock their doors until nine. It was just the two of us and the faint sound of Dec moving around inside and the smell of charred wood that hung in the cold air.
“There’s a diner up the block,” I said. “Bev Holloway’s place. She’ll have something hot.”
Brenna looked toward The Pines Diner, then back at me. I could see her working through it—whether this was charity, whether I felt sorry for her, whether she wanted to sit across from a stranger and eat eggs while her bakery sat gutted across the street.
“You don’t have to babysit me,” she said. “I’m sure you have actual work to do.”
“I’m off shift.”
“Then you should go home and sleep.”
“I’m not tired.”
That wasn’t true. I’d been up for almost twenty-six hours.
But “tired” wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I was standing three feet from this woman and every instinct I had was telling me not to walk away from her.
Not yet. Not until I knew she’d eaten something and had a plan and wasn’t going to stand on this sidewalk alone staring at a boarded-up door until someone made her stop.
She studied my face for a long moment. Whatever she was looking for, she must have found it, because something in her expression shifted—not a smile, but the tension around her eyes eased just slightly.
“Fine,” she said. “But I’m buying my own breakfast.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything else.”
She started walking toward The Pines, and I fell into step beside her.
I didn’t put my hand on her back. I didn’t touch her at all.
But I shortened my stride to match hers, and when she glanced up at me with a look that was half suspicion and half something warmer, I held her gaze and didn’t look away.
She looked away first.
That was fine. I wasn’t in a hurry.