The Firefighter’s Heart (After the Ashes #1)

Chapter 1

Lucy

Three years had passed since Mateo was gone, and one since my mother followed. I still couldn't close my eyes without losing them all over again.

The nightmare started the way it always did with smoke filling my lungs, thick and suffocating, the kind that tasted like ash and endings.

I was running through the warehouse, the one I'd never actually seen but had rebuilt a thousand times from news reports and imagination.

Steel beams groaned overhead. Flames climbed the walls like living things, hungry and patient.

Lucy. Mateo's voice, somewhere ahead of me. Lucy, I'm here.

But every corner I turned led to another hallway, another wall of fire, another dead end.

And then the warehouse dissolved, the way dreams do, and suddenly I was in Mom's hospital room instead.

The antiseptic smell replacing smoke. The steady beep of monitors.

Her hand in mine, so thin I could feel every bone, and her voice saying You're going to be okay, mija. You're going to be okay.

I wasn't okay. I was never going to be okay.

Lucy. Mateo again, but I couldn't reach him. Couldn't find him. The smoke was back, filling the hospital room, and Mom's hand went slack in mine, and somewhere in the distance a ceiling collapsed—

I woke up gasping.

The ceiling above me was water-stained and unfamiliar for three panicked heartbeats before my brain caught up. I was back in West Valley Springs, in my apartment. The one I'd rented six months ago when I came crawling back to the town I swore I'd never see again.

I pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw stars instead of smoke.

The clock on my nightstand glowed 4:30 AM. Too early to get up. Too late to fall back asleep. I lay there in the gray almost-light, listening to my own breathing slow, cataloging the facts of my life the way I did every morning:

My name is Lucy Moreno.

I'm twenty-nine years old.

I work at a café and I live in a town I used to love and I am alone in every way that matters.

Three years since Mateo, the love of my life, died in a warehouse fire, pulling a child to safety while the ceiling came down.

One year since my mother lost her battle with the cancer that had been eating her alive for eighteen months.

Six months since I fled Denver with nothing but two suitcases and a desperate hope that the one place I'd been running from might be the only place left to hide.

It was a ritual, a reminder that I was still here, even when I wasn't sure I wanted to be.

Moreno was my mother's name before she married my father.

My legal name was still Lucy Delgado on every document that mattered—driver's license, social security, the teaching certificate I'd let lapse.

But Moreno was the name I gave Joanna when she hired me, the name on my apartment lease.

It wasn't a legal alias. Just a ghost I was hiding behind.

I didn't turn on the lights. There was no need to. I knew this apartment in the dark. I knew the twelve steps from bed to bathroom, the way the floorboard creaked near the closet, the exact angle of moonlight through the window that never quite closed right.

The bottom drawer of my dresser sat closed, the way it had been for weeks now. I used to open it every morning and take out the bundle wrapped in soft blue fabric, my mother's chemo scarf, the one she wore even after her hair grew back because she said it made her feel brave.

Inside the scarf, Mateo's badge. The one Cal had pressed into my hands at the hospital, still smudged with soot from that night.

The department had given me a clean one at the funeral, polished and encased, but this was the one that had been on Mateo's chest when he died.

Cal thought I should have it. I'd never been able to clean it.

I used to hold them both every morning. They were proof that they'd existed. Proof that I'd been loved.

Now I couldn't even look at the drawer.

Survival, I'd learned, meant not wanting too much. Not feeling too much, not reaching for things that would only remind me how empty my hands were.

I got up. Showered. Pulled on jeans and a soft gray sweater that made me look invisible, which was exactly the point. By 5:30, I was walking the six blocks to Mountain Café, the sky still purple-dark above the peaks, the air sharp with early autumn cold.

This was my life now. Small. Quiet. Careful.

It was enough. It had to be enough.

The café smelled like coffee and cinnamon and the particular warmth of a place that had been serving the same town for forty years. I'd worked here for five months, ever since Joanna hired me on the spot when I walked in looking like a ghost and asking if they needed help.

She hadn't asked for references. Hadn't asked why I'd come back to West Valley Springs after all these years, or why I flinched every time the door opened too fast, or why I used my mother's maiden name on the application instead of my own.

She just handed me an apron and said, "Coffee's in the back, training starts now. "

I owed her more than I could ever repay. So I showed up early, stayed late, and pretended I was fine.

"Morning, Lucy." Joanna looked up from the register as I came through the back door, her reading glasses perched on her nose and her graying hair already escaping its bun. "You're early. Again."

"Couldn't sleep."

She made a sound that meant she didn't believe me but wasn't going to push. Not yet, anyway. Joanna had a way of waiting people out, letting silence do the work until you filled it with truths you hadn't meant to tell.

I tied on my apron and started the opening routine: chairs down, tables wiped, coffee brewing. The motions were automatic now, muscle memory carrying me through while my mind stayed somewhere far away.

By six, the first regulars started trickling in.

Harold Brennan, eighty-two years old, same booth every morning since his wife died.

Black coffee, two sugars, and twenty minutes of telling me about his grandkids in Denver.

I listened, nodded, asked questions about little Emma's soccer games and whether Tyler had decided on a college yet.

Harold's face lit up the way it always did when someone remembered the details.

It cost me nothing to remember. And it meant everything to him.

Carla and Diane from the bookshop down the street, sharing a blueberry muffin and gossip about tourists.

I refilled their coffees without being asked, smiled at their jokes about the woman who'd tried to return a book she'd clearly read cover to cover.

"Loved the ending," Carla mimicked, "but I'd like my money back. " Diane snorted into her latte.

Father Miguel, who never ordered anything but hot water for his own tea bag, and who always left a five-dollar tip anyway. "For your patience," he'd said once, and I hadn't known how to tell him that patience was just another word for not having anywhere else to be.

The morning rush built and crested and faded. By nine, the café had settled into its mid-morning lull: a few laptop workers nursing cold drinks, a mom with a toddler destroying a scone, Harold still reading his newspaper in the corner booth.

I was restocking the pastry case when Joanna appeared at my elbow.

"The fifteenth," she said quietly. Not a question.

My hands stilled on the tray of croissants.

"Your mom," Joanna continued. "One year. That's coming up."

I'd forgotten. Not the date, never the date, but that Joanna knew. I'd mentioned it once, months ago, in a moment of weakness I still regretted. She'd caught me crying in the stockroom and I'd mumbled something about anniversaries, and because Joanna was Joanna, she'd remembered.

"I'm fine." The words came out automatic, smooth. I'd said them so many times they didn't even feel like lies anymore.

"Lucy."

"Really." I made myself look at her, made myself smile. "I'm okay. Just another day, right?"

Joanna's eyes were too knowing. She'd been married for thirty years, raised four kids, buried both her parents and a sister. She knew what grief looked like from the inside out.

But she also knew when to push and when to wait.

"If you need the day off—"

"I don't." The last thing I wanted was time alone with my thoughts. "I'd rather work. Keeps me busy."

She nodded slowly. Didn't believe me, but let it go.

I turned back to the pastry case, arranging croissants I'd already arranged, and felt her watching me for a long moment before she walked away.

The lull stretched into afternoon. I cleaned things that didn't need cleaning, refilled salt shakers, reorganized the shelf of travel mugs we kept by the register. Anything to keep my hands moving, my mind empty.

But Joanna found me in the back during my break, sitting on an overturned milk crate with a cup of coffee I wasn't drinking.

"You've picked up four extra shifts this week." She leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. "And you look like you haven't slept in a month."

"Business has been good. You needed the help."

"I needed the help in July. Now I need you to stop running yourself into the ground." She paused, that waiting silence again. "Something's wrong. And it's not just the anniversary."

My phone sat heavy in my apron pocket. I thought about the text that had come last week.

Unknown Number.

Miss you.

I'd deleted it immediately, told myself it was a wrong number, a coincidence, nothing.

Then another one, two days later.

Unknown Number.

Thinking about you.

Then yesterday:

Unknown Number.

You can't hide forever.

"Lucy." Joanna's voice pulled me back. "Talk to me."

I almost told her. The words were right there, pressing against my teeth: I haven't slept through the night in three years.

I dream about smoke and hospital rooms and the two people I loved most in the world, and I wake up reaching for them, and they're never there.

I miss my mother so much sometimes I can't breathe.

I miss Mateo so much I've forgotten what it feels like not to miss him.