10. Brooks
Brooks
“The town motto used to be ‘Peaceful and Proud.’
— The Archive of Suncrest Hollow
The stove box takes up the entire bed of my truck.
It’s a floor model I found at the hardware store three towns over—nothing fancy, just a clean, electric four-burner that doesn’t smell like a potential gas leak.
The sales guy at the hardware store tried to upsell me twice.
Ice maker. Convection setting. Some kind of advanced moisture-lock baking technology.
I told him the woman this stove is for once nearly blew herself into low orbit trying to preheat an oven, so maybe let’s start with basic survival features and work our way up.
I back the Ford up to the Gilded Goat’s porch. The gravel crunches, a loud, angry sound in the middle of the quiet afternoon.
Sophie is at kindergarten until three, which gives me four hours to swap the units, drag the old green monster to the scrap pile, and check the water heater before my shift.
When I kill the engine, the valley is dead silent, save for the crows in the hollow and the distant, rhythmic thwack-thwack of a hammer hitting wood from the side of Emmy’s house.
I hop out and start unhooking the straps.
Emmy is standing on a six-foot ladder by the kitchen window. She’s wearing those oversized denim pants with one strap hanging loose, and her blonde curls are tied back with a piece of frayed blue nylon twine.
She’s trying to nail a piece of cedar trim into the rotting window casing with a heavy, rusted ball-peen hammer that looks like it belongs in a museum.
“You’re going to split the wood if you keep hitting it like that,” I call out, leaning my elbows against the tailgate.
She flinches, nearly drops the hammer, and twists around on the top step. Her face is flushed from the heat, a streak of gray wood dust is, once again, smeared across her jawline, but her red lipstick is, for some reason, perfectly intact.
As always.
“Brooks! Good morning,” she pants, wiping her brow with the back of her wrist. “I’m just doing a little emergency maintenance. It’s an authentic technique. I call it high-impact carpentry.”
“It’s called destroying twenty dollars worth of cedar,” I say, walking toward the porch. “Get down from there before you tip that ladder right into the drainage ditch and break your neck.”
She rolls her eyes like I’m being dramatic but climbs down, her sneakers hitting the grass with a light thud. She sets the hammer on the porch step and narrows her eyes as she catches sight of the massive box in my truck.
“What is that?” she asks, walking over to the tailgate. She tilts her head, looking from the box up to my face with a slow, teasing smirk. “Did you buy me an appliance, Chief? Are we exclusive now? Do I need to update my relationship status on LinkedIn?”
“It’s a floor model,” I say, already grabbing the hand truck. I focus on the straps so she doesn’t see the heat creeping up my neck. “Your old one is a hazard. I told you I wasn’t going to spend my day pulling you out of a kitchen fire. It’s electric. We’re capping the gas line today.”
Emmy stands there for a second, hands slipping into the pockets of her pants. The quick, sarcastic retort doesn’t come. She just looks at the white enamel of the stove peeking through the torn cardboard, her eyes softening into something quiet and heavy.
“You didn’t have to do that, Brooks,” she says. “I have money. I could have ordered something online.”
“Online takes three weeks to deliver out here. You’d be living on cold beans until July, and based on what I’ve seen so far, there’s at least a fifty-percent chance you’d somehow burn those too.” I say, adjusting the hand truck. “Grab the door for me. And try not to drop it on your toes.”
“I know how to hold things, thank you very much,” she retorts, instantly regaining her footing.
She marches to the door and holds it open, her shoulders squared.
“I’ll have you know I’ve survived far worse than a heavy appliance.
I once moved an entire studio apartment during a blizzard in Manhattan. ”
“A blizzard is just snow, Emmy. This is five hundred pounds of metal and a house that’s held together by termites and sheer stubbornness.”
“Termites are just nature’s architects,” she quips, stepping aside as I heave the stove over the threshold.
It takes us forty minutes of sweating and maneuvering through the narrow hallway to get the green stove out and the new one in. Mostly because Emmy insists on narrating the process like we’re competing on a home renovation show.
At one point she calls me “emotionally repressed Bob the Builder.”
The old floorboards are covered in fifty years of grease, which Emmy insists on scrubbing down with a lemon-scented cleaner before I can slide the new unit into place.
I’m on my knees behind the stove, tightening the cap over the gas pipe, when she sets two mugs of black coffee on the counter above my head.
“So,” she says, her voice echoing in the small alcove. “Now that the kitchen is modernized, I’m launching phase two tomorrow morning.”
“What’s phase two?” I ask, holding the flashlight between my teeth. I give the wrench one last tug, checking for leaks with soapy water.
“Tomorrow, I’m tackling the barn,” she says, her voice full of that ambition that usually ends with her bleeding or crying on a porch step.
“I found a local supplier who has twenty sheets of industrial tin. I’m going to rent a flatbed, haul them over, and re-roof the north lean-to.
I watched a tutorial. It’s just a giant jigsaw puzzle with screws. Super simple.”
I pull myself out from behind the stove and stand up, dusting off my pants. I set the flashlight down and look at her.
“You’re not doing that tomorrow,” I say.
She pauses with her mug halfway to her mouth, her eyebrows snapping together.
“Excuse me? Is this the local patriarchal veto? My core strength is adequate. Or are you just looking for an excuse to come over and flex your rescue-worker muscles again? You can just ask, Brooks.”
“It’s not about your core strength,” I say, my voice dropping.
My right hand feels stiff—a phantom throb that always starts right around the first week of June. I reach for the coffee mug, the ceramic warmth soaking into my skin.
“The town is closed tomorrow. The hardware store, the lumber yard, the rental place. None of them are opening.”
She frowns, setting her mug down with a clink. “Why? Is it a local holiday?”
“It’s June sixth,” I say.
I don’t look at her. My eyes drift out the kitchen window, tracking the sharp line of the ridge where the old timber mill used to sit.
Even three years later, you can still see the jagged, blackened tops of the pine trees that caught the fire. My stomach does a familiar, ugly turn—the same weight that settles in my chest every time the calendar flips to this week.
“Did something happen?” she asks.
“Three years ago tomorrow,” I say, my thumb tracing the rim of the mug. “The old lumber mill went up. Dust explosion. Structure was ninety years old and dry as tinder. We were a volunteer outfit back then and there wasn’t enough water pressure.”
I stare out the window at the ridge line, but I’m not really seeing the mountains anymore.
I’m seeing orange.
Smoke thick enough to choke on before you even made it through the mill doors. Radios screaming over each other. Men running hoses that felt useless in their hands because the pressure kept dropping every time another line opened.
We were hauling portable tanks in with pickup trucks and praying the relay pump would hold.
It didn’t.
“Chief Miller—Tommy—was inside looking for two night-shift kids who hadn’t clocked out. The roof collapsed. Tommy didn’t make it.”
Tommy didn’t make it but I did.
The words still feel wrong in my mouth.
Like saying them enough times should eventually change the ending.
“The hydrant system out here was ancient,” I say. “Half the lines were corroded through. Tommy had been fighting with the county for upgrades for years, but nobody thought the mill was worth the budget.”
My jaw tightens.
“The first collapse happened fast. Faster than it should’ve.” I rub a hand over my mouth. “We got one of the boys out with second-degree burns. The other one was still unaccounted for. Tommy went back in with me through the south corridor.”
Emmy doesn’t interrupt. She just watches me carefully from across the kitchen.
“There was this moment,” I say, my voice roughening, “where everything went quiet. That’s the part I remember most. Not the explosion. Not the fire. Just… quiet.”
I swallow hard.
“The dust had ignited up in the rafters, and the whole structure shifted. Tommy looked at me and told me to get the hell out.” A humorless breath leaves my chest. “I argued with him about it. In the middle of a burning mill.”
“Brooks—”
“I wasted time.”
My hand curls around the coffee mug so hard the ceramic creaks faintly under my grip.
“I should’ve dragged him out the second the pressure failed. I should’ve called the retreat earlier. But Tommy was chief, and he kept saying we still had a shot at finding the kid.” I stare down into the dark coffee. “And I listened.”
The kitchen goes silent except for the hum of the refrigerator.
“When the roof came down…” I stop for a second, jaw flexing hard enough to ache. “It pinned his lower half. We tried to get back to him, but the heat was too high. The hoses were barely pushing water by then.”
I shake my head once.
“I could hear him on the radio for almost four minutes after the collapse.”
Emmy’s expression crumples for just a fraction of a second before she smooths it back out.
“That’s why you hate unsafe things.”
I let out a dry laugh with no humor in it at all.
“That’s why I don’t tolerate stupid risks,” I correct. “People think I’m controlling because I like rules. And they’re right, I like rules because I know exactly what happens when something small gets ignored.”
My eyes drift toward the old porch outside.
“One bad valve. One overloaded line. One guy saying ‘it’ll probably be fine.’ That’s all it takes.”