21. Ember
Ember
“Daddy says adults fix things.
But Emmy fixes moods too.”
— Sophie
“Once upon a time, in a penthouse so high it poked the clouds, lived the Grand Duchess of the Upper West Side,” I begin. “She had everything a duchess could want: velvet slippers, a collection of antique spoons, and a diamond necklace that sparkled like the stars on a clear night.”
I pace the small circle of the kitchen, the flashlight beam bouncing against the cupboards.
“But one Tuesday, while she was busy practicing her royal wave, the necklace vanished. The royal jewelry box sat empty, save for a single, suspicious dusting of crumbs. Naturally, the Duchess called for the butler. He was a very tall, very nervous man. He insisted he was innocent, but the Duchess was suspicious because he had a habit of hiding his snacks in the silverware drawer.”
I pause, letting the flashlight hover over a patch of shadows.
“She paced her parlor, her silk robes swishing, trying to solve the mystery. She checked the cupboards. She checked the secret passage behind the bookshelf. She even checked inside the grandfather clock. Nothing.”
I look toward the bedroom door, keeping my voice just loud enough to carry through the quiet house, weaving the absurdity of the story to keep the darkness at bay.
“The Duchess was just about to declare a royal emergency when she noticed something strange by the balcony door. A trail. Not crumbs this time, but something shiny—a single, tiny link from her necklace caught on a potted fern. She followed the trail, her slippers silent on the marble floor, until she reached the velvet curtains of the study. And then,” I say, lifting the flashlight beneath my chin so the beam casts long shadows across the ceiling, “the Grand Duchess of the Upper West Side realized that her diamond necklace hadn’t been stolen by the butler at all. ”
Sophie sits on the middle of the kitchen table, her small denim-clad knees pulled all the way to her chin, her eyes tracking every movement of my hands.
She’s got a faint mustache of powdered sugar from the raspberry knot I’d smuggled out of the shop, and her tiny red-and-white sneakers are hooked over the edge of the old pine table.
She looks like a miniature version of her father, all focused intensity and stubborn expectation.
“Was it the goat?” she asks, her voice dropping into a conspiratorial whisper. “Did Mildred eat the diamonds?”
“Mildred was the prime suspect, obviously,” I tell her. “He had a history of illegal paper consumption and an unvouched-for alibi between the hours of two and four. But no. It was actually her own grandmother’s cat, who had mistaken the clasp for a very expensive grasshopper.”
Sophie lets out a high laugh that bounces off the peeling wallpaper, the sound so bright and unbothered it makes the knot of tension between my shoulder blades loosen for a fraction of a second.
She drops her forehead against her knees, her pigtails shaking. “Cats don’t eat grasshoppers, Emmy. They just squish them with their paws.”
“This was a very sophisticated cat, Soph. It had a financial portfolio,” I say, leaning my elbows on the table and blowing out a long breath that flickers the flame of the three-wick lavender candle sitting between us.
I try to keep the story light, but my focus is shot.
I’m doing the math in my head—if the wind is hitting the ridge this hard, the peat is going to be breathing fire. I don’t know why I’m thinking about it like it’s a living thing, but out here, the land feels like a beast you don’t want to wake up.
“Emmy?”
Sophie’s voice is smaller now. She reaches out with one sticky finger and touches the metal casing of my dead phone. “Is my dad still on the mountain?”
“He’s the Chief, sweetie,” I say, forcing my mouth into a wide, easy smile.
I reach across the table and give one of her dark pigtails a light, playful tug.
“He has to stay until the trees promise to behave themselves. It’s part of his contract with the county.
He has to give them a formal lecture on fire safety. ”
“He has a big shovel,” she says, her little chin lifting. “He can dig a hole bigger than the truck.”
“I bet he can,” I say, though my eyes involuntarily drift toward the black glass of the kitchen window.
The north ridge is entirely gone from view, swallowed by a thick, seamless ink that feels less like night and more like a physical wall closing in on the hollow road.
The wind is growing teeth now, ripping the dried peony heads off the porch steps and sending them rattling across the gravel like tiny skull bones.
“Right,” I say, clapping my hands together. “Enough about grand duchesses. Do you know the song about the Ants Go Marching?”
Sophie’s eyes light up. “The ones who go under the ground?”
“The very same,” I say, sliding off my stool and dropping into a dramatic, wide-legged stance on the linoleum.
My green plastic hair clip finally gives up, letting my curls tumble down into my eyes, but I don’t care.
“Grab that wooden spoon from the counter, Sergeant Sophie. Your country needs you.”
I clear the kitchen chairs away from the stove, creating a five-foot stage between the refrigerator and the sink.
Sophie scrambles onto her stool, clutching a wooden spoon and a heavy soup ladle.
“The ants go marching one by one, hurrah! Hurrah!” I bellow, marching in a high-kneed, exaggerated stomp.
BANG! CLANG! Sophie whacks the pot with the ladle, her timing chaotic, but she’s grinning so hard her eyes are just slits.
“The ants go marching two by two, hurrah! Hurrah!” I sing, picking up the pace, doing a clumsy kick-step. “The little one stops to tie his shoe!”
Sophie shrieks, a high, piercing sound that cuts right through the low, mechanical rumble of the firetrucks passing down on the main road.
She drops the ladle and starts stomping her own feet on the metal stool.
“And they all go marching, down, to the ground, to get out, of the rain!”
“Boom! Boom! Boom!” she shouts, jumping off the stool and grabbing my hands.
We spin in a wild, uncoordinated circle, my boots sliding on the linoleum, her small, denim-clad knees knocking against my legs.
“The ants go marching three by three!” I sing, breathless now.
“The little one stops to climb a tree!”
We spin until we’re stumbling, our laughter mixing with the rattling of the house, until finally, we collapse onto the floorboards together. We’re both panting, our breath coming in short, white, visible puffs in the cooling air of the kitchen.
We stay tangled together on the kitchen floor for a long moment, our chests rising and falling in sync. I keep one hand pressed firmly against the small of her back, letting the rhythm of her breathing anchor me while the house creaks around us.
“Emmy?”
“Yeah, Soph?”
“Do you think the stars are still there? Even when the sky gets all angry and black like this?” She shifts, pulling back just enough to look at me.
“Sometimes I think they go hide in the clouds because they’re shy.
Or maybe they’re just waiting for the wind to stop so they can come back and watch over the trees. ”
I brush a loose strand of hair away from her forehead, my heart squeezing. “I think that’s exactly it. They’re just waiting for the coast to be clear. They’re very patient. They’ve been watching this mountain for a long, long time.”
She nods, satisfied, but then her expression shifts, turning contemplative. “Do you think the trees talk to each other when it’s loud like this? Dad says they don’t have mouths, but I hear them whispering when I’m trying to sleep.”
I laugh. “I think they’re probably just grumbling about the weather. You know how old trees get. They’re probably saying, ‘Hey, you’re leaning on my branch!’ or ‘Stop poking me with your pine cones!’”
Sophie giggles. “I bet the big oak by the driveway is the boss. He’s the tallest. He’s probably telling everyone else to stand up straight and be brave.”
She pauses, her fingers absently tracing the stitching on my sweatshirt sleeve.
“Emmy, do you ever get scared that you’ll forget things? Like, if you don’t think about them really hard, they’ll just float away into the dark?”
I swallow hard, trying to keep my voice steady. “Sometimes. But that’s why we tell stories, right? To hold onto the important parts so they stay right here with us.”
“I don’t want to be scared,” she says, her voice dropping to a whisper. “I want to be like my dad. He never looks scared, even when the fires get really big.”
I pull her tighter, resting my cheek against her soft hair.
“You know a secret, Sophie? Being brave isn’t about not being scared.
It’s about being scared but doing the right thing anyway.
It’s like when you took that big spider outside with the cup instead of yelling.
That was brave. And right now? You’re being so brave for staying here with me while the wind does its big, grumpy dance. ”
“I am?”
“You are,” I promise, kissing her forehead.
“You’re the bravest girl on this whole mountain.
You have a lion’s heart in that tiny chest. And even if the wind is loud, it can’t touch you, because we’re a team.
And teams are the strongest things in the world.
Stronger than trucks, stronger than trees, and definitely stronger than a little bit of wind. ”
She smiles, a slow, sleepy expression that tugs at my heart, but then the house lets out a sharp, groaning crack as another gust of wind hits the roof.
It’s followed by the dry, scraping rattle of a maple branch dragging across the tin of the lean-to behind the house, the sound like jagged fingernails against a chalkboard.
Sophie stiffens instantly. The dreamy, quiet light in her eyes vanishes, replaced by a sudden, rigid watchfulness.
She doesn’t cry—she’s too much her father’s daughter for that—but her gaze snaps toward the black windowpane, and I feel her small shoulders tighten against my chest, her body coiling like a spring.
“Are the goats okay?” she asks. “The wind makes the barn make the funny noise. It sounds like it’s scared.”
“The goats are totally fine, Sophie,” I say, squeezing her tight as I stand up, hoisting her onto my hip.
“All twelve of them are tucked away inside the big barn. The latches are down, the hay is full, and they’re probably all asleep in a giant, furry pile right now.
Kevin is supervising from the center stall. ”
I grab the flashlight from the mason jar, the yellow beam slicing through the kitchen’s heavy shadow like a knife as we move toward the back mudroom to check the door lock.
When I crack the window in the mudroom to check the latch, the smell hits me—not the clean, wet scent of summer rain I’d been praying for, but a thin, bitter trace of wet ash that makes the back of my throat scratch.
Down in the lower pasture, the heavy barn stands solid against the dark.
A distant, collective chorus of soft, grunting bleats carries up the hill—the goats letting us know they are perfectly dry, safe, and entirely unbothered by the storm inside their tight perimeter.
“See?” I whisper to Sophie. “They’re inside their own fortress. They don’t need us out there messing up their routine.”
The kitchen is even darker when we return.
To keep Sophie’s mind off the roaring wind, I fetch the old tin box of watercolors I found in the pantry cupboard, along with a stack of heavy white printer paper I had leftover from my old life.
“Alright, Sergeant,” I say, setting a small bowl of water on the floorboards between us. “The lighting conditions are less than ideal, but a true artist doesn’t care about that.”
Sophie drops down onto her stomach, her legs kicking out behind her as she dips a plastic-bristled brush into the water and then vigorously swirls it into a cake of bright, cobalt blue.
“I’m making the mountain,” she announces. “But with lots of rain so the fires go away.”
For twenty minutes, we sit shoulder-to-shoulder on the floorboards, the yellow beam of the flashlight propped against a cereal box to give us just enough illumination to see the colors bleeding into the paper.
Sophie’s small tongue pokes out the corner of her mouth as she adds a massive, disproportionate orange rectangle to the bottom of her mountain.
“What’s that part?”
“That’s Dad’s truck,” she says simply. “He’s driving through the big trees to come get me.”
A sharp pang of something heavy and tight squeezes my ribs.
I look at her clumsy, wet painting, the bright orange paint running into the deep blue water, and I have to take a slow, deliberate breath to keep my voice steady.
“He’s very good at driving through the big trees, Sophie. He’s got the big tires for it.”
By eight-thirty, she’s so exhausted from the dancing and the sugar that her brush slips from her fingers, leaving a long yellow streak across the linoleum.
I carry her into the downstairs bedroom and lay her down on the quilt. Her eyes are already half-shut before her head hits the pillowcase, her tiny hand still holding a loose thread from the sleeve of my sweatshirt.
“Emmy?”
“Yeah, Sophie?”
“Tell my dad that I painted the truck the bright color so he can see it in the dark.”
“I’ll tell him,” I whisper, leaning down to press my lips against her forehead. “Sleep tight, Sergeant.”