Chapter 4
She called her brother that night, something she did every Sunday without fail.
“You sound different,” Toby said. Twenty years old and perceptive in the specific unwelcome way younger siblings often were. “Good different. What’s going on up there in the mansion?”
“Nothing’s going on. I burn things professionally and get paid well for it.”
“Uh-huh.” She could hear him grinning through the phone. “You’ve mentioned this Damon guy three times in the last two calls. You’ve never mentioned an employer three times in two calls in your entire life.”
“He’s my boss, Toby.”
“Sure,” Toby said in the tone of someone who intended to bring this up again at length once he had more evidence.
Then, more seriously: “Tuition’s due next month. I wanted to say thank you. I know what this job actually costs you.
Being away from Portland, being up there alone in some house with a guy who apparently doesn’t own a single photograph of himself.”
“It doesn’t cost me anything,” Ren said, and found to her own surprise that she meant it more than she expected to. “I like it here. That’s the strange part. I actually like it here.”
She didn’t tell him about the frame or the cardigan folded outside her door or the particular quality of quiet that had settled between her and Damon Cole over the past few weeks.
Something that felt less like employer and employee and more like two people slowly, cautiously learning the shape of each other’s damage and finding, against both their expectations, that it fit.
Ren had never told Damon about the fire. She’d told him her mother died — that fact was unavoidable, threaded through casual conversation the way facts about your family always are.
But she’d never told him how.
And he’d never asked, respecting the same kind of locked door in her that she respected in him.
She’d been fourteen. An electrical fault in the kitchen wall, the fire marshal said later, though Ren had spent a decade afterward turning the word “electrical” over in her mind, like it explained anything at all about the smell of smoke, the sound her mother’s voice made through a closed door, the fact that Ren had made it out and her mother hadn’t.
She became a chef anyway. Some stubborn, contrary part of her refusing to let fire win a second victory by taking her career from her too. But she’d never fully made peace with flame. She kept every stovetop fire extinguisher inspected monthly. She never once left a burner unattended. Not for thirty seconds. Not ever.
Which was why, on a Tuesday in early November, when a dish towel caught on the gas burner while Ren’s back was turned — reaching for a spice — and flame leapt up fast and bright across the stovetop, something in her simply stopped working.
She didn’t scream. She didn’t move. She stood frozen in the middle of her own kitchen, watching fire climb toward the cabinet above the stove. And her body took her somewhere else entirely. Back to a hallway with smoke pouring under a door. Back to being fourteen and unable to make her legs carry her toward the sound of her mother’s voice instead of away from it.
Damon found her like that.
He’d smelled smoke from his office and come running. What he found wasn’t a chef calmly reaching for the extinguisher three feet from her hand. It was Ren standing rigid and silent, eyes fixed on the flame, her breathing gone shallow and fast in a way that had nothing to do with the size of the fire — which was small, contained, entirely manageable — and everything to do with something much older than tonight.
Damon grabbed the extinguisher himself. He put the fire out in under ten seconds. Then he turned to find Ren still standing exactly where she’d been, shaking now, her hands pressed flat against her own chest as though trying to hold something inside that wanted out.
“Ren.” He said her name once, carefully. She didn’t respond. “Ren, look at me. The fire’s out. You’re safe.”
“I know,” she managed, though her voice didn’t sound like it belonged to her. “I know it’s out. I just — I can’t.”
He didn’t try to make her explain. He simply crossed the kitchen, took both her hands in his. They were ice cold despite standing three feet from the stove. He lowered them both to the floor, sitting with his back against the cabinets, pulling her down beside him so she wasn’t standing anymore. Wasn’t at risk of her knees giving out the way they looked like they might.
“Breathe with me,” he said. “That’s all. Nothing else.”
They sat on the kitchen floor for what felt like a long time. Damon’s hand steady around hers, his voice low and even, counting breaths out loud until hers slowly matched his rhythm instead of racing past it.
When she could finally speak again, the whole story came out of her in pieces. The electrical fault. The smoke under the door. The fourteen-year-old girl who ran the wrong direction and had spent a decade since wondering if a different direction would have changed anything.
“You didn’t run the wrong direction,” Damon said quietly when she finished. “You ran toward staying alive. That’s not the same thing as running away from her.”
“I know that. Logically, I know that.” Ren wiped her face with the back of her hand. “It doesn’t always feel that way at two in the morning.”
“No,” he agreed. “It doesn’t.”
He was quiet a moment, his thumb moving absently across the back of her hand. A gesture she suspected he wasn’t fully aware he was making.
“After the accident, I used to wake up certain I could still hear the sound the car made. Metal on ice. I’d be in some group home bedroom, some room that had held six other kids before me and would hold six more after. And I’d lie there hearing that sound, and no one in the house even knew my name well enough to check on me.”
“That’s why you don’t sleep,” Ren said, understanding arriving all at once.
“That’s why I don’t sleep,” he confirmed.
They stayed on the kitchen floor a long time after that, past the point where either of them needed to, simply because neither wanted to be the one to break whatever fragile, unguarded thing had opened up between them.
Before he helped her up off the floor, he pulled her into a hug. Brief at first, almost hesitant, like a man testing whether he still remembered how. Then longer than either of them expected, his hand coming up to cradle the back of her head, her face pressed into the curve of his neck. Both of them breathing each other in like something neither wanted to be the first to let go of.
Ren felt his heartbeat against her cheek — faster than it should have been for two people simply sitting on a kitchen floor. And understood, with a small, dangerous thrill, that it wasn’t only the fire that had unsettled it.
“You can let go,” she murmured, though she made no move to let go herself.
May you like
“I don’t want to yet,” Damon said, his voice low against her hair.
And the honesty of it landed somewhere low in her chest, warm and unmistakable, and entirely unlike anything a boss was supposed to make an employee feel.
