Page 53 of The Fire

“I’m definitely not complaining.” Jamie ducked down to kiss me again. “I’m gonna taste all those sweet parts of—”

But Jamie’s words were lost as the whole world exploded in a loudcrash, like the sound of a freight train slamming into a car… or a giant tree crashing through glass.

One instant, Jamie was poised above me, and the next we were both running down the hall toward his bedroom.

“Holy shit.” I peered over Jamie’s bicep as he braced himself in the doorway of his bedroom. “Holyshit.”

A giant tree branch protruded from the window above his bed in a bizarre sculpture of pine needles, glass shards, and twisted metal from the window frame. The curtains hung drunkenly, with one side of the rod dislodged by the weight of the branch.

I tried to duck under Jamie’s arm to get a closer look, but he held me back.

“Glass,” he said shortly, pointing at my socked feet.

I nodded in understanding.

“Fuck,” he said. His shoulders slumped and he ran both hands through his hair. “I’ve gotta—Oh.”

Jamie moved me aside with a hand on each shoulder, darted to the next door down the hall, and threw the door open.

Molly’s room.

“Fuck, fuck,fuck,” Jamie said. His eyes were wide and he looked… absolutely devastated.

“What?” I demanded, following after him, but Jamie didn’t answer. He walked into Molly’s room like he was locked in some kind of nightmare.

When I looked, I was horrified too, possibly for an entirely different reason.

Pine branches had broken through the window here, also, breaking the window frame almost completely, and the plaster near the ceiling was bowed, like maybe the tree outside was resting against the wall right there. But that wasn’t the horrifying part.

The walls were painted bright Peace Yellow—a fact I knew since I’d been the one to help Molly pick from the paint chips—and the bedding was dark purple. Molly’s paintings and photographs hung all over the walls, and her old camera sat on a shelf above her white desk, ready for her to grab, like she might walk in the door at any moment.

The room looked the same as it had the last time I’d been here. Just as the kitchen did. And the living room. And the bathroom. And Jamie’s room too. The entire Burke home was like that scene fromGreat Expectations, except there was not a single speck of dust anywhere. It was like a time capsule. Like inside these walls, time had stopped.

“Jamie!” I yelled, as the man wandered toward the bed. “Glass,” I warned him this time.

Jamie shook his head like he was coming out of a dream and stopped by the end of the bed. “Right,” he said hoarsely. “Thanks.”

“Stay right there,” I demanded. I ran to the kitchen and stuffed my feet into my mostly-dry sneakers, grabbed Jamie’s boots, and rushed back. “Here,” I said, holding them out. “Put these on.”

Jamie hadn’t moved. He was frozen, one hand on his forehead, staring at the walls like he’d never seen them before.

“Jame?” I walked around him and stopped in front of him, grabbing his face in both hands so he looked at me. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Jamie said softly, but his eyes looked lost. “I’m fine. I—” He took the boots from me and jammed them on, then rushed to the destroyed window and looked out. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. It’s just a branch, I think.” He looked back at me. “The rest of the tree is standing strong, so I think we’re good structurally.”

I nodded. “I hadn’t even considered that, but that’s good, right?”

“Yeah. If it was coming down on the roof, we’d have to leave.”

“That’s good. Good. So, now we need to… What? Call someone?”

Jamie shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess. Find some wood and board it up.” He swallowed. “I haven’t been in here for months.”

“Yeah?” I blinked. “It’s really clean.”

“There’s a company that comes a couple times a month to keep the place tidy.” He shrugged. “I mostly bother with the outside stuff. Except I forgot to cut back the trees.” He stared up at the ceiling and shook his head. “Fuck,” he said again.

“Hey,” I said softly, “shit happens. But we can fix this, okay?”