My brain scrabbled toward a thought: mask. Oxygen. That’s what they put on people on TV when things had gone really, really wrong.
I tried to move. My limbs answered like they were made of wet sand.
A warm, solid weight settled against my shoulder, keeping me from lurching upright. “Hey. Easy.”
His voice cut through everything else.
Even before the rest of the world came into focus, I recognized that voice. Low. Steady. A little rough around the edges, like it had been scraped over gravel.
Powell.
My eyes dragged open, the lids heavy and reluctant. The night above me was smeared and bright—Christmas lights, street lamps, and something flashing red-blue-red again. My vision tunneled and then snapped back, narrowing on the dark silhouette leaning over me.
He was close. Too close. His features resolved slowly: soot streaked across his cheek, mask askew on top of his head, brows drawn tight with a worry I’d never seen on his face before. His hand curled firm around my shoulder, fingers splayed as if he could anchor me to the concrete.
“Jess.” My name in his mouth came out like a promise and a plea at the same time. “You with me?”
The plastic mask over my nose and mouth made it hard to talk. I managed the tiniest nod. The motion sent a spike of pain behind my eyes.
Everything smelled of burned plastic and old coffee and wet asphalt. The back of my throat tasted like an ashtray. I coughed, and that hurt too, a raw scraping up my windpipe that made my eyes water.
“Slow breaths,” he said. “In through the mask. Let the O2 do the work.”
Bossy, I thought fuzzily. But my lungs were in no shape to argue, so I tried it his way. Cool, faintly metallic air flowed in as I inhaled. It wasn’t pleasant, exactly, but it was better than choking.
Bits and pieces came back in disjointed flashes: the flicker of the breaker panel in the back of the truck, that weird electrical odor, a sudden plume of smoke where there absolutely should not have been any, and the bone-deep, oh-shit certainty that things were about to go sideways.
And then nothing.
I forced my gaze to shift past him, toward where my truck should be.
Pour Decisions looked… wrong.
Soot coated the Airstream’s shiny skin, black fans of smoke staining the metal above the service window. The roof vent was warped, edges crumpled inward. Water pooled dark underneath, reflecting the sagging tangle of ruined twinkle lights that had once cheerfully framed my workspace. The wreath I’d wired up that afternoon—fake holly, real pinecones, red ribbon—hung crooked and blackened, edges curled from heat.
Steam belched from the open side door, the one I’d cursed a hundred times for sticking, the one that had clearly lost that fight tonight. Firefighters moved around the truck, hoses sweeping, voices clipped as they called to each other.
The sight punched the air out of my lungs harder than the smoke had.
I’d lived in this town long enough to know what fire could do to a structure. I’d watch it strip a building down to studs in less than half an hour. A food truck was smaller. In no universe was the damage anything but expensive and catastrophic.
A broken, ugly little laugh tried to push out of my chest and came out as another cough instead.
Powell’s hand tightened on my shoulder. “Hey. Easy.”
“My… truck…” The words rasped against the mask. I tried to lift a hand to point, but it trembled halfway up and fell uselessly back to the concrete.
He followed my gaze. His jaw flexed, a muscle ticking once near his ear. “You’re okay,” he said quietly. “That’s what matters.”
“That’s—” I coughed again, throat protesting. “That’s my everything.”
The oxygen mask mangled the consonants, but he understood anyway. His expression shifted, some mix of sympathy and something darker moving behind his eyes. “I know.”
He couldn’t. Not really. Pour Decisions wasn’t just a truck and an espresso machine and a hand-painted logo. It was every inch of independence I had left. My rent. My savings. My hours and my recipes and my stupid, stubborn dream of not having to answer to anybody after a lifetime of answering to everybody.
The holiday season was when I made enough to float the slow months. December paid for March. December kept the doors open. December meant appointments on my calendar and preorders and special orders and custom holiday drinks with kitschy names that regulars loved.
And now my December leaked steam into the night while strangers watched.
