I lift my head and scan the crowd.A woman stands half a block off, hair too bright for the night, mouth a hard line.She watches the bakery burn the way some people watch a parade.My stomach goes cold and mean.
Trina.
She clocks me the same second.She smiles, small, satisfied, and melts into the dark like she never learned to walk, only slither.My hand flexes.The old part of me that bites first and thinks later bares its teeth.
Not tonight.
Tonight is triage.
I pull my cut off and wrap it around Carol because the blanket ain’t enough.The leather swallows her shoulders, swallows the tremor, swallows me whole along with it.She leans into me like gravity made a new rule.
By morning, the trucks are gone, and the bakery is a rib cage picked clean.The sky tries to do mercy with pink and fails.Carol sits in the hospital wrapped in my cut, her hair smelling like smoke and sugar that got mean.
They check her out good.Got pictures of the baby and all.I breathe a sigh of relief when the nurse says all is right as rain.
“I can’t stay here,” Carol says, voice sanded raw.
“I know.”
“I have nowhere to go.My apartment.It burned up too.”
“Yeah,” I say.“You do.”
She turns her face up, eyes tired, bright under the ash.“Where?”
“Home,” I tell her.“Back to Evervale.”
She stares at me long enough to weigh past against future, love against pride, fear against the kid, we both just seen inside her.
“You’ll be safe at the club,” I say.“I’ll make damn sure of it.Frost will clear a room.Roof.Heat.People who won’t let you carry weight alone.”
She leans on the seat, eyes half-closed, one hand resting where my mind can finally admit it, our kid.I lay my palm over hers without asking and she doesn’t move away.
“Family?”she echoes, soft like a dare.
“Mine,” I say.“Ours.”
Her throat works.She doesn’t speak.Picking up the one thing she saved from the bakery, the journal with the cookie cutter attached, I shove it in my jacket pocket.I walk her outside, offer her a seat on my Harley.She takes it.I start the engine.She doesn’t tell me to stop.
We roll out under a sky the color of steel.I can breathe easy for the first time in ages.I head toward Evervale.I don’t look in the mirrors.I know what’s back there.
Fire.
A woman with a matchbook heart.
A promise I plan to keep even if I must carve the words into my own hide.
I’m taking Carol home.
And I’m not letting go.
Chapter 21
Carol
The snow looks different when you’re leaving behind ashes.It’s cleaner somehow, like the world’s trying to make up for what it took.
I don’t look back at the bakery.The odor of smoke still clings to my hair, my skin.Every breath tastes like loss.Humbug’s bike rattles beneath us.The motion steadies me, reminds me what’s left, what still matters.
