And now, standing in front of the burning building, heat licking my face, that thought is still echoing—louder, sharper, impossible to swallow.
“Nora, wait for the fire department!”Jay’s voice cracks as he grabs my arm, but I’m already running.
Nate’s in there and the building’s burning and my pulse is a drumbeat of pure terror.
The heat hits first, then the smoke—thick and choking, clawing at my lungs.
“Nate!Nate!” My voice disappears into the roar.
The hallway stretches endlessly ahead, walls painted orange by the fire.I stumble forward, one hand dragging along the wall, the other over my mouth.
Everything is chaos—the crackle of flames, the groan of metal, sirens screaming somewhere too far away.My eyes sting, vision blurs, but I keep going because stopping means losing him.
But then I see what I fear the most.They’re here., both of them.
Nate’s sprawled on one side of the room, his skin gray in the firelight, lips blue and he’s barely breathing.Jake’s on the other side—blood pooling beneath him, dark and endless.His eyes are open but empty.
“No, no, no?—”
The words rip out of me as I fall to my knees beside Nate, shaking.I grab his wrist, his pulse is weak but still there.
“NATE!”
I shake him—gentle, then harder.
“Wake up!Please, you have to wake up!”
Jay appears through the smoke like a ghost, face pale, eyes wide.
“Oh my God…” He keeps saying it over and over, uselessly.
I want to screamhelp me, but I can’t speak.
Jay kneels beside Jake, checks for a pulse but his expression tells me everything.
“We need to get them out—now.The building’s going to come down.”
He hauls Jake up, dragging him toward the door, and I should move, but I can’t.I’m staring at Nate’s face, peaceful in the firelight, still and wrong and gone.
“Nora!”Jay’s shout snaps me out of it.
I cradle Nate’s head in my lap.His skin is slick with soot and sweat.I brush his hair from his forehead, whispering, “Stay with me.”
His pulse flutters weakly beneath my fingertips.I bend over Nate, shielding him from falling embers.
“Please,” I whisper, rocking him like that could keep him tethered.“Please don’t leave me too.”
The world is burning, and I’m just a heartbeat caught inside it.It shouldn’t feel familiar—fire licking at the sky, smoke clawing at my lungs—but somehow it does.Not because I’ve lived this before, but because my body remembers the shape of panic, the way grief tilts the world off its axis.
It’s the same as that day with Dad—not the scene, not the details, but the feeling.That sharp, unreal slipping—like the edges of the world are warping and I’m watching myself from somewhere outside my own skin.
I remember the carpet under my knees, my breath sawing in and out, too loud, too fast.Time thick and slow and then suddenly rushing.And now… it’s happening again.
My hands don’t feel like mine.
My voice is a ghost in my throat.
I’m here, standing in a burning house, but it’s as if some part of me has gone quiet and far away.
