Different moment. Different loss.
Same terror curling through my bones.
And through the roar and the smoke, one thought keeps looping—familiar, sickening, inevitable:Not again.Not again.
The rest blurs—just slightly at first, like a camera slipping out of focus—and my thoughts scatter into the smoke.I’m still trying to breathe, trying to understand what I’m seeing, when everything around me erupts into motion.
Voices shout.
Boots pound against gravel.
Steady hands close around my arms and Nate’s at the same time.I don’t even register being moved until the cool night air hits my face.
The smoke is thick in my lungs.
My knees buckle.
Someone catches me.
Then the chaos rushes in all at once.
Firefighters pulling us back and paramedics swarming.
Nate being lifted from my grip and laid onto a stretcher, silhouettes bending over him, calling numbers I can’t decipher.
A blanket drops over my shoulders like a sudden weight, and I let them guide me, my feet barely tracking the ground.
Everything is happening at once, fast and loud and blinding—and I’m drifting somewhere just behind it all, consciousness slipping, the world narrowing to fire and sirens and the fear that I’m losing him.
“I’m going with him,” I manage, breath shaky, fingers already reaching for the stretcher.
“Ma’am, we need to get you checked out?—”
“I said I’m going with him.”I try to take a step, but my knees give out again.The paramedic catches me—again.
A second paramedic steps in.
“Let her ride with him.We’ll check her at the hospital.”
I don’t wait for permission.I’m moving before my body is ready, stumbling into the back of the ambulance.
When I finally reach Nate’s side, I take his hand—ice cold, limp, terrifyingly still—and hold on like it’s the only thing keeping me conscious.
“Stay with me,” I whisper.“You told me to hold on, so I am.But you have to hold on too, please.”
The paramedic’s voice is clipped, urgent.
“His breathing’s shallow.Possible overdose.We’ve got naloxone going, but his vitals are weak.”
I squeeze his hand harder.I can’t lose them both.
The town rushes past in streaks of light.I talk to Nate the whole way—about books I’ll read to him, places we’ll go, the life we still have waiting.I tell him I love him again and again, like repetition might anchor him here.
The ER is chaos—bright lights, sharp voices, antiseptic.
They wheel Nate away, and I’m left standing there, covered in ash, feeling like a ghost whose body hasn’t caught up yet.Nick, Danny, Lydia, Kat, Ollie—they’re all there, faces hollow with grief.Somehow word travels faster than fire.
I collapse into a chair.
