CHAPTER 1
Lucy
Three years had passedsince Mateo was gone, and one since my mother followed. I still couldn't close my eyes without losing them all over again.
The nightmare started the way it always did with smoke filling my lungs, thick and suffocating, the kind that tasted like ash and endings. I was running through the warehouse, the one I'd never actually seen but had rebuilt a thousand times from news reports and imagination. Steel beams groaned overhead. Flames climbed the walls like living things, hungry and patient.
Lucy.Mateo's voice, somewhere ahead of me.Lucy, I'm here.
But every corner I turned led to another hallway, another wall of fire, another dead end. And then the warehouse dissolved, the way dreams do, and suddenly I was in Mom's hospital room instead. The antiseptic smell replacing smoke. The steady beep ofmonitors. Her hand in mine, so thin I could feel every bone, and her voice sayingYou're going to be okay, mija. You're going to be okay.
I wasn't okay. I was never going to be okay.
Lucy.Mateo again, but I couldn't reach him. Couldn't find him. The smoke was back, filling the hospital room, and Mom's hand went slack in mine, and somewhere in the distance a ceiling collapsed?—
I woke up gasping.
The ceiling above me was water-stained and unfamiliar for three panicked heartbeats before my brain caught up. I was back in West Valley Springs, in my apartment. The one I'd rented six months ago when I came crawling back to the town I swore I'd never see again.
I pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw stars instead of smoke.
The clock on my nightstand glowed 4:30 AM. Too early to get up. Too late to fall back asleep. I lay there in the gray almost-light, listening to my own breathing slow, cataloging the facts of my life the way I did every morning:
My name is Lucy Moreno.
I'm twenty-nine years old.
I work at a café and I live in a town I used to love and I am alone in every way that matters.
Three years since Mateo, the love of my life, died in a warehouse fire, pulling a child to safety while the ceiling came down.
One year since my mother lost her battle with the cancer that had been eating her alive for eighteen months.
Six months since I fled Denver with nothing but two suitcases and a desperate hope that the one place I'd been running from might be the only place left to hide.
It was a ritual, a reminder that I was still here, even when I wasn't sure I wanted to be.
Moreno was my mother's name before she married my father. My legal name was still Lucy Delgado on every document that mattered—driver's license, social security, the teaching certificate I'd let lapse. But Moreno was the name I gave Joanna when she hired me, the name on my apartment lease. It wasn't a legal alias. Just a ghost I was hiding behind.
I didn't turn on the lights. There was no need to. I knew this apartment in the dark. I knew the twelve steps from bed to bathroom, the way the floorboard creaked near the closet, the exact angle of moonlight through the window that never quite closed right.
The bottom drawer of my dresser sat closed, the way it had been for weeks now. I used to open it every morning and take out the bundle wrapped in soft blue fabric, my mother's chemo scarf, the one she wore even after her hair grew back because she said it made her feel brave.
Inside the scarf, Mateo's badge. The one Cal had pressed into my hands at the hospital, still smudged with soot from that night. The department had given me a clean one at the funeral, polished and encased, but this was the one that had been on Mateo's chest when he died. Cal thought I should have it. I'd never been able to clean it.
I used to hold them both every morning. Theywere proof that they'd existed. Proof that I'd been loved.
Now I couldn't even look at the drawer.
Survival, I'd learned, meant not wanting too much. Not feeling too much, not reaching for things that would only remind me how empty my hands were.
I got up. Showered. Pulled on jeans and a soft gray sweater that made me look invisible, which was exactly the point. By 5:30, I was walking the six blocks to Mountain Café, the sky still purple-dark above the peaks, the air sharp with early autumn cold.
This was my life now. Small. Quiet. Careful.
It was enough. It had to be enough.
The café smelled like coffee and cinnamon and the particular warmth of a place that had been serving the same town for forty years. I'd worked here for five months, ever since Joanna hired me on the spot when I walked in looking like a ghost and asking if they needed help.
