CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The gun pressed against Jamie Thornton's thigh like a secret.
He'd been sitting in his car for forty-seven minutes, parked across the street from Wanderlust Travel on East Superior Street, watching the storefront with the patient attention of a man who had learned to wait.The February sun—such as it was—hung low and pale behind a ceiling of clouds, casting the kind of flat gray light that made everything look like a photograph left too long in a drawer.Valentine's Day.The irony wasn't lost on him.
Two years ago today, he'd made reservations at The Fireside Grill.Rebecca's favorite.He'd planned to surprise her with tickets to that bed and breakfast up the shore she'd been hinting about for months—the one with the clawfoot tub and the view of the lake.He'd even bought her a card, something sentimental that he'd spent twenty minutes choosing, the kind of thing she always pretended to roll her eyes at but secretly loved.
The card had burned with everything else.
Jamie's hand drifted to his coat pocket, where the magazine lay folded against his chest.He didn't need to open it—he knew every page by heart now, every photograph, every smiling face—but the weight of it comforted him.Proof that the world still held echoes of what he'd lost.
I Love Duluth.The winter edition.His own column ran on page sixty-three: "Dining Out with Jamie Thornton: A Critic's Guide to Local Comfort Food."The last restaurant he'd reviewed had been The Fireside Grill—a glowing piece about their new winter menu, about the warmth of the service, about the way the candlelight played across Rebecca's face as she'd laughed at something he said.
That had been their last dinner together.Three days before the fire.
He'd been at the newspaper office when the call came.A electrical fault in the old wiring of their Victorian on Fifth Street, the fire marshal had said later, his voice careful and practiced in the way of men who delivered bad news for a living.The blaze had started in the basement and spread faster than anyone could have predicted.By the time the trucks arrived, the entire first floor was engulfed.Rebecca had been upstairs in the study, working on her lesson plans for the following week.
She'd been a teacher.Third grade.The kids had adored her.
Jamie closed his eyes against the memory, but it found him anyway—the way it always did, the way it would until the day he died.Standing in the street at two in the morning, watching flames claw at the sky through what had been their bedroom window.The firefighters holding him back when he tried to run inside.The moment when the second floor collapsed and he knew, with a certainty that hollowed him out completely, that she was gone.
Everything had burned.The furniture they'd chosen together, the photographs on the walls, the wedding album her mother had assembled by hand.Twenty-three years of accumulated life, reduced to ash and charred timber in a single night.The only things that survived were what he'd had with him at the office: his laptop, his wallet, his coat.
And the magazine.The advance copy ofI Love Duluththat had been sitting on the passenger seat of his car, waiting for him to bring it home and show Rebecca his latest column.
He'd read it that first night, sitting in a hospital waiting room while doctors examined him for smoke inhalation he didn't remember breathing.Read it again in the hotel room that became his home for the next three weeks.Read it so many times that the pages had gone soft, the spine cracked, the cover worn thin from handling.
At first, he'd only been looking at his own words.The column about The Fireside Grill.The description of their meal, their conversation, the way Rebecca had stolen bites of his tiramisu when she thought he wasn't looking.It was all he had left of that night—those paragraphs, that memory preserved in print while the physical evidence of their life together smoldered in the wreckage of their home.
But then he'd started noticing the other photographs.
Page twenty-two: a feature on local entrepreneurs, including a shot of Monica Hayes at her hair salon, scissors in hand, blonde hair catching the studio lights.Page thirty-one: Amanda Pierce accepting her Teacher of the Year award, her smile radiant, her light hair swept back from a face that seemed to glow with quiet pride.Page forty-seven: Sarah Ramsey in her accounting office, professional and poised, the caption praising her innovative approach to small business finance.
Blonde women.Women in their thirties.Women with soft features and gentle smiles and the particular kind of warmth that radiated from the page.
Women who looked like Rebecca.
Not exactly like her—never exactly.But close enough that when Jamie let his eyes unfocus, when he let the details blur into impression, he could almost see her face in theirs.Could almost believe, for just a moment, that she wasn't gone.That she was still out there somewhere, smiling for cameras, accepting awards, living the life the fire had stolen from her.
The first time he'd found himself standing outside Monica Hayes's salon, he hadn't even realized he'd driven there.One moment he'd been at his apartment, paging through the magazine; the next, he was across the street from The Looking Glass, watching through the window as Monica cut and styled, her movements graceful, her laugh carrying faintly through the glass.
He'd told himself it was nothing.A coincidence.The desperate grasping of a broken man trying to find connection in a world that had become unbearable.
But he'd gone back.Again and again, watching from his car, learning her schedule, her habits, the way she always stayed late on Tuesdays to catch up on paperwork.And the more he watched, the more he saw Rebecca in her movements, in her smile, in the particular way she tilted her head when she was listening to someone.
The idea had come to him slowly, crystallizing over weeks of grief and obsession.Rebecca had burned.The fire had taken her, consumed her, left him with nothing but ash and the fading imprint of her face in his memory.But fire couldn't touch ice.Fire couldn't reach the cold.
If he could preserve them—these women who wore Rebecca's face like a mask they didn't know they were wearing—then some part of her would survive.Would be safe.Would be protected from the flames that haunted his dreams every single night.
The freezers had been his salvation.He'd learned about closed restaurants from his work as a food critic—knew which places had shut down for renovations, which had failed health inspections, which sat empty and forgotten with their equipment still humming in the dark.The first time he'd walked into Bella Ristorante through the unlocked service entrance, he'd felt something shift inside him.A sense of purpose he hadn't experienced since before the fire.
A sense of control.
Monica had been the first.He'd approached her in the parking lot of her salon, late on a Tuesday night, his hand wrapped around the gun in his pocket.She'd been frightened at first—of course she had—but he'd been calm, reasonable, almost gentle in the way he'd explained what she needed to do.Come with me.Don't make a sound.I won't hurt you if you cooperate.
A lie, but a necessary one.The truth would have terrified her more.
He'd taken her to Bella Ristorante and done what needed to be done.His hands around her throat, squeezing until the light faded from her eyes.Then the careful work of arranging her—folding her hands, closing her eyes, positioning her just so in the blue-white light of the freezer.When he'd stepped back and looked at her, peaceful and preserved, untouchable by fire or time or the cruel entropy of the world, he'd wept.
