Page 154 of Honeyfires

We lay tangled in the gold light, not sleeping, not talking for a while. Her fingers found the phoenix on my ribs. The initials. The compass.

"Tell me something good about Copper Valley," she said eventually.

"I've never been."

"Guess, then."

I thought about it. "Quieter. Smaller. Nobody knows my face." I looked at the ceiling. "Different terrain. Different fire behavior patterns to learn. Different crew."

"Are you scared?"

"Yeah," I said honestly. "But not of the fire."

"What then?"

"Starting over." I paused. "Being the new person again."

She propped herself up on one elbow. "You won't be the new person. You'll be the forewoman who cleared an active crown fire to get her crew out alive. That's who you'll be from day one." Her expression was very certain. "And I'll be there. So you won't be starting over. You'll be starting the next part."

I looked at her. The afternoon light. The escaped curl against her cheek. The violet frames slightly askew.

"The next part," I said.

"Of the story." She smiled. "It's a good one so far."

"Library science," I said. "You're very positive about narrative arcs."

"I've read enough of them to know how they work." She kissed the corner of my mouth. "The hard part in the middle is never the end."

I laughed, and she smiled at the sound of it.

"We should probably eat something," she said, settling back against me.

"Probably."

A pause.

"Before whoever Jackson called shows up," she added, very casually.

I turned my head to look at her. "You knew."

"He texted me from the hallway. Said he was organizing something and did I need time first." She sounded entirely unbothered. "I said an hour."

"An hour."

"Seemed right."

I stared at the ceiling. "You are terrifyingly competent."

"Library science," she said again, and kissed my shoulder, and climbed out of bed to go start something in the kitchen.

I lay there for another moment in the quiet apartment, in the last gold hour before the crew arrived, in the particular stillness of a day that had changed the shape of everything and left me, somehow, intact.

Then I got up and went to help her.

That night, the crew came over.

Not planned. Not organized. Jackson showed up first, Cassie beside him, with two six-packs in his hands. Stevens arrived twenty minutes later, his cane tapping on the stairs, and Vera opened the door before he knocked and immediately started fussing over whether he needed to sit down, which he bore with the patient dignity of someone who had been fussed over by Vera before and understood it was non-negotiable.