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Then the acrid smell hit her. And when she looked up at where the stovepipe met the ceiling, a thin curl of smoke was seeping out from the joint.

“Oh God,” Emily whispered.

Mrs. C. stood up from the table so fast her chair screeched backward across the floor.

“Everyone out,” Emily said. Her voice came out too high. She cleared her throat. “Everyone out. Now. Go out the front.” She didn’t want them in the alleyway in case the firefighters needed to access the kitchen that way.

The crafting club didn’t need to be told twice. Kit grabbed her beret and Edith’s arm in the same motion. Mrs. Bishop left her mac and cheese. Cassidy scooped up the quilt squares, because of course she did. Madison was already holding the door.

Emily’s hands shook as she reached for her phone in her back pocket. She dialed 911 and the line rang once, twice⁠—

“Maple Falls 911, what’s your emergency?”

“This is Emily Whitaker at the Pumpkin Pie Bakery on Oak Way. I’ve got a chimney fire, I think—the stovepipe is—there’s smoke coming from where it meets the ceiling⁠—”

She backed toward the door as she talked, but she couldn’t stop staring at the stove, at the way the metal was changing color, going from black to a dull, ugly red near the base of the pipe. The roaring was louder now.

“Emily.”

She spun toward the back door—the one she’d cracked open earlier—and Cole was already stepping through it, Captain’s leash wrapped around the porch railing outside. Snow dusted his shoulders. How did he get here so fast? But he was in a Henley and a down vest, not his gear. Just a guy who’d been walking his dog.

But his eyes went straight to the stove and his whole body changed. It was like a switch, shifting him from Civilian Cole to Captain Cole.

“Chimney fire,” he said, reading the situation.

“I called 911⁠—”

“Good. Get outside.”

“I’m not⁠—”

“Emily.” He looked at her then, and his voice was calm in a way that made her want to scream and also, absurdly, made her feel like nothing that bad could actually happen. “Get outside. Don’t forget Nutmeg.”

Emily looked wildly around and then dashed to the front to fetch her kitty, his ears flat, tail puffed to three times its normal size.

She grabbed Nutmeg, who dug her claws into Emily’s arm but didn’t fight her, and went through the front. The crafting club was clustered on the sidewalk, breath pluming in the cold, Mrs. C. wringing her hands, and Mrs. Bishop clutching her oversized spoon like a weapon.

“Did you see the way he just walked right in there?” Mrs. Bishop said, awe in her voice. “I see what Dorothy meant.”

“He’s a fire chief, Myrtle. That’s literally his job,” Mrs. C. said.

“Doesn’t make it less attractive,” Mrs. Bishop mumbled back.

Through the front window, Emily could see Cole moving through her kitchen with a focused efficiency that made her chest tight in a way she refused to examine. He’d closed the flue.

He was—she couldn’t tell exactly—doing something with the damper, cutting off the oxygen. He found the box of baking soda next to her mixing bowls, and she watched him use it on the base where a lick of flame had crept out from the pipe joint, snuffing it calmly, methodically, like he’d done it a thousand times before. Because he probably had.

The whole thing took maybe three minutes.

By the time the fire truck rolled up, siren cutting through the cold, Cole was stepping out the front door, brushing soot off his hands.

“Chimney fire,” he told the crew—Jackson was driving. “I’ve cut the air supply and it’s dying down, but you’ll want to check the ceiling joists and the wall behind the pipe. No structural involvement that I can see.”

He said that way too calmly for Emily’s nerves.

Jackson nodded and took his crew inside. Cole turned to the cluster of women on the sidewalk, and Emily watched something flicker across his face—amusement, maybe—at the sight of Mrs. Bishop holding a spoon like a weapon, like she was going to physically fight the fire.

“Everyone okay?”