© 2020 Krista Jensen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Shadow Mountain®, at [email protected]. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of Shadow Mountain.
This is a work of fiction. Characters and events in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are represented fictitiously.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
(CIP data on file)
ISBN 978-1-62972-787-5
eISBN 978-1-62973-951-9 (eBook)
Printed in the United States of America
Publishers Printing
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Book design: © Shadow Mountain
Art direction: Richard Erickson
Design: Sheryl Dickert Smith
Cover photos: AntartStock, alekso94, rvika, Hamperium Photography, sergiophoto/Shutterstock.com
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For my dear friend Carmen and our hours in the dialysis center. You joked that one day I could use the experience in a story and we laughed. Who knew? You are a light.
And for the firefighters of the Pacific Northwest, who work so hard to preserve this beautiful chunk of Earth.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Acknowledgments
About the Author
In another life, Mark Rivers would’ve focused on the woman who’d just entered the bakery and nodded in her direction with a smile of appreciation. The new art teacher had turned more than a few heads in town. But this wasn’t that life, so he took the bag of apple fritters Lette Mae handed him, pulled his hood farther over his head, and ducked past the new customer and out into the chill of November third.
He brushed off the lingering feeling that she’d looked his way. Everyone looked. It had taken months for the locals of Miracle Creek to stop staring at him like he wasn’t who he’d always been. Like he hadn’t gone to their schools and played in their conference championships and been to their weddings and funerals and anything in between. Eighteen months had passed since the summer fires had devoured a large portion of his family’s orchards—and a portion of Mark, too.
Rivers Orchards hadn’t been the only property devastated by the fires. A lot of families were hit with loss. But while orchards were replanted, homes were rebuilt, and new growth covered charred ground—even in the skeletal remains of the Cascade Forest—Mark was still scarred, and, in some ways, still burning.
He passed James Dean, Lette Mae’s basset hound sprawled on an old quilt in the winter sun, and climbed into his truck, still careful of the healed burns on his body.
Town wasn’t much. Main Street made a sort of “J”—the bakery, the auto shop, and gas station on the corner, the IGA and Ace Hardware across the street, the Grill-n-Go drive-thru next door. The street meandered past the K-12 school and a park, a few blocks of homes, some “town” orchards, and then out of town.
Pick a valley. Pick a hillside. Almost any road led to orchards. Acres of apple, peach, pear, apricot, and cherry trees along with the occasional vineyard had been tucked into the curves of this foothill region just east of the Cascade Mountains. The coastal weather from the west kept things mild, and the mountains siphoned off just enough rain to keep things irrigated. Usually.
Two summers ago, a rare drought had settled in, and without the rain, everything had crackled on the ground. Midsummer greens had turned yellow and brown. A spark—campfire, cigarette, broken glass in the sun—nobody knew for sure how the blazes started, but once they began, high gusty winds out of nowhere had pushed and pulled until—
Mark shuddered and clenched his right hand. That kind of thinking used to end with him in a sweat, screaming, his body feeling phantom flames. Even now, sometimes, the heat burned in his dreams. Not as much as it used to.
He took a deep breath and let the truck follow its own way out to the old homestead.
Several minutes later, Mark realized he was sitting in front of the house, his truck idling in park. That happened more often than he liked. He cut the engine and took in the stark reality of the fire’s hunger. The property north and west of the house remained charred except for what had greened up this past spring and summer. It had looked hopeful for a couple of months. Now with winter set in, it only looked bleak. The hillside was still pocked with mounds of blackened apple tree limbs—skeletons—and was traced with rows where irrigation pipes, twisted from the heat, had been dug up and hauled away. The acreage sat like a primitive battlefield in the morning mist.
Only forty yards from the house, a large outbuilding had stood for decades. Now, nothing but foundation remained. His dad had started building a new orchard shop, office, and storage building all-in-one where equipment repairs could be made and the workers could eat lunch. They’d selected a plot down the east side near the irrigation pumps. Just in case. His dad hadn’t said as much, but Mark knew. The fire department’s response couldn’t be relied on. Not when half the force were volunteers—good volunteers, sure—because the full-time firefighters were out miles away in all directions, fighting other fires. Moving the outbuilding made sense when their only water came from irrigation pumped from the river or the house well.
The house sat untouched, thankfully. The wind had turned the flames back on themselves, and with no more fuel, the fire had burned out. But only after destroying thousands of acres and a dozen homes in the county alone.
Mark reached for the bag of apple fritters and made his way to the front porch.
“You make
