She didn’t even look to see who asked. “I’m fine.” Her voice shook and the tears were only going to flow faster if she talked to anyone. She dug in her purse, slid on her sunglasses, and exited the building. Only when she had skirted past the morning drop-off and climbed behind the wheel of her car did she lower her head and sob.

Parker’s car pulling into the driveway and past the trucks stuck out like a lake in the desert. Colin felt a smile in his chest knowing she was home. He looked at his watch, was it two thirty already?

No, it was only half past one.

He could have sworn she said she worked until two thirty.

Ray brought his attention back to the job. For the next hour he worked with the building crew on the first structure. Every once in a while he’d pop his head up to see if Parker was meandering around the yard like she had the day before.

It wasn’t until her brother came home from school that Colin saw any activity up by the house. He noticed Scout running around the yard, chasing a ball, and Austin standing there watching at a distance.

Maybe Grace was right. Maybe his calling Parker out on the wife question made her defensive enough to pull back.

“Hey, Colin . . . you with me here?”

“Sorry, yeah.” He forced his attention to the work in front of him.

By four thirty Austin was sitting in their break area with Scout on a leash lapping up the attention of some of the men on the team.

Colin made his way over and knelt down to pet the dog. Scout licked his face in approval. “It’s Austin, right?”

“Yeah.”

“See ya tomorrow, Colin.” One of his crew waved to Colin as he headed to his car.

“What do you think of all this?”

He shrugged. “Not sure. Weird seeing everyone here.”

“I bet. It’s probably pretty quiet around here most of the time.”

“Not since the fire.”

If Colin hadn’t been looking at the kid, he would have missed the flash in his eyes that said those words had a deeper meaning.

“Were you here? During the fire?”

“Yeah. We all were. I thought the house was gone. Fire was everywhere.” And to help his point, Austin pulled his phone from his pocket and pulled up a picture.

Colin stood up from where he was with the dog and sat beside Parker’s brother and looked at his cell phone.

“I recorded this right as we were leaving.”

The sky was black; flames licked the side of the hills and surrounded the Sinclair home to where you couldn’t see the structure. The video stopped right as Austin had crossed the dry creek bed.

“That’s, ah . . .” He had no words.

“It sucked.”

“Yeah. I can’t imagine.”

“We didn’t die, so . . .”

Jesus . . . Colin never thought about that angle.

“You had time to get out, right?”

“The fire took a while to get here, but then it exploded. I’ve seen stuff on the news and always thought that people could just get out. We did, but I get why some don’t. One minute it was over there.” He pointed to the V in the mountain range where the dry creek bed lived. “The next it was hopping trees and cutting us off.”

“I’m glad you got out.”

The kid shrugged. “Yeah.”

There was more there, but Colin didn’t feel like it was his place to ask. “I thought I saw your sister pull in a while ago. Is she here? I had a question for her.”

“She’s here. She was in bed.”

“Bed? Is she sick?”

Austin shrugged again. “I don’t know.”

Colin wondered if he had ever been a teenager as he stared into one in Technicolor.

“It can wait.”

But Austin was putting the phone to his ear after pressing a few buttons.

“Hey, Colin has a question for you . . .”

He wanted to stop the kid. If Parker wasn’t feeling well, he didn’t want to wake her up.

“Okay.” The kid hung up. “She’s on her way down.”

“You didn’t have to. It can wait.”

Austin patted Scout on his neck. “It’s okay. She’s a control freak. The more she knows about what’s going on out here, the easier it will be for her.”

Suddenly the teen was gone and the adult he would become made a peek.

“It sounds like you know your sister well.”

“I guess.” The teen was back.

“I’m going to make this as easy on you guys as I can,” he assured him.

“That’s what Parker said.”

Colin watched while Austin looked at his phone.

Yeah . . .

He didn’t talk teenager.

Once he saw Parker walking down the drive, he excused himself and abandoned the kid.

He could tell something was off several yards before Parker reached him. She wasn’t smiling, sunglasses hid her eyes, and the confidence she normally carried in her stride had been replaced with a slow pace and slumped shoulders.

“Hey.” He kept his voice even and measured. “Austin said you weren’t feeling well. This can wait.”

“It’s okay.”

He doubted that, but kept talking anyway. “We’re going to be bringing in K-rails that we’d like to set on this side of the wash.”

“All right.”

He kept waiting for her to look at him.

She didn’t.

He pointed to two posts that were once part of a split rail decorative fence. “Did you plan on fixing this?”

“I don’t know. The fire trucks knocked them down. I’m waiting until after the winter to see what damage we take on.” There was very little emotion in her voice.

“You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine.” But her declaration was met with a sniffle.

He couldn’t stop himself. She was upset, not sick. And he had a hard time not probing. “When a woman says fine, she’s never fine.”

“Who told you that, your mother?”

“My mother showed me. My sister told me.”

“Did your sister also tell you that when a woman says she’s fine, it’s her way of saying she doesn’t want to talk about it?” Her head swiveled his way, he felt her eyes on him through the sunglasses.

“Yeah . . . she did.”

Parker lifted her palms in the air. “Well?” She was getting more annoyed and less sad as the conversation progressed. At least anger had energy, which he always thought was a better emotion than depression.

“Right. Okay, so these posts make it hard for the trucks to turn into this part of the property.”

“You want to take them out?”

He nodded, but jumped right back into their other conversation. “I’m really good at fixing things, maybe if you told me what was wrong, I could help.”

She angled her body toward him, removed her sunglasses, and pointed her tear-swollen eyes his way. “Can you fix my job? Can you turn back time and make it so this fire never happened? Can you magically make it so that no rain comes and none of this is necessary?”

He pulled out the only part she had any control of. “What happened at work?”

“I was demoted.”