“I can’t sit here,” Sam said as he stood. “I’m going in to see if the house is still there.”

“The canyon is closed,” his wife told him.

“I’ll take the Jeep to the wash and walk over.”

Austin stood up. “I’m going with you.”

Sam stood beside Parker, placed a hand on her shoulder. “I won’t let you sleep tonight not knowing,” he told her.

Tears rolled freely down her cheeks. The house was all they had left of their parents. A big gaping hole that hadn’t had a chance to heal since their deaths was punched back open and left her bleeding out.

She nodded.

Mallory sat curled up on the couch, two out of the four Chihuahuas on her lap. The other two were curled up next to Scout on the floor.

“C’mon,” Jennifer said. “Help me with dinner.”

They moved into the kitchen and Jennifer handed her a beer. “You doing okay?”

Parker shook her head. “I’m a mess.”

“It’s going to be okay. Whatever happens.”

“What if it’s gone?”

“You have insurance.”

“To what, rebuild?” The thought made her ill. “And where would we live in the meantime?”

“You can stay here.”

Yeah, right. Sam and Jennifer had two of their own kids, four dogs, and two cats. There was no way that was going to happen.

“Mom, Samson won’t let me play.” Jennifer’s eleven-year-old daughter ran into the kitchen to tattle on her brother.

“I’ll be right back.”

While Jennifer left to deal with her children, Parker looked out the kitchen window. The sun had set and she could still see the glow of the fire in the far distance.

Breathe . . .

Just breathe . . .

Thirty minutes later her phone rang.

Austin’s name popped up on the screen.

Her hands shook.

“Tell me,” she demanded while holding her breath.

“My hand is on the house. It’s still here.”

Her chest shook with the force of tears that took the place of worry.

“It’s a mess, Parker. The barns are gone. But the house is still here.”

“Oh, thank God.” The first smile that split her lips in two days told everyone in the room watching that everything was okay.

A mess.

Understatement of the year.

Even as Parker stood in the center of their charred property, three-hundred-year-old oak trees, gone, her mother’s small fruit orchard, gone, the barns, gone, the wood fence only six feet from their home . . . gone . . . Even then, Parker counted her blessings.

All she had to do was look up on the hill, to the home above them, the one where the neighbor did a piss-poor job of clearing his brush every year . . . the house that was reduced to smoldering timber.

Gone.

The neighborhood was quiet. Even the sound of the wind chimes didn’t fill the air.

She managed to sneak back into the canyon by way of driving through the wash where the authorities weren’t monitoring.

They had a generator and food. And now that she knew they had a home, Parker wanted to stay. And thankfully, Sushi had hid somewhere in the house during the whole thing and hadn’t so much as charred one hair on his feline back.

Sam walked up the side of the hill that Parker had climbed to take in the damage from above. The ground was black and warm under her feet. Once at her side, he draped an arm over her shoulders. “We tapped the sprinkler lines that were melted.”

They’d arrived early and found two lines that were spraying water everywhere. Though the power was off, the water flowing to the house was not. And the fire had melted the PVC pipes that rose from the ground.

“Thank you.”

“You coming back to our house?”

She shook her head. “No. We can stay here. But thank you.”

Leaving the canyon meant not coming back without the same shenanigans to get back in. Much as she appreciated the favor, she didn’t want to keep asking for help. “I’ll come for the cars as soon as they open everything up.”

Sam stared up at the hills. “Looks like moonscape.”

She turned to the blackened forest behind them. “I never knew these bowls were here.”

There were three bowled-out stretches of earth, hidden by fifty years of brush, now exposed with nothing but charred sticks where plants and trees once stood.

“Looks different, that’s for sure.”

“Feels different.”

That night as she sat on the porch, the hillside above the house and up the canyon was a speckled glow of smoldering fire that burned roots deep in the ground and was kicked up by a small gust of wind.

The fire still blazed in a remote part of the canyon, and every once in a while the sound of someone’s propane tank exploding would catch them off guard . . . but for the most part it was quiet.

No coyotes.

No shaking of a rattler’s tail.

Nothing.

Soot and ash coated her throat and skin as Parker walked over the remains of what once were the estate barns. Three hens and Bennie managed to escape the flames and return once the dust settled. The others weren’t so lucky.

“I have pictures of what it looked like before the fire,” she told Andrew, the insurance adjuster. “It once housed three horses, two goats, and these guys.” She pointed to the remaining chickens with a huff.

The past three weeks had been a blur.

It took four days for the canyon to open up. In that time, she had just about every fire marshal, county, city, and forestry department official or advocate on their property. At one point they brought in a real-life chain gang. As in inmates to draw a line between the dark soil and the light where the fire had been put out, as a containment line. Parker thought the firefighters that told her that were kidding.

She’d watched as the orange-suited men filed in a straight line and marched up her driveway and around her house like they were just another crew.

“They’re inmates,” the firefighter she couldn’t name told her.

“Ex-inmates?” she assumed.

“No . . . as in right now. Guys on good behavior and all that.”

With that tidbit of information, Parker had raced up to the house to cover her father’s gun collection she’d tossed on the floor after their return, and locked the doors.

Never in a million years did she think she’d have criminals on the family property, good behavior or not.

Nothing unexpected had happened, and the inmates did the job they were commissioned to do and moved on.

Now Parker stood ankle deep in what the fire left behind.

“Pictures help, but I can get a pretty good idea of what was once here.”

They walked out of the small barnyard, past the horse barn and charred fencing.

“Somewhere in all the mess, someone ran into the gate entering the property. My guess is the power blipped and the fire department had to force it open. And the split rail fences didn’t survive the fire or the trucks,” she pointed out.

Andrew smiled at her as he wrote down his notes. His accent was pure midwestern. “What about the house itself?”

“The fire wrapped around the back, took out a few trees, the fence, but overall it didn’t seem to damage a lot.”