A Few Days Earlier
“Something came up. You need to take them,” she says, one hand firmly planted on her hip. Her phone buzzes incessantly with incoming texts.
“You promised you’d look after them for the full evening,” I reply. I take deep, measured breaths as I stare at my mother in sheer disbelief. “I’m working.”
My blood is boiling but I try to keep my composure in front of my kids.
Luna, at five, is perceptive enough to catch the tension in my body language. Sammy, who just turned four, quickly mirrors my mood. The last thing I need is a cranky son on top of an exhausting shift and sore feet.
“What do you want from me?” she says with a nonchalant shrug.
It is uncanny to see a woman in her mid-fifties acting like a bratty teen with zero responsibilities. Then again, Shauna Harrison has always been a bratty teen, even after she married my dad and had me. That never changed, which is why Dad ended up raising me once the divorce papers were signed.
Surprisingly, she’s the one who offered to help me with the kids while I get my feet back on the ground. I should have known better, but times have been tough.
Tonight, she’s showing her true colors, again.
Flaking when I need her the most.
Her phone vibrates once more, and I can’t help but scoff. “Let me guess, there’s a Texas Hold’ em game going on somewhere with a couple big whales for you to play,” I say.
“Big whales don’t even scratch the surface,” she replies with a hungry smirk. “I’m telling you, honey, if I land at the right table, I’m gonna walk out of there with at least a couple hundred grand.”
“My God, are you hearing yourself?”
“Oh, come on, Halle,” my mother sighs with frustration. “Just keep them upstairs in your room with the door locked. You’ve got… what, another couple of hours before you close up?”
“Four hours. I’m not going to keep my children locked in a room for four hours, Mom.”
“Sorry, honey, but I gotta go.”
“Mom!”
She gives Luna a quick kiss on the cheek, then waves goodbye to Sammy before rushing out the door, the bell chiming behind her. I’m left standing in the middle of the diner like the ultimate idiot. Sammy clings to my leg while Luna gives me a curious and dismayed look.
“Grandma’s gambling, huh?” she asks.
“Yep,” I exhale sharply and give her the upstairs key. “Baby, do you remember what I told you about staying inside with your brother?”
Luna gives me a firm nod. I look at her for a moment, seeing so much of myself embedded in her features. Her long and curly dark brown hair, ringlets framing her pale, round face. Her vibrant blue eyes and the dimples in her pink cheeks.
She has bits and pieces of Colby, too, much like Sammy, but she’s mostly me, and it fills me with a quiet hope. Maybe she’ll take after me more than her father.
“I lock the door as soon as we get in and don’t open it unless it’s you,” my daughter says, a slight frown pulling her dark brows together.
I love the way she looks in this little jean dress with pink knitted flowers sewn onto the shoulders. Sammy is a cute miniature sailor in his dark blue shorts and white tee, his chubby cheeks flustered as he glances up at me. “Bedtime stories! I want the Rex stories!” he says.
“Oh, sweetie, not yet” I tell him, a painful pang tugging at my heart. I’d like nothing more than to end my shift right now so I can hang out with my kids, but we are dirt poor and struggling. I can’t afford a single day off while I’m recovering from a toxic and devastating marriage. “I need you to go upstairs with your sister and be a good boy until Mama’s done with work.”
“Ma—ma…,” he exaggeratedly moans, throwing his head back in a most dramatic fashion, his brown curls jiggling with every motion. “No!”
“I’m sorry. I promise I’ll make it up to you,” I say. “I’ll read two Rex stories when I’m done.”
“Three!” he insists, showing me three of his cute tiny fingers.
“When the heck did you get so good at counting?” I mutter with a raised eyebrow.
Luna lifts the key up and jingles it for me to see. “You go work, Mama, I got this.”
“You’re my savior.” I bend down and kiss my daughter’s warm forehead. “You come right down if you need anything at all.”
“Love you!” she says as she pulls Sammy off my leg.
The little guy protests a bit more but ultimately follows his sister up the shoddy wooden stairs. I listen to their receding footsteps for a short while, content once I hear the door to my room closing and locking behind them.
Luna may be only five, but she is smart as a whip and ridiculously tenacious. I guess that comes with the territory when you grow up in a difficult environment. Colby was hardly around, and when he was home, he was too busy humiliating and tormenting me than being an actual father to our children.
I shudder to think what would’ve happened had I stayed.
“Halle, darlin’!” Marty calls out from his table. He’s been labeling and packing scented candles in a box for the better part of an hour, and from the looks of it, he’s almost done. “Can you get me some of that tape?”
I follow his gaze and see the roll sitting on the edge of the counter. Hurriedly, I bring it over to him, checking his mug while I’m at it. “Need a coffee refill?” I ask the old man.
“No, just the check. I’ll be out of your hair soon,” he says.
Marty used to be a postal service worker, but since he retired last year, he has repeatedly stated that he hates this part of his life. He can’t sit still. He didn’t know what to do with himself until Rhonda, my boss and the diner’s owner, suggested giving him a part of her scented candle side business to keep him busy.
Marty jumped at the opportunity, even though he didn’t know a thing about melting and blending wax with fragrances. He learned fast, though, and now he’s pouring, packing, and shipping about five hundred candles every day for Rhonda’s website.
I set the check on the table and smile warmly at him. He’s one of my favorites. He starts rummaging through his wallet, briefly checking the tab. I’m about to walk away when he calls out, “Hold on, Halle. You only put three coffees here, but I had four.”
“Fourth one’s on the house,” I smile again and make my way toward the stock room.
“You’re a good woman, Halle. Some fella’s gonna be really lucky when they land you.”
“Let’s hope so,” I mutter as I disappear into the stock room. It’s getting late. There may be a few stragglers that come in later for coffee before they start their night shift work, so I use the time to do some administrative duties.
Luna and Sammy should be fine on their own for a while. I will check in on them in about half an hour, just to be sure. Until then, however, I grab the inventory clipboard and start counting, my mind wandering back to the one decision that brought me here.
I was supposed to become a fashion designer. I went to college on a full ride. But the future I had planned ever since I was eleven went up in smoke the minute I met Colby Nash.
I want to say that he is the biggest mistake of my life, but Luna and Sammy came out of it, and they are truly the best thing that has ever happened to me. I only wish they had a better father because Colby has been a nightmare. As soon as we got married and moved in together, he released the monster he’d kept hidden.
I shake the thoughts away. There’s nothing I can do to change any of it now. It’s done and over with. There are no do-overs. I can only move forward and start fresh. That’s what all of this is about, in the end.
Right now, I’m penniless and struggling, crammed in a tiny apartment above the diner with my two kids and hiding from my dangerous ex-husband, but at least I’m working an honest job in a place with decent folks. It is infinitely better than the despair and misery that I left behind, and my kids are better for it.
The bell over the door chimes. Marty must’ve left.
I’m on my own, at least for now. My boss is out of town with her husband and nieces and they won’t be back until Monday. They have a beautiful ranch just outside of Dallas. I’ve seen photos of the place, built around a man-made lake, hundreds of horses and cattle roaming freely.
There was a time when I would’ve given anything to live in Paris or London, smack in the heart of the fashion world, but life has had a way of knocking me down a peg or two. I haven’t given up on that dream, not completely, anyway, but I think I could make something of myself in Dallas, too. The fashion scene is different here, not nonexistent.
The smell of smoke tickles my nose.
“What the hell?” I grumble and head for the stock room door.
As soon as I set foot in the diner, I’m hit by a devastating heatwave.
I stand frozen before a scene of rapidly spreading flames, orange tongues licking at everything in sight. Sweat instantly bursts from my pores, my skin hot as I try to make sense of what caused this hell. Everything is burning.
“Oh, no…”
The seating, the tables. The old, burgundy red curtains. The walls are mostly plywood and wallpaper, all instantly devoured by a merciless blaze. My instincts kick in at the same time as the fire alarm. The incessant beeping scratches my brain, and I rush to the fire safety panel, desperate to get the ceiling sprinklers on.
“Fucking hell!” I cry out when I realize that the sprinklers aren’t working.
The flames are getting bigger and hotter and dangerously close to the staircase leading to my apartment. I leave everything behind and run up the stairs, breathless, the fire following me like a flaming demon.
Everything happens so fast, I can barely register it.
I only know that I need to get Luna and Sammy out of here.
I hear sirens wail, thankfully we are close to the fire station, but I don’t have a second to spare.
“Open up, Luna!” I call out as I bang on the door.
“Mama, what’s wrong?” she asks, but I can’t hear the key in the lock.
“Luna, open the door, we need to get out of here!”
“Is Daddy here? I won’t let him in!” she shouts, and the words hit me like a punch in the gut. Even now, months later, she is still terrified of her father.
Hearing her fear and knowing the urgency of the situation makes my blood boil. The flames are now engulfing the staircase and the carpet-padded hallway. “My God, this place is going up like a fucking tinderbox,” I gasp and start banging on the door again. “Open up, honey, we have to leave! NOW!”
“Okay, okay!”
Finally, Luna unlocks the door. But as soon as she opens it and catches a glimpse of the fire behind me, she starts screaming. In perfect unison, Sammy starts screaming, too, and I’m left with mere seconds to try and figure out how I’m going to get myself and my children out of this inferno.
The stairs are out of the question.
“Head for the window,” I say and yank my boy off the floor. He latches onto me while Luna follows. “We need to get out right now.”
“Mama, it’s high up!” my daughter says, understandably worried.
“I know, honey, but we have to get out of here and it’s the only way.”
I open the window and look down. The roof on this side of the building is already compromised, heat emanating from the diner downstairs. But it is sloped and there’s a lattice at the end with climbing ivy covering most of it. I point out the lattice to Luna.
“Help Sammy get to it,” I tell her. “Climb down, okay?”
“Mama, I’m scared!” Sammy cries in my arms, refusing to let go.
We can either burn alive or risk breaking a limb on our way down. Those are our only options, and I don’t know how to make my children understand that. Terror grips me tightly by the throat, the smoke filling my bedroom and making me choke. My mouth is dry. My hands are shaking. And Sammy still won’t let go, even as Luna gathers the courage to cautiously climb over the window ledge.
Red and white lights flash brighter and brighter.
The fire roars, wood crackling all around us. Thick smoke covers the night sky above in a suffocating black.
A fire truck pulls up in the parking lot. I can see it, big and red and loaded with everything needed to put this nightmare out. But we still need to get down from here. We need to do it fast, too, as the flames are almost at the bedroom door.
“Help!” I scream from the bottom of my lungs.
Four firefighters look up and I recognize one of them immediately.
“Eric!” I shout and wave in desperation. “Help us!”
“Hold on, Halle!” he replies while his colleagues rush to get the ladder as close to the edge of the roof as possible.
“Come on, honey, you can do it,” I tell Luna and help her climb down the roof, smoke rising from in between the wooden shingles.
“Hang in there, Halle, we’re coming!” Eric shouts back.
I see him at the top of the ladder, while Chase, his brother, pushes a button on the connected remote to extend it all the way up. Wyatt, the third Danson brother, liaises with the others to pull the firehose out and connect it to the hydrant just outside the parking lot. They’ve done this so many times, their movements swift and automatic.
But the heat becomes unbearable.
Luna is crying and sliding down the roof a little too fast for my comfort. Sammy is screaming, clutching my waist tighter and tighter as I struggle to get him off me, to get him out of harm’s way before it’s too late.
“Sammy, please, go after your sister. Do what Luna is doing, come on, honey, you can do this.”
“I’m scared, Mama!” he wails, tears streaming down his soot-covered cheeks.
The air is filthy, almost black, as the fire engulfs the room and rages closer toward us. I hear the support beams crackling under the pressure.
Water gushes from the firehose as Wyatt aims it at the diner below.
Eric is getting closer. He’s focused on getting us out of here, his brow furrowed above those big blue eyes of his. Gosh, I used to fantasize about him whenever he came into the diner for his regular cup of coffee and egg and bacon breakfast. It was the highlight of my day when the Danson brothers walked in, either before, or after, their twenty-four-hour shift. Now, it’s all burning. My haven, my fresh start, it’s all on fire.
“I’ve got her,” Eric says as he scoops Luna from the edge of the roof.
Chase climbs up behind him and grabs her, giving his brother enough momentum to reach out to Sammy and me. “Come on, honey,” I tell my boy and finally unglue him from my side.
“Mama, no!” he cries out but I manage to set him onto the roof.
Eric jumps up on the edge, his firefighter uniform a dirty yellow with reflective patches everywhere, his red helmet mirroring the monstrous flames that swell behind me. My heart is racing. My throat burns. The smoke swirls around me.
“Get him!” I manage before a coughing fit takes over.
I watch as Eric grabs Sammy and gingerly passes him down to Chase before turning his focus back on me. “Come on, Halle, your turn!”
“Watch out! It’s coming down!” Wyatt shouts from below, still shooting water at the diner while his colleagues take my children away from the fire. They’re safe. It’s all that matters.
Ambulances and police cars arrive.
Time slows down.
Then I hear it. The moan of a roof beam just before it breaks.
The crackling of the fire as it eats away at the wood.
“Halle!” Eric shouts.
Something heavy, big, and hot comes down. I gasp as it crashes into me, knocking the air out of my lungs. I’m pinned down. Boiling. My skin burns.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t see.
Darkness quickly swallows me whole.
If you replace any errors (non-standard content, ads redirect, broken links, etc..), Please let us know so we can fix it as soon as possible.
Report