She just listened, and people felt it.Â
She could feel him noticing that she did this.Â
"So," she said. "Tell me about a fire."Â
He raised an eyebrow. "Just any fire?"Â
"A significant one. Something that stayed with you. I'm a writer — I collect the way things feel from the inside."Â
He looked at her for a moment, assessing. "Most people ask about the dramatic rescues," he said. "The moments. The big stuff."Â
 "The big stuff is probably less interesting than the stuff around it," she said. "That's always true in stories."Â
He put both hands around his cup — he'd brought his original coffee with him, hadn't finished it yet, and she liked that he hadn't rushed it — and considered. "There was a house fire," he said, "about three years ago. Over in East Atlanta. Old craftsman bungalow, middle of the night. We got there, and it was going — really going — and the family was out, everyone accounted for, and my job was perimeter."Â
"Perimeter means —"Â
"Keeping people back. Making sure the scene is safe from the outside. Watching for structural changes." He looked at his cup. "And there was a little girl, maybe six, seven years old. Wrapped in a blanket someone had given her, standing on the lawn watching her house burn. And she was — she wasn't crying. She was past crying. She was just watching, very still, and she was holding a stuffed animal, and the look on her face was —" he paused.Â
 Jasmine was completely still.Â
 "It was the look of someone learning, for the first time, that something you love can be here one day and not the next," he said. "That lesson. The moment of that lesson. I've thought about it a lot."Â
The café noise moved around them: steam and voices and the soft percussion of cups.Â
"What happened to them?" Jasmine asked.Â
"The house was a total loss. But, I checked — our station does follow up sometimes, especially on family residentials. They were with family. The city helped with temporary housing. They were okay." He looked up. "She still had the stuffed animal."Â
Jasmine looked at him. The depth of him was something she hadn't fully anticipated, which was irrational — she'd noticed his warmth and his patience and the way he'd talked to Duchess — but there was something about hearing a person speak from inside their work with that kind of care that landed differently. It landed like yes; this is a real person in a way that was both obvious and revelatory.Â
"That's what stayed with you?" she asked. "Not the house, the fire itself —"Â
"The things fire takes," he said, "are almost always the wrong things. The things that can't be replaced. The way something feels when you've always had it, and suddenly you don't." He looked at her steadily. "You know about that."Â
She held the look. "I do," she said.Â
She took a beat.Â
"The divorce?" he said, gently. Not prying — giving her the choice of whether to go there.Â
"The divorce," she said. "And more specifically, the before-the-divorce. Learning to live without something, I'd built a version of myself around." She paused. "Even when the thing wasn't good for you, there's a losing of it. The self that organized around it."Â
This is an unedited excerpt. Copyright 2026 © Allyson M. Deese - All rights reserved.Â