“But believing you doesn't make it harmless.”
“I know.”
We never spoke again.
That seemed right.
Chapter: The First Fire
The first time I used the fireplace again was in February.
A storm came over the mountains after dark and dropped the temperature into the teens. Snow collected along the flagstone walkway, and the wind moved through the scrub oak with a low, steady hiss.
I stood in front of the hearth holding a match.
For five full minutes.
Milo lay on the rug behind me.
“You can stop judging me.”
His tail tapped once.
I checked the damper.
Again.
Then the carbon monoxide detector.
Again.
Then I walked downstairs and looked at the cleanout.
Again.
Everything was normal.
Still, my hand shook when I struck the match.
The flame caught the newspaper.
Then the kindling.
A small line of smoke rose into the chimney.
Up.
Not back.
I watched it like a man waiting for a medical test result.
The cedar caught.
Flames moved across the first log.
The room gradually warmed.
Nothing happened.
No smoke spilled into the living room.
No alarm sounded.
No hidden concrete blocked anything.
Just fire.
I sat in Rebecca’s old chair.
Milo moved beside me.
The house smelled like cedar.
For several minutes, I cried.
Not because I was scared.
Because I remembered the first winter Rebecca and I owned the place.
We had no money.
The furnace broke.
We burned scrap wood for three nights while waiting for a replacement part.
Rebecca sat on the floor beneath two blankets and declared that we were “living like pioneers with a mortgage.”
I had forgotten that.
Nolan’s concrete had occupied the fireplace in my mind so completely that it pushed older memories aside.
Sitting there that night, I took one back.
Then another.
Rebecca laughing.
Claire asleep near the hearth on Christmas Eve.
Milo as a puppy trying to steal kindling.
Football games with Nolan.
That one hurt.
I let it.
Then I added another log.
The fire kept burning.
Chapter: Fourteen Feet
Spring came late.
The first lavender shoots appeared beneath the south windows in April.
Rebecca had planted them twenty-four years earlier.
I knelt beside them with pruning shears.
Then stopped.
I could almost hear her.
Don't massacre them this year.
“I know what I’m doing.”
Milo wandered past.
“You stay out of this.”
That afternoon, a survey crew arrived.
Not because the boundary was still disputed.
Because I wanted it marked permanently.
They set new iron pins and recorded the coordinates.
No wooden stakes Nolan could move in the dark.
No string lines.
No argument.
Then I did something Claire thought was strange.
I left the fourteen-foot strip exactly as it was.