Page 175 of At First Spark
“That wasn’t an answer.”
“No,” I agree. “It wasn’t.”
A small silence opens between us. Not awkward. Not empty. Just full of the kind of things that don’t fit cleanly into language. I open my arms, and she easily slips closer into my embrace. Her gaze drifts back to the barn, and I watch the exact second her expression changes. Softens maybe. Or tightens in a different place.
She feels it too, the loss. Not because it was hers, but because it mattered to me.
Cars start coming up the drive before either of us can say anything else.
The town doesn’t exactly gather. It accumulates. A truck here. A car there. By the time my mother’s SUV comes around the bend, probably filled with enough casseroles to feed a church potluck, Bailey and my brother Crew behind her, Lila’s just pulling in from the other direction with two coffees balanced in one hand and Dean’s truck not far back.
People in places like this don’t always know what to say when something breaks, but they know how to show up.
Mom is halfway up the walk before the engine fully cuts. She doesn’t waste time on commentary, just thrusts a foil-covered dish into my hands and kisses my cheek hard enough to make the point clearer than words would.
“You look tired,” she says.
“Good morning to you too, Mom.”
She ignores that and immediately turns to Lark, her whole face shifting in that way it only does around people she’s decided are hers, whether they agreed to it or not.
“You’ve eaten?”
Lark blinks once. “Not yet.”
Mom gives her a look that says this answer has disappointed her on a personal level and sweeps past both of us into the house before either of us can defend ourselves.
Hadley arrives next with all the subtlety of weather. She doesn’t come up the walk so much as charge it, sunglasses on top of her head and a grocery bag in each hand like she’s gearing up for battle and brunch at the same time.
She spots me first. The brightness in her expression dims for one quick second before she puts it right back where it belongs and says, “Well, this is depressing. Good thing I brought muffins.”
That gets the laugh she wanted. From me. From Lark. Even from Bailey, who’s still halfway to the porch and already shaking her head.
Hadley catches me around the neck in a rough, quick hug as she passes. “Don’t ever do that again.”
I hug her back one-armed, brief because too much tenderness in front of people still feels strange in my skin.
“Planning on avoiding it.”
“Good.”
She pulls away and moves directly toward the kitchen, as if she lives here. Which, in spirit, she probably does. The house fills after that.
Lila and Dean, with concern packaged neatly beneath practical questions. Bailey and Crew with coffee and a stack of forms from somewhere in town because she “figured bureaucracy would try to get involved and wanted to get ahead of it.” Ivy and Rowan arrive last, quiet as always, carrying flowers she definitely did not pull from her own garden at the farmhouse, and place them on the kitchen table without fanfare, making the whole room look less like aftermath and more like life continuing.
It would be overwhelming if it weren’t so familiar. Instead, it feels like being held in place by a dozen small anchors at once.
That doesn’t stop my attention from tracking Lark through all of it. The way she takes the coffee from Lila and thanks Bailey for the paperwork and lets my mother feed her without pretending too hard she isn’t hungry. The way she listens when Dean offers to connect her with a contractor from town who specializes in historic beams. The way she doesn’t flinch when Hadley loops an arm through hers and says, loudlyenough for everybody to hear, “You’re not allowed to disappear into the inn for twelve hours today.”
Lark actually smiles at that. Something in me loosens that I didn’t know I was still holding so tight.
By the time the deputy and marshal show up, the kitchen has become command central. Coffee, legal pads, insurance contacts, Mom insisting everyone answer questions while eating something. The marshal is a woman in her fifties with a clipped voice and eyes that miss nothing. She goes through the usual process first—timeline, materials, prior incidents, witness statements—but once Kenzie’s name comes up, the whole thing escalates.
The evidence is enough now.
Traffic footage. The photograph. Fibers from the note tape match something found in Kenzie’s car. Gas can residue in the trunk. And, most damning, security footage from a marina-side business two blocks down, catching her walking toward the access road the night of the inn fire and again the afternoon before the barn burned.
It’s over.
