Page 38 of Love Again

I don’t even know where to begin.

But I know I have to.

Chapter Eleven

Devon

The first call comes from Mateus at two-thirty the next day and about twenty-four hours earlier than I had hoped. We need to drive to York. I flip through the file on my phone to see the grainy image of the site of a house fire from two years ago.

Slipping into Luke’s Honda CRV is like crawling into a time machine. I was there when he bought it, used, but new to him. New to us. He insisted I take it when I left, but I couldn’t.

There’s the scratch I made with my boot along the baseboard. The silly pair of tiny dice I gave him, painted with flames, are strung from the rearview mirror.

I don’t comment on the dice or the scratch or make mention that I even remember the car.

We’ve been on the road for five minutes when we start talking at the same time.

“Listen, I—”

“We have to—”

He begins again. “I got the papers.”

My stomach clenches, and again, my mouth goes dry. I want to make this easy for him, far easier for him that it is for me, but I know that will be impossible.

He grips the wheel. “We have to figure out a way to work together and be supportive professionally, and that might be hard.”

I work at making my face completely flat. I don’t want him to know how hard this is for me. I don’t want him to feel worse. And I don’t want him in pain. “I agree.”

“Then we also need to agree not to talk about this situation or any divorce stuff on the job. Agreed?”

The tension in my shoulders evaporates. “Perfect. We’ll just compartmentalize.”

Luke makes a hard left, turning south onto Route 1.

“Sounds like a plan,” is all he says.

After a silent hour-and-a-half drive, we pull onto Apple Hill and drive up to the fire site. Other than navigating us to the right address, I’ve felt useless, and all that tension has returned. The back of my neck is stiff, and I can feel a small drilling behind both eyes as a headache comes on.

We turn up the narrow, winding road, where pieces of asphalt are broken into chunks and tossed off to the side, and potholes are as wide as dinner plates. When we reach the top of Apple Hill, there are the remnants of a small saltbox still standing, though gutted by fire.

It’s clearly the work of an arsonist. Around the base of the building, the siding is evenly charred. Every ten feet or so, the ghost of ash flares nearly to the roofline. The fire started in multiple, set places and moved up immediately.

This is not the work of a professional. Even my smokejumper wildfire eyes can see that.

“Wow,” Luke says as we exit the car. “Whoever did this wanted it to go up in about a minute. Look at that perimeter.”

It rained here lightly the night before. Large, black timbers and charcoal-colored broken particle board and sheetrock lie broken and soppy.

Luke sets up the camera on the tripod and starts feeding information into the software program. He keeps adjusting the camera. I don’t know what good this will do. The site is nearly three years old, and it’s probably been vandalized for whatever was left.

I try to focus on these details, because watching him work, so focused, so driven, is so sexy. I have to stop looking at his hands.

He glances at me for a second. “Nobody lived here, right? No occupants, no owners, and therefore no rebuild?”

I think I know where he’s going with this. “You think this was a test site?”

Luke stands perfectly still for a moment and then points to the walls. “Yeah. I think he was figuring out how to do it. What the best propellants are. The report said they thought this fire had four different means of ignition.”