My living room is smokier, but nothing prepares us for the stairwell. Shay wrenches the door open, and we both jump back as a wall of heat and thick smoke assaults us. This is not the time to panic—I need all the air I can get—but that doesn’t stop my heart from racing a mile a minute.
I pull Shay back from the doorway so I can speak without inhaling too much smoke.
“We either make a run for it down the stairs to the fire exit, or we try to climb over the balcony and hope the store’s awning holds us.” It’s not the biggest drop in the world, but I don’t like the idea of falling.
Shay peers down the stairs. “It’s dark—the fire isn’t in the stairwell yet, but we don’t know if the awning is damaged.”
“Right. Shit.” Something about the “yet” in her sentence makes a wave of panic course through me. Fuck.
She must notice the way I freeze up, and she squeezes my hand. “We’ve got this, baby. It’s just a few stairs and we’re outside.”
I nod, because what else is there to do here?
“I’ll go first. Hold on to the back of my T-shirt,” Shay says, and I know better than to waste time arguing over who goes first.
The air quality in the apartment is bad, but the stairs are worse, so we both take deep breaths before covering our faces. My lungs scream, burning as I breathe in the thick air, but there’s no time to think about it. We approach the door, and Shay drops my hand so I can grab her T-shirt.
And we run. As carefully and quickly as we can, holding our breaths. It probably doesn’t take us more than thirty seconds to get down the stairs, but I’ve never felt heat like this, emanating from the door that leads into the bakery. I glance back at it asShay presses the bar on the fire exit door and tugs me out into the cool night.
The door bangs closed behind us, and I suck in a long breath of cool mountain air. Which, apparently, is the wrong thing to do, because it catches in my throat and I have to lean against the dumpster to stay upright as a coughing fit overtakes me. My mouth tastes like ash.
Shay must have had the same idea as me, because she’s coughing up a storm, too. I reach for her as mine subside, clasping her face.
“Are you okay, sweetheart? Tell me you’re okay.”
She presses her hand against mine, closing her eyes as she stops coughing. “I’m okay. We’re okay.”
We stand for a moment, just holding each other. From here, the building doesn’t look different, save for the black smoke coiling above it.
A siren sounds in the distance, and we break apart.
“We should probably go around front so they know we’re okay,” Shay says, and I nod, because if I talk, I might start coughing again.
I follow Shay around the side of the building, grateful for the alleyways on either side of the bakery. Hopefully nothing else catches. She gasps as we step onto the street, and I follow her line of sight.
I almost don’t believe what I’m seeing. Not my bakery, that’s for sure. It’s barely visible. The whole storefront is a mass of orange, yellow, and red, and it’s a good thing we didn’t try to climb down to the awning, because it’s gone.
The pumpkin window display I woke up at four a.m. to put up—gone. The candy-cane-striped paint around the door I spent hours getting perfect—gone. The gilded store sign that I designed in my room when I was fifteen and cried when I saw it brought to life—gone.
Shay pulls me back so we’re further from the fire. I hear the firetrucks stopping, their doors banging, and someone shouting my name—Quinn, probably. He’s the chief of Wintermore’s volunteer fire department, which means my family is probably on the way. Maybe it’s my parents’ tires I hear squealing, their car doors I hear slamming.
But I can’t focus on any of that.
All I can think about is everything I’ve ever worked for, burning down before my eyes.
And the deep, bone-crushing relief I feel at the sight of it.
32
SHAY
Considering how little experience they get in Wintermore, the volunteer fire department has the fire out in twenty-five minutes. It all goes fairly smoothly, and once the fire is out, a few of the team go in to check for lingering embers.
From the street, it’s hard to say how much damage there is, but I saw the look Quinn exchanged with Felix when he first checked out the bakery. It’s not good.
The Whittens arrived almost as quickly as the fire department. Noelle accepted the hugs but didn’t speak to anyone other than Rora—I watched Noelle ask her a question, but I was swept up by the Whittens, hugging me and checking to make sure I was okay.
Just seven hours ago, we were laughing at Charlie’s blatant attempt to cheat at Monopoly. It’s scary how quickly things change, but I can’t pretend I’m not touched at how easily the Whittens have accepted me in their midst—they seem genuinely concerned for me.
