Chapter Nine
River
I traced the letters on her headstone, grief wrapping around my heart, uncaring that it had been eight years since we lost her.
“Man, I miss you,” I told her before looking up to where Avery stood, flowers in her arms. “She would have loved you.”
“I’m a hot mess.”
“You’re my hot mess,” I corrected her. After the handful of times I’d taken her in the last twelve hours I was pretty sure she’d have a hard time arguing that she wasn’t mine.
She placed the flowers on Mom’s grave as I stood, then stepped into my arms as I held them out to her. The cemetery was quiet, peaceful.
“I’m sorry you lost them both.”
“I’m glad they went close to each other. Losing Dad in the fire, that was brutal, but when cancer took her a couple years later…” He shook his head. “For a long time I wondered if I was cursed. If I wasn’t supposed to have anything good.”
“You deserve the best,” she said, her voice soft.
“It all changed when I saw you. Frustrated, ponytail a mess, fighting with the tire iron and rusted lug nuts.”
“Ugh. I’d been on the side of the road for a half hour.”
I brushed her hair back from her face, loving that it was down and free. “You were beautiful, and I fell in love with you in that moment.”
Her lips parted. “Because I couldn’t change a tire?” she whispered.
“Because you hadn’t given up. There was zero chance you could have gotten those bolts off, but you weren’t giving up. When I realized that you were raising Addy, caring for your dad...there wasn’t a force in this world that could have stopped me from loving you.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“You weren’t ready and I was terrified. I’d lost everyone I loved except for Bishop. When the wildfire came, when Dad died, there was a part of me that shriveled, that started to expect heartache. I couldn’t show it, of course. The whole town was in mourning, and there were sixteen of us left behind without fathers. Indigo was left without a mom. In our collective grief, we weren’t allowed to break down, not when there were so many eyes on us.”
“River…” she whispered, holding me tighter in her support.
“Then the rebuilding began, and Mom got sick. She died the summer of my junior year, and we had the new high school open by my senior year.”
“Then you and Bishop came up to Alaska.”
I rested my chin on the top of her head, loving how well she fit me. “And you know the rest.”
“I wish I knew how it ended.”
My heart sank, knowing as much as she loved pretending, she hadn’t really decided. Because as fierce as my love of this crew and my family was, hers was just as intense for hers, and she wouldn’t leave her father.
In a place that had always brought me so much loss, I couldn’t help but wonder if the biggest heartache was yet to come.
“Me, too, baby.”
* * * *
The ceremony was somber. Bishop and I took the wreath up for our father, and then placed it at the new memorial where it stood with seventeen others.
Ten years later, and I still missed him like hell.
He’d been larger than life, a force of nature. In so many ways Bishop was just like him, but the years of raising me had hardened him in ways Dad hadn’t been. Where Dad was optimistic, Bishop saw the pitfalls of everything. Where Dad loved Mom with the same kind of intensity I felt for Avery, Bishop held himself away from everyone who could leave.
As I looked around at the other Legacy kids, the ones who had grown up without their dads or mom, I realized that the casualties of that day were far more reaching than the firefighters laid to rest in Aspen Cemetery.
The entire town had lost. Homes, businesses, and memories were ash by the time the fire had finished with us, but it always felt like we had lost a little more. We took our seats, and the bells rang—one for each loss, each sacrifice, each choice that had been made the day they headed up Legacy Mountain with the odds and the weather against them.
Avery took my hand, steadying me like always. I concentrated on the feeling of her fingers with mine and tried to keep the memories at bay. But the harshest ones fought through—the order for evacuation, the way he’d held us, kissed our mother. The way he’d told Bishop to keep me out of trouble while he was gone.
My resolve sharpened with each bell. The council could be afraid of the liability of having another Hotshot crew. They could deny us the Legacy name, and they could claim it was to salvage the tender hearts of this town.
But the Legacy crew had been family, and damn it, we were getting it back.
As the ceremony cleared out, the sixteen of us stood in a line facing the monument, from the youngest kid, Violet, who had never met her father, to the oldest, Shane Winston, who’d been away at college when it happened.
Those who wouldn’t be joining us on the crew—the ones who were too young or who had no interest in firefighting—left, until it was just those of us who were.
“Are you sure about this?” Bash asked, Emerson by his side. Time had turned the dark-haired, reckless guy into a hell of a stubborn man.
I looked around as we all nodded.
“They’re going to fight us tooth and nail,” he warned. “They don’t want this. They’re terrified of what could happen.” He looked pointedly at our youngest members who couldn’t be older than twenty.
“We’re with you, Bash,” Bishop answered from next to me. “They’re not taking this from us.”
“We’re with you,” we all agreed.
Avery’s soft smile was forced as I looked down at her, and I sent up a fervent prayer that she would stay, because I knew in that moment there was no way I could leave.