“So how is the missus?” Davis asks me as the truck bounces along the old logging road, heading to the station. The air is thick with acrid smoke, a sign that the fire is burning hot and quick and to everyone else this is just another day on the job, hence why they’re catching up on the gossip they’ve missed over the winter.

It’s not just another day on the job though. None of us expected to be called out in the middle of April to a fire for one thing and for me especially, this is the first time I’ve been out on the job knowing that I have a soon-to-be-born baby at home.

I’m not sure I like it. There’s too much at stake now. Before it was just my life I had to think of and I didn’t think much of it. Now I have to think about Del and the baby. Now I want to. I left them once, I don’t want to do that again.

But duty calls.

“You okay, Foxy?” Davis asks, elbowing me in the side.

Normally I glare at that nickname but today I can’t be bothered. “I’m fine,” I tell him. “And she’s not my missus.”

“Oh. Shit man. I thought you were engaged.”

“No,” I say, staring down at my hands. “Not engaged. I proposed but she said no.”

“Fuck,” Simon, the other guy in the truck, says. “That’s rough.”

I nod. “She had her reasons.”

“Like what? Isn’t she pregnant with your child?” Simon asks.

Now I’m glaring. I don’t appreciate the callous tone. “She is.”

“Then what happened?” Davis asks.

I shrug and sigh, staring out the window at the fresh green leaves on the trees. Hard to believe anything is burning right now. “I asked her to marry me. She said no. She said she was in love with me. She asked if I was in love with her. And I told her the truth. I said no.”

“She needs to get with the times,” Simon says. “Half the marriages out there are loveless. My parents are a great example of that.”

“Yeah and look how you turned out,” Davis says dryly.

“Delilah has never been a girl to settle,” I tell them. “She tried that once with someone, didn’t work. She even tried that with me. Now she wants the world and I’m going to do whatever I can to give her that world.”

“But you don’t love her,” Simon points out.

I give him a twisted smile. “The funny thing is, man, I think I always did. I just didn’t know what it was. I think I know now.”

“And what’s love feel like to you?” Davis asks with complete sincerity, despite being dressed in our fire fighting gear, helmet in his hands.

When you’re part of a team like this for so long, you grow close. I might be more closed-off than the others, I might not contribute much in way of my feelings, but there’s an honesty and comradery that you don’t get anywhere else. They’re as much my brothers as Shane and Maverick are, even if they don’t know it. That’s why losing Roy was so hard.

And that’s why I don’t shy away from telling them the truth, even over something as sentimental and vulnerable as love.

“Love is like everything I’ve ever lost has come back to me,” I tell them.

They both stare at me for a moment, nodding. They get it. Both of them are married. They have babies too. They’ve been there.

For me, it’s the first time.

But it’s one hundred per cent real.

Now that I know what it feels like.

It feels like coming home.

It feels like creating a home.

Somewhere deep in Delilah’s immeasurable heart, that’s where I’ll keep living.

* * *

The fire turns out to be a fucking monster.

Our team responded to it pretty much right away and the local stations in Penticton and Kelowna were already fighting it, but even so, it’s been growing and growing, and there hasn’t been much we’ve been able to do to stop it.

Despite it being spring, with some trees and plants still budding, the fire is hot as hell, coaxed by a heat wave this week, a dry winter with very little snow, plus a solid month without any rain.

The fact that the fire started near town doesn’t help either, the flames jumping from ponderosa pine to ponderosa pine instead of running along the ground. Normally, at least in the past, at least twenty-years ago when this subdivision wasn’t here by the forests and fields, we would have let it run its course. When you bring homes into the question, that’s when things get complicated. Instead of fire being a natural process of renewal of the land, it becomes something that must be snuffed out at all costs, and some of those costs are the lives of the hot shots like Roy.

So here we are trying to make the decisions based on the homes we can save. Everyone in the subdivision in question and the neighboring surrounds have been evacuated so their lives aren’t at risk but their properties and possessions are.

And I understand. It would be horrible to lose your home. We had a fire at the ranch last year thanks to a lightning strike and it nearly burned both Vernalee and Shane alive. But it was their lives that were important. The house was just a thing. A thing we missed since it was used as the worker’s cottage, but a thing nonetheless.

Maybe it’s because I’ve found a home in Delilah that I’ve realized that a home isn’t found in a building and so those buildings aren’t always worth trying to risk your life for.

Maybe I’ve just become disillusioned with my job after this winter, after the counselling, the rehab, after losing Roy.

Maybe it’s because I have Del and the baby waiting for me in North Ridge and I’m spending each minute more worried about them and how they’re doing than saving some rich dude’s home.

Whichever way you spin it, I’m fighting a monster and though I will do all I can to tame this beast, I’m starting to wonder if this might be a turning point for me.

Of course, that thought itself is scarier than anything else.

If I’m not a hot shot, a fire fighter, then what am I?

A father, the word shoots through my brain like an arrow. A father, a lover. Maybe someday a husband. You’re Fox Nelson, that’s who you are. One hundred per cent.

“Fox, we need help at the back burn,” Mad Dog runs up to me, breathless, face black with soot. Night is starting to fall but you wouldn’t be able to tell with how thick the smoke is. “The fireline won’t hold, the flames are a ladder, jumping from tree to tree and that first house at the end of the cul-de-sac has a line of fir along the back of the property.”

I nod and pick up my Pulaski axe and drip-torch and follow Mad Dog, away from the fireline we’ve all been frantically digging, down the hill toward the houses, jogging all the way, breathing in smoke and fumes.

With a few of my crew as well as some members of the local fire station, we start digging a new line around the house, this one thick and wide, with plans to start burning down the firs on their property. If they burn first, controlled, they might stop the fire from reaching the house.

The only problem is, this fire is hot and getting hotter and completely unpredictable. With the wind picking up, the embers could be thrown in any direction. What happened with Roy is fresh on my mind.

“I don’t think we have enough people,” I gasp, as I pull down my mask to talk to Mad Dog who is right beside me, getting the drip-torch ready. “We need back up.”

He nods grimly. “Go tell the chief over there by the garage.”

I jog over around the house to the garage where a small outpost has been set up. I see the fire chief as well as some of his crew, plus some medics on hand. Beyond them is police tape and news crews filming the action.

I wait for the chief to stop talking before I say. “Mad Dog from NRHS says we need more men.”

“All right,” he says, giving a curt nod to the crew he was standing with who scamper off. “What’s your name?”

“Nelson. Fox Nelson,” I tell him.

“You look like you need a drink,” he says, reaching into the cooler beside him and pulling out a bottle of water from the ice. “Hydrate yourself or else you’re no good to anyone out there.”

I nod and take the water, my heart racing all over the place, adrenaline fueling my cells.

“Take a moment,” he goes on as I drink the water down. “Rest. Clear your head. Then get back out there.”

And at that, he grabs an axe, slips on his mask, and goes around the corner to join everyone else.

I take my phone out of my pocket to glance at the time, not expecting to see a million missed calls and texts. I’m so used to fighting fires where there’s no reception, the sight is jarring. And frightening.

I bring the phone close to my eyes and squint at it. I can’t scroll with my big gloved hand but what I see on the lock screen strikes terror in my very soul.

Text from Shane: You need to come back Del is in the hospital it’s serious

Text from Maverick: I know ur out there in the fires but pls come back ASAP

Text from Rachel: Del went into early labor, there’s a complication with the baby, she needs you, do what you can to leave

I can’t breathe at all now and it’s got nothing to do with the smoke.

Panic floods me as I rip off my glove and start scrolling through the messages, aware that there’s a fire raging at my back and not caring.

I can barely read them but I understand them.

That this isn’t good.

I call Maverick and my phone gets put to voice mail.

I call Shane and it just rings. He doesn’t even have voice mail.

I call Rachel and she picks up on the fourth ring.

“Fox!” she cries out. “Oh, thank god you got this.”

“What’s happening? Is she okay?”

“No, she’s not okay,” she says tearfully. “She was in labor, they’re doing what they can. It’s called preeclampsia, it has something to do with her blood pressure.”

“The baby? How is the baby?”

The seconds between my asking that question and Rachel answering are scarier than that fire behind me burning me to the ground.

Rachel sobs. “I don’t know, I don’t know. Del lost a lot of blood, the baby is going to be premature and normally that’s not too dangerous but with this thing, I don’t know. I don’t know, we’re all freaking out and the doctors are working on her.”

“Okay, I’m coming back now, okay? I’m leaving right now.”

“Okay. Please hurry Fox. I don’t know what’s happening. You need to be here for them. Just get here as quick as you can.”

I hang up.

And now I have to make the biggest decision of my life.

Choosing one love over another.

This fire, this job, my hot shots.

Over Del and the baby.

Maybe once it would have been a tough choice to make.

It’s not a tough choice anymore.

I’m about to head over to the fireline to tell Mad Dog but I don’t want to distract him, not now when so much is at stake, so I see Davis and pull him aside.

“Hey man,” I’m practically yelling over the roar of the flames. “I have to go.”

“Go?” he says. “Where?”

“North Ridge. Del is in the hospital. Something’s really wrong.”

“Oh shit. Sorry man. Yeah go, I got your back.”

I glance at the fire and I swear the flames are waving at me goodbye. “We need more crew. I’m going to be needed here.”

“I know,” he says. “But you’re needed more out there. We will be fine.”

“I could get fired.”

“You could. But you know what you’re doing, don’t you Foxy?”

I give him a shaky grin. “You’re a good man Davis. I hope you remember I said that when I steal the truck and you don’t have a ride home after this.”

Before I can wait for his reaction, I turn and run toward the truck, away from the flames.