that fear drove her to keep her head and do everything possible to get them out of this situation even as thoughts of their home, her job, and the future swamped her mind. She’d barely made it by these last many months. If she lost everything . . . What then?
How would she support herself and the boys?
More flashing red and white lights glowed against the thick smoke ahead. She inched her way toward the emergency vehicles, the cars slowing ahead of her as they approached what must be an intersection. Fire trucks and police cars blocked the cross street, drawing everyone’s attention and slowing them down as everyone stared to the side to see if the fire had destroyed everything down that road. Ahead, cars shot forward as if they were racehorses released from the starting gates as they passed the commotion and the open road broke free of the fire border.
Relief hit like a crashing wave.
We made it.
Now what?
She didn’t really have a plan for where to go. She ran out of her house with the clothes on her back, her purse, an armful of personal files, and her two sons in tow with the stench of smoke heavy in the air and flames devouring the houses only six streets away. By now, for all she knew, her house and all those on her block were gone.
Bile rose to the back of her throat, the thought so terribly upsetting, their future left uncertain.
Right now, though, she’d take the thirty-five-mile-an-hour speeds, the open land and road ahead of her as she outran the fire and smoke and spotted the sign for Yountville and the acclaimed restaurant the French Laundry.
“Is the fire gone?” Oliver asked.
She wished. “We’re getting farther and farther away from it.”
“Where are we going?” Danny leaned toward his brother so he could see through the windshield.
Now that the flames weren’t licking at the sides of the car and bearing down on them, Sierra took a moment to think about her next move. She needed a place to put the boys down to bed tonight. In the morning, there’d be news of the firefighters’ efforts to stop the massive blaze and whether or not her home had been spared. She hoped, but her heart sank with the realization it didn’t seem likely and they’d lost everything.
Chapter Two
A wasteland of ash and blackened trees spread before Sierra. It looked like an apocalyptic scene from a movie. But this was her neighborhood, the site where her home used to stand, its welcoming garden inviting you to the front door and the safe place she used to love.
Nothing stirred but the wind. The quiet unsettled her.
An officer escorted her into the fire zone and dropped her off, just as he had with some of her neighbors.
Driving through the eerily empty neighborhood, having to try extrahard to decipher where she was and where she used to live, left her stomach clenched in a knot. The park where the kids used to play was nothing more than a few burnt trees, their empty blackened branches reaching for the bright blue sky from barren ground. Many of the trees had burned to ash. The play set was nothing but some metal bars sticking out of the sunken cement rectangle with pools of melted plastic from the slides, seesaw, and swings.
Tears stung her eyes as memories of her boys playing and laughing with their friends assailed her.
It was nothing compared to standing in her driveway and seeing nothing but her blackened washer and dryer shells, twisted metal from her stove vent hood, and half her chimney standing, the top part in a heap of brick where the hearth used to be. She remembered hanging stockings from the thick wood mantel every Christmas and dashed a tear from her cheek with her finger.
The loss felt like a sledgehammer to what was left of her broken heart.
The boys’ photo albums from birth to now, gone. She had the digital photos stored in the cloud, but she’d painstakingly put the albums together with other mementos. The hospital bands they wore when they were born. The ticket stubs from their first movie. The armbands from their first visit to the zoo. The pictures they colored on their first day of preschool. The colored and stained kids’ menu from breakfast with Mickey at Disneyland. The prayer card from their father’s funeral.
It killed her when they asked if all their father’s things were gone. She’d promised them she’d find everything she