A few people are out and about. Some are raking through debris in the continued search, I suppose, for the odd gem or coin that the flames did not devour. Others are sweeping, pushing, and piling the remains of their houses into piles to be hauled away and dumped in large open spaces by the marina. I continue up the street, remembering how it was to escape down it the morning of the quake.

As I ascend the last block, I can’t get a good look at where my house should be, as the home directly next door is a brick structure that is partially still standing and obstructing my view. I can see that Libby’s house across the street still stands as well, but it is missing half its roof and every window frame is charred. My breath is coming in short gasps as I close the distance and step ever nearer to the house I lived in. When the hulk of the house next door is no longer impeding my view, I behold what remains. It is as though a giant hand of flame had reached down and grabbed the contents of my house, held it in its blazing fingers, and then flung to the ground its ashes. There are no walls, no floors, no roof.

There is no part of the house that is recognizable except for half the chimney, the misshapen shell of the cookstove in what had been the kitchen, and twisted pipes here and there. Large chunks of blackened onyx and marble from the fallen fireplaces on the second story litter the ground floor like ancient ruins. The space the house occupied looks smaller somehow, reduced now to just its footprint on the charred ground.

There are no timbers to have to push past to get to what had been the kitchen, no heaping piles of burnt plaster, no ceiling tiles or skeletal frames of bedroom furniture. I read in the newspaper before I came that the fires had burned at one thousand degrees Fahrenheit—an unbelievably intense heat that I couldn’t imagine until now. This fire did not just burn; it consumed.

I pick my way across the pocked ground and around the fallen fireplaces, crunching down on unrecognizable charred bits, to stand at the iron cookstove. I look down at the spot where I left Martin. He was by the butler’s table and the back window, both of which are now gone, and near the door to the boiler room, now a sunken receptacle of ash and blackened metal. I bend down to poke at the gray powder at my feet with a shard of marble, but I find not a trace of Martin’s body. Not his wedding ring, not a tooth, not a fragment of bone.

I cast my gaze back across what had been the dining room, searching for a skull, a torso of blackened ribs. Shouldn’t there be a scrap of something if Martin crawled across the kitchen floor in an attempt to escape? I stand and pick my way back among the second-story fireplaces, all of them heavy enough to fall on a burning body and crush it.