Not here, I thought. Not now.

___

I was on the foundation, pushing the door to Blake’s room open.

No.

There I was, at the table with everyone.

___

There Blake was, on the mattress. He was shifting a little bit. Maybe some distant part of him smelled smoke and sensed danger.

Even in the urgency, time seemed to stop.

“Save him!” my mother screamed from below.

I stood in the doorway to his room. He sprawled on his new bed, the bed where he fucked my mother, the bed he bought with my grandparents’ money.

I could wake him.

Morning would come.

He would rise and devour us again.

Lies and tricks. The way he took her from me and kept taking and taking. My ghost—he took her, too. And he hurt us on purpose. And he poisoned everything good—the California poppies, the hours my mother spent with me, even the story of us.

My heart pounded rage instead of blood. At first there was a stab in my chest, a blindness. And then my vision returned. The flames crept closer.

I still had time to save him. All I had to do was throw something in his direction. Kick him. Scream.

He may have been a monster in the daylight, but at that moment he was only a man, asleep. Flesh and bones and a beating heart. Hair and clothing. Lungs that would fill with smoke.

The flames caught the drapes above the bed.

All I had to do was warn him.

Fire engulfed the blankets. I could scream, and he would wake.

And then the flames found his hair, his clothing. I saw him stir. I could have saved him, but I made a choice.

___

Bread and butter and ash in my mouth.

I gagged and the food flew out, onto my plate, but what landed didn’t look like bread at all. It was powdery and black.

The sight of it made me heave. I vomited right there, onto the floor of Terry and Julia’s house—not food but ash—wet and clumpy and vile. Like our blackened, ruined things when all of it was over, drenched and then forgotten.

I sprang from the bench, holding my stomach, flooded with shame. How could I be so disgusting? Turned toward me were so many faces—Liz and Billy and Lee, Terry and Julia, Emma and Hunter and Jackson, Darius and Blanca and Mackenzie and James, Diamond and Ruby—all of them, horrified.

“I’m so sorry,” I sobbed. “I didn’t . . .”

I stepped out of the doorway as the room filled with smoke and fire.

“I couldn’t . . .”

I turned from him right before the walls crashed in.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” I said, and my stomach heaved again, and I had to cover my mouth.

Julia was beside me now, her arm tightening around my waist.

I left him there—a man—to burn to death.

“Come with me,” Julia said.