At 2:17 in the morning, my mother looked straight at me through a hallway filling with smoke and said, “We can’t risk losing our daughter.”

The emergency room did not smell like smoke. It smelled like bleach, cold linoleum, and stale coffee.

Marcus stayed in the corner of the cubicle, arms crossed over his chest, shoulders rigid against the beige curtain. He didn't ask what had happened. He had seen the soot baked into my skin. He had seen the shredded denim and the purple, ballooning skin of my left ankle. When the triage nurse asked for an address, Marcus had given his own without looking at me.

"Sprain or fracture?" Marcus asked when the doctor finally walked in with the black-and-white films.

"Grade three fracture of the lateral malleolus," the doctor said, snapping the films onto the light box. "Six weeks in an immobilization boot. Crutches. No weight-bearing."

"Understood," Marcus said.

I sat on the paper-lined examination table, listening to the crackle under my thighs every time I shifted. The pain in my ankle was a dull, rhythmic hammer, but my mind was stuck twelve miles east, staring down a smoke-choked hallway.

*We can’t risk losing our daughter.*

Not *daughters*. Just Diane.

My phone, resting on the bedside tray, buzzed once. Then twice. A group text from local neighborhood watch alerts.

*Structure fire reported on Elmhurst Lane. Two-alarm. Units responding.*

Ten minutes later, Marcus paid the pharmacy co-pay for my painkillers, took the paper prescription, and wheeled me out to his truck. He hoisted me into the passenger seat as carefully as if I were made of blown glass.

"Where to?" he asked, putting the truck in reverse.

"Anywhere with four walls that aren't on fire," I said. My voice was a scrape of iron against gravel.

Marcus drove us to his workshop outside town—a converted barn with an apartment above it. The air out there smelled of sawdust, oil, and wet pine. It was clean. It didn't burn the back of my throat.

He carried me up the wooden stairs, settled me on his sofa, and propped my foot up on three pillows. Only when he had placed a glass of water and two white pills into my hand did he pull up a chair.

"The house is gone, Jo," he said quietly.

"I know."

"Your father’s car was in the driveway. Diane’s sedan was parked out front. They were all on the front lawn when the chief got there." He hesitated, his jaw flexing. "They told the paramedics that you were already out of town."

I looked at him. The glass of water shook in my fingers. "What?"

"They told Chief Henderson that you left yesterday afternoon for a conference in Chicago. They said no one was inside."

A cold stillness settled in my chest, heavy and absolute.

It hadn't just been a split-second panic. It hadn't been smoke confusion.