Dedication
For all of you out there who need to rebuild or renovate your life, this one is for you. Let go of the past and anything that doesn’t bring you joy. Fill your life with laughter and love. You deserve to be happy.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
About the Book
Praise
Also by Jennifer Ryan
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
Flames burned bright orange and red on both sides of the two-lane road as they consumed and destroyed everything in their path. Homes, businesses, multimillion-dollar vineyards. Nothing was spared as the fire climbed over the Napa Valley hills, unrelenting in its destruction. Sierra prayed it spared everyone on the road leading out, especially her sons.
She drove, heart pounding, fear amped to infinity, with her clammy palms locked on the steering wheel. Bumper to bumper, traffic moved at a snail’s pace. Like her, the other residents had been notified too late to gradually evacuate. The sheer number of people trying to escape all at once down a single lane prevented them from racing away from the flames. The other lane was left open to emergency vehicles that occasionally sped into the belly of the beast. Everyone had to feel exactly like her: desperate to flee before this dark and dangerous road became their grave.
She loved watching the flames dance in her woodburning stove, but driving through a wildfire made her feel like she was inside an inferno. Trapped. A wave of terror shot through her, cold fear dancing down her spine. She wanted out. Now.
Sierra glanced at her two small sons in the back seat, danger inches away outside. Helpless to eradicate it, she sucked in a breath to calm the fear and focus on getting them out of here as safely as possible. Every instinct told her to stomp on the gas, jump in the other lane, speed past everyone, and get them to safety no matter what. But like everyone else, she tried to stay orderly and calm.
Noxious fumes, unbelievable heat, and fire surrounded them. Nothing and no one was a match for Mother Nature’s firestorm. Ash, smoke, and sparks blew all around them while the satellite radio cut in and out, the signal blocked by the thick smoke obliterating their view of the night sky. Fear knotted her gut and rising panic sped up her heartbeat. Every second trapped within the blaze raging on both sides of them made it harder to keep it together for her two little boys.
She thought about their lives, how they’d already suffered a great loss when their father died, and all they had ahead of them. She didn’t want it to end this way. She wanted to see them grown, happy, healthy, living the life they chose and thriving.
“Mom.” Danny’s voice shook. “The window is hot.”
“Don’t touch it.” She’d flipped the vent system to recirculate, but the smoky stench permeated the car along with the immense heat. The acrid scent turned her stomach and left a sour taste in her mouth.
Oliver held his favorite blanket over his mouth and nose. His eyes held a world of worry, too great for one five-year-old to face and understand beyond the fact that the scene outside was scary as hell and he wanted to be far away.
So do I.
Frustration got the better of the guy in the pickup truck behind her and he laid on the horn. Where did he expect her to go? The line of cars had only moved ten feet in the last two minutes. At this rate, they wouldn’t get out of the fire zone before dawn.
At least, it felt that way.
A rush of adrenaline shot through her again, signaling the flight-or-fight response she’d felt when she’d seen the smoke and fire headed toward their home. She could neither fight it nor flee from it when it literally surrounded her. And so she tried her best to stay alert, remain calm, and pray this all worked out.
Three more fire engines sped past in the opposite lane. Reinforcements for the dozens she’d passed on the tedious and exceedingly dangerous trip out of here.
We’ll make it out. We have to.
She’d worked too hard the last eleven months to keep her head above water after her husband’s tragic car accident to have it all end like this . . . in a car, on a dark road, consumed by fire.
It felt too eerily close to how they lost David.
Sierra gripped the steering wheel even tighter to stop her hands from shaking and focused on the car in front of her, following it around another curve, not getting her hopes up when their speed increased even marginally, but telling herself steady as she goes was good enough, so long as they got out of this alive.
The thought of anything happening to her babies . . . She couldn’t go there. It stopped her heart. But 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 could.
She thought of the cuff links he wore at their wedding. She’d hoped that one day the boys would wear them when they married the person of their dreams. She’d kept his golf clubs, despite how many times she’d resented him taking off for eighteen holes of solitude and fun when she barely got an hour to herself each day. But she’d hoped her boys would give the sport a try and find some commonality with their father. She pictured them standing on the course and taking a moment to think about him every time they played.
David died so young. It wouldn’t be long before the boys lost the sharpness of their memories of him. She feared Oliver would forget him altogether.
She’d kept as much as she could of David in the house to remind them, despite how those reminders triggered her resentments and anger.
Sierra reminded herself that she didn’t need the things in the house to remember all they’d shared under that roof. The good times. The bad. She still carried them with her.
David’s sudden death left her the keeper of his memory for the boys. She tried to keep him alive for them, but the fire took everything of his, all the mementos the boys needed to help them remember their father.
His stuff may be gone, but he’d left her with suspicions and doubts about the many months leading up to his death. Those didn’t burn up in the fire. But anything that might have revealed the truth was gone.
Sierra didn’t know if she could live without knowing, but what choice did she have now?
The fire had wiped the slate clean of every possession and tie to the past. She had to rebuild from the ground up.
No home. No job. A dwindling savings account.
It had taken hours to complete her claim with the insurance company, but a payout was weeks if not months away.
Rebuilding could take years with all the government red tape. But the cost of rebuilding . . . The insurance probably wouldn’t cover it.
Added to her worries, she no longer had an income. The property management company she worked for had burned down, too, along with many of the properties they oversaw.
She faced a long journey ahead of her to figure out what to do with the home she no longer felt a connection to.
It felt like one more thing David had left for her to deal with on her own.
What am I doing here?
There’s nothing left.
But she had promised the boys she’d take back anything she could salvage. She hoped to find at least one thing for each of them. The stuffed fish David won Oliver at the fair knocking down milk jugs with a baseball wasn’t even worth consideration. Neither was Danny’s science fair certificate he was so proud of winning. The memory would have to be enough for both of them. But maybe something survived.
She walked toward the property site and slid the respirator mask she’d been given over her head to cover her nose and mouth. She didn’t want to breathe in all the soot, ash, and toxic chemicals from everything that had burned and melted.
With the layout of the house ahead of her obscured by debris and simply unrecognizable without the walls defining the space, she started at the cement porch steps that led to where her door used to be. She stepped up to what used to be the entry and surveyed the destruction with a lump in her throat, tears in her eyes, and a very heavy heart.
Nothing in the living room, kitchen, dining room, or bathrooms was worth sorting through all the wreckage to find. She visualized the house and made her way to where the boys’ rooms were located, her rubber boots crunching over the remains of what used to be their home.
She tried not to think too hard about all they’d lost. Dishes, furniture, TVs, computers, clothes—all of it could be replaced, she reminded herself. That didn’t help ease the ache in her chest or the wanting to have it all back. The baby clothes she’d saved. The crib she’d stored in the garage just in case one day they had another baby.
Not possible for them now.
But she’d liked knowing it was there if she needed it.
Just like her grandmother’s quilt wrapped in tissue and stored in a box in the hall linen closet.
With the destruction spread out before her, it seemed ridiculous to even think something survived the flames and heat.
Sierra found what she thought was Danny’s room and where his desk and bookshelf used to stand. She pulled on thick work gloves and dug into the debris, hoping to find something recognizable. Ten minutes in, her fingers brushed something hard. She picked up the disk and stared at it, not believing her eyes. The outside of the pocket watch had blackened, but when she opened it, the inside wasn’t that bad off. The glass had cracked and the clock mechanism didn’t work, but Danny would love to have it, anyway. She and David bought it for him at some downtown antique shop on their vacation up to Jamestown where they took the kids gold panning in an old abandoned ghost town turned into a tourist attraction. The kids had even made candles.
The memory along with finding the pocket watch eased her heart a bit. She had something to give to Danny besides the metal frame of what might be a Ford Mustang Hot Wheel with no tires and the paint melted completely away.
She spent ten more minutes rummaging through what was left of Danny’s room before working on Oliver’s space. She didn’t find much until she made it to where his toy box had sat below his window. There, she found a treasure that brought tears to her eyes. His marble collection had survived i
nside a tin that had once held Hershey’s chocolate they’d bought at the chocolate factory they’d toured in the Central Valley.
Oliver would be so happy.
She lifted a half-burnt board and found two dirty but perfectly intact plastic dinosaurs. How they didn’t melt escaped her, but she’d take the little guys back to Oliver. The mound of burnt plastic ten inches away had to be the bin that held all the others. She didn’t even bother trying to pull it apart to see if anything in the middle survived. She just moved on, brushing things this way and that hoping something else caught her eye.
Even though her thighs and ankles hurt from crouching, she moved on to her bedroom, strategic in where she looked. She started where she thought the closet used to be, hoping that even if her wooden jewelry box hadn’t survived, some of her jewelry had, especially the pieces she’d put into a metal lockbox.
Metal hangers told Sierra she was in the right place. But she didn’t find anything resembling the few pieces of jewelry she owned until she started backing up toward where the bed used to be. Her foot kicked something and the metallic thump of it hitting something else made her heart pound and hope rise. She shoved debris aside to get to the blackened rectangle with the lock still intact. She hugged the box to her chest and heard several things inside rattle. She didn’t have the key to open it, but with some tools, she hoped to bust it open and find her and David’s wedding rings, along with her pair of diamond studs, and a couple other rings and a diamond heart pendant David gave her their first Christmas as a married couple.
“Find something?” the officer who dropped her off asked from the road as he stood outside his patrol car.
She stood, pulled her mask off, and found a smile. “Yes. I did.”
“It’s getting late. We’ll close the neighborhood off to visitors for the night soon. It’s time to head back. You can return tomorrow if you’d like.”
They’d closed off the neighborhood to keep looters from trying to sort through homes looking for anything that survived the fire.
Some people suck.
It wasn’t bad enough the people who used to live here lost everything; someone wanted to profit off them.
Sisters and Secrets Page 1