Sweet Water(104)

Josh is running after me, his phone in hand. “Blackburn . . .” He’s screaming my address to someone on his cell as he runs, probably 911.

“Stop, Sarah!” he orders, but I’m already to the front door.

“My dad is inside!” I yell. I grab the brass door handle, and it’s so hot, it scalds my hand.

Josh grabs me, pulling me away. “Wait for the fire department!”

“They won’t be able to make it up the road!” I wail.

Josh’s face crumples, because he knows it’s true. Even the real estate agent warned us that one of the pitfalls of living here was the restricted gravel roadway.

My judgment time has arrived. The ticking clock has finally run out.

I’m fighting Josh to get back to the door handle, all the while thinking this is my punishment for all of this—wanting, pining over a house set way back in the woods, so private, so exclusive that it’s nearly inaccessible.

A road that’s too narrow to properly host large vehicles—like fire trucks.

This is my penance for turning a blind eye to Tush’s death and letting Martin snake the house out from under Josh’s family. And most of all, this is what I get for leaving Yazmin in those woods.

For allowing her body to be desecrated by the wild.

And now my house is burning to the ground.

And my father with it.

I’m in a coughing fit from the smoke as I fight off Josh.

“Stop, Sarah!”

I’ve taken hold of the door handle again by wrapping a piece of my long dress around it and yanking it open.

Heat and smoke rush out of the front, almost knocking us over. I hold my breath and wave the smoke out of my eyes. We step inside, and the fire is raging up the wood paneling in surreal licks of bright caramel and orange that would be almost pretty if they weren’t practically melting off our skin.

“Dad!” I scream, but the fire and the smoke fill my lungs, and I cough the word back up. My eyes are stung shut. I can hear the crackling of wood just above me. Josh grabs me and swings me out of the way. A ceiling beam splits and falls, black ashes burning my bare feet.

I swing myself down, step on the floor. Pure pain, but I have to, because—my father.

Navigating around the beam, I hold my hand over my eyes, looking for any sign of him.

“Sarah, we have to get out of here!” Josh says.

The great room looks like an inferno, the gateway to Hell as the flames rise up and up, all the way to the high ceilings. Straggles of wood hang from the raised pulpit, the maple-paneled ceiling fully engulfed in the room made for acoustics in the house where no one plays music—and no one ever will.

Shrieking sounds escape the walls as the fire splits apart the wood. Stonehenge is screaming: This is all your fault. I tried to warn you.

“I’m sorry!” I shout back. All these years you’ve protected me; I’m so sorry I couldn’t do the same.

“Dad!” I try to move farther into the house, but Josh holds me back. We’re squinting, and neither one of us should still be standing there, but I think we’re both paying a brief homage to our lost home. I have the slightest inclination to sit down in the middle of the floor and let the flames take me too.

It’s then that I notice there’s broken glass everywhere, and I look up and see billows of black smoke streaming out of the places in the great room where the stained-glass windows used to be. Someone has knocked them out. I’m sure of it, because the other windows are intact. The narrow channels of oxygen seem to only feed the flames.

I know in an instant, as I’m dragged back on the porch, who knocked out those windows.

Cash was here.

Josh is carrying me onto the lawn now, but all I can see are my broken windows.

Cash knocked them out. Cash set my house on fire. I just know it. Yazmin journaled about how much I love this house and how much she despised those windows. She likely told him about them, and he knocked them out for her, in her honor. No one needs to tell me this; I already know.

And Cash killed my father—that’s why he’s not downstairs—and he may have killed my sons too. I know it.

I’m desperately hoping my father has already made it out, but I know in my heart that he hasn’t.

The Veltris lost someone and so should I.

This could’ve all been so different. The Veltris wouldn’t hold so much hate in their hearts if I’d done the right thing and not left their daughter behind. They couldn’t report us because they have no proof and they knew we’d win the fight, so they took back from us the only way they knew how.

By burning our riches to the ground and taking our family with them.

And where’re my boys? Are they in there too? Burning to death?

Josh is carrying me away from the house as I’m having these awful thoughts, no longer able to fight him. The smoke has overcome my lungs, and I’m fighting to remain conscious. There’re sirens in the distance, but they’re too far away, and they’ll never get here in time to save my father—or my house.

“Oh my God, my dad,” I choke out. “Not my dad.”

Dad doesn’t belong at Stonehenge; I do. Dad shouldn’t die in Stonehenge; I should.

“Sarah, he wasn’t downstairs. Is the trellis that goes up the side of the house to the front bedroom still there? I used to climb on it when I was a kid to sneak out,” Josh says.