registered behind the nurse’s glasses. She knew baby Alex was an orphan now.
An orphan. Oh no. Could she live through this torment again? She’d already lost her parents. Janna had been her family, her best friend, her sister. They’d had each other when life had been too hard to bear.
Cassidy closed her eyes and swayed. The nurse looped an arm gently through hers. “I’ll walk you down. You must be devastated.”
Devastated. Devastated. Like a recording stuck on repeat, words reverberated and replayed in her head.
All she could do was nod and stumble on, going through the motions. Doing what had to be done.
Whatever that was.
Alex. Baby Alex needed her. He was alone. All alone in a violent world that had stolen his mommy and daddy. A mommy and daddy who had loved him fiercely.
She felt lost. Alone. Just like Alex.
At the door of the room, she paused and sucked in a deep breath, hoping for strength, settling for vague sensory input. Hospital food. The clatter of trays coming off the elevator. Breakfast.
It seemed like hours since the sheriff had appeared at her door. But morning had just arrived, the dawn of a new and terrible day. A day she could not bear to face.
Maybe she was still asleep. Still dreaming. That was it. Bad dreams about death and destruction were all too common to her.
Wake up, Cass. Wake up.
The urging didn’t work. She was still standing outside a thick, brown door inside Northwood Regional Hospital staring into the gentle eyes of a nurse. Wishing she could slide to the floor and die, too, Cassidy faced the fact that this nightmare was the real thing.
“Is Alex…?” How did she ask if he was horribly burned or hooked up to tubes and wires? If he was suffering?
The nurse nodded, understanding Cassidy’s concern. “He was far enough away from the fire to escape the worst. He suffered some smoke inhalation, but nothing that breathing treatments won’t resolve in a few days. He should recover well.”
With a push to the center of her glasses, the kind woman left the rest unsaid. Alex had slept in the remodeled nursery upstairs. His parents slept downstairs in the unfinished portion of the old house. The fire must have started on the bottom floor, sucking their lives away while they slept, exhausted from the chore of remodeling the beautiful old Victorian into a bed-and-breakfast. A dream that would die with them.
The nurse hovered, leaning close to whisper. “He came in with the baby. I hope you don’t mind.”
Cassidy paused, perplexed, the flat of one hand against the cool wooden door.
“Who?” She had no relatives close enough to have arrived already. Not anymore. No one but Alex.
“The firefighter. He won’t leave.”
Cassidy tensed. The last thing she wanted was a firefighter hanging around to remind her of what she and Alex had lost this horrible night. She wanted the man to get out, to leave her in peace. But she hadn’t the strength to say so.
“I’ll handle things from here. Thank you.” Her voice sounded strangely detached, as though her vocal cords belonged to someone else far away in a big, empty auditorium.
“If I can do anything….”
Cassidy managed a nod. At least she thought she did as she pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The eerie quiet that invades a hospital deepened inside the room. Pale morning light from the curtained windows fell across a bulky form. Still dressed in the dark-yellow pants and black boots of a firefighter, stinking of soot and smoke, a man had pulled a chair against the side of Alex’s crib. Turnout coat hung on the back of the chair, his dark head was bowed, forehead balanced on the raised railing. One of his hands stretched between the bars, holding Alex’s tiny fingers.
Too exhausted and numb and grief-stricken to think, Cassidy paused in the doorway to contemplate the unlikely pair—a baby and a fireman. What was the man doing? Sleeping? Praying? Why was he here?
Unexpected gratitude filtered in to mix and mingle with her other rampaging emotions. After the night’s tragedy, she could hardly bear to think about anything related to fire—even the men who fought it—but she was very glad her four-month-old nephew had not been alone all this time.
The fireman roused himself, lifting his head to observe the sleeping baby and then to turn and look at her. Cassidy’s first impression was of darkness. The same black soot covering his clothes smeared his face, so that Cassidy had a hard time discerning his age or looks. His eyes, though reddened behind the spiky eyelashes, were as dark as his nearly black hair. Only the fingerprint cleft in his chin stood out, stark white against the soot.
With another look at the baby, the man carefully slid his fingers from Alex’s grip and stood. He wasn’t overly tall, but his upper body was athletic and fit beneath the navy Northwood Fire Department shirt. Weariness emanated from him.
“Are you the aunt?” he asked. “They said he had an aunt.” He glanced back at Alex, swallowed. “My sister has a baby.”
Then he stopped as if the word sister was too strong a reminder of the night’s loss.
“Yes, I’m his aunt. Cassidy Willis.”
She moved to the raised crib and gazed down at the child with her sister’s dark-blond hair and Brad’s high cheekbones. What was she going to do now? What would Janna want her to do? Who would be mother and father to her sister’s little boy?
“Is anyone else coming to be with you?”
Gripping the rail with both hands, she struggled to think. Her brain was a fog. Her emotions jumbled, but mostly numb.
“Brad’s parents.”
“Brad?” he asked gently, standing close as though he thought she’d faint. The scent of smoke seeped from him in insidious waves. Her stomach churned, fighting down a memory. She’d hated the smell of smoke before. Now she hated it even more.
“Alex’s father. My sister’s husband, Bradley Brown.”
“Ah.” He didn’t have to say the words. She could hear his thoughts. Brad Brown was dead along with her sister.
“His parents live in Missouri, just over the state line. They’ll come.”
“Have they been notified?”
She looked at him then, lost. Notified? Of what? “The fire?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I gave their information to the sheriff.” At least she thought she had. Those moments in her small living room with the solemn sheriff were a painful blur, a slow-motion torture of trying to comprehend the loss, of answering questions, of understanding that Alex needed her and she had no time to grieve.
She knew little about Brad’s parents except that they lived in Joplin and had raised a son who loved her sister. The pair of them had been building the one thing Janna and
