Embers in the Snow

She left to become someone. I stayed and became someone else.

For fifteen years, I've been fine. Steady. The guy people call when the alarm sounds, someone's missing, or the fire's through the roof. I run toward other people's worst day for a living, and I never rattle. Ask anyone in town.

Then Darcy Bennett walks into the one bar I happen to be sitting in, and I find out exactly how much of that is true.

She says she's home on leave from her Chicago law firm. She won't be staying. This town never suited her. But Darcy cross-examines people for a living, and now she's asking questions about the one night nobody in Stillwater talks about.

The night her sister died.

We were eighteen. Everyone here knows how that night ended, and everyone has spent years wishing they'd done something different. Me most of all. Darcy is looking at it with a lawyer's eyes now, and the story this town has been living with is starting to come apart.

And someone is determined to make her stop digging.

I let Darcy go once. I told myself it was the right call. But as old secrets start breaking loose, I'm not so sure anymore.

A blizzard is coming. So is the truth. Neither one is waiting for permission.

And when it comes, I'll walk through fire to keep the only woman I've ever loved safe.