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Happy reading!
Cari Lynn Webb
To Stacey—a best friend who quickly became family. You’re the sister I got to choose myself.
Special thanks to my editor, Kathryn Lye, for pushing me to become a better writer. I’m grateful. To Melinda and Anna for your continuous support. To my husband and daughters for your plot-twist suggestions that always make me laugh and disrupt my stress.
Contents
Note to Readers
“CAN I OFFER you a ride?” A man’s deep voice broke through Brooke Ellis’s stupor.
Brooke squeezed Luna’s dog leash and tried to squeeze a sense of composure through herself.
Why were simple questions the hardest?
Maybe they’d always been hard and that was why Brooke had chosen to live alone in the mountains of Northern California for the past five years.
Until two days ago.
Exactly fifty-two hours earlier, a wildfire had ripped through the forest, forced Brooke and her neighbors to evacuate and destroyed lives.
Brooke turned in her gravel driveway and stared at the older gentleman watching her from inside an oversize pickup truck.
He smiled and repeated his question, “Do you need a ride someplace?”
She stepped closer, found patience in his kind gaze and her answer. “I have no place to go.”
He got out of his truck and walked toward her—he was wearing a volunteer fire-and-rescue jacket. The man may have been older, but he towered over Brooke by at least a foot and seemed to understand his height might make her guarded. He knelt and held his hand out for Luna to sniff. “There’s a shelter set up in town. I could drop you off there.”
Brooke indicated the two pet carriers near her feet. Archie, her one-year-old cat, slept in one. The veterinarian hospital had to evacuate its