Free Hearts on Fire by Roz Lee Page B

apartment. By then, Mike had filed for divorce. The loom you saw in my tent and another, bigger, one were in the locker. I spent the next six months learning to use them.”
    She sighed. “They saved me. Once I came up from the pit I’d been in, I looked around. The only thing in my apartment was a mattress, no frame, and the looms. I’d lost all my friends, what few I had, and my family could hardly look at me. I had to get out of there, so I bought the motor coach and started traveling. I stopped at the Renaissance faire one day and met Nadya—the fortune-teller whose booth you tried to save. The next thing I knew, I had my own booth, and I was making a living, sort of, selling garments made from the cloth I weave.”
    “You could sell your cloth from anywhere, so why travel?”
    “If I stop in one place for too long, the memories come back. Then I remember all the reasons I can’t go back to my old life.”
    “Who says you have to go back to your old life? What’s wrong with starting a new one?” He knew the minute the words left his mouth that he’d said the wrong thing. Her body stiffened in his embrace.
    “I had my chance, and I blew it. I won’t do that again to anyone, let alone to myself.” She tried to get up, but he held her tight.
    “No, don’t go. I wasn’t suggesting you try to replace what you had. God knows, if I lost Megan, nothing would make up for the loss.” He took a deep breath. “What I’m trying to say is you’re a young woman. And if there’s one thing I’m certain of, children want their parents to be happy. You didn’t do anything wrong, Shannon. You provided your children with the best home you could. You worked hard to provide them with the things they needed, and I’m sure they loved you and your husband.”
    He hated the words forming in his head, but he had to say them, no matter how much they were going to hurt her. “I’ve seen a lot of house fires, and I can tell you this—you probably couldn’t have done anything if you’d been there. Everyone thinks they can, but they can’t. Even wearing full turnout gear, it’s almost impossible to save people trapped inside a burning house.”
    “I would have heard the smoke alarms. I could have saved them.” Her body heaved with the force of her tears.
    “I know you want to think you could have, but chances are you would have died, too.”
    “I wanted to die. God knows I wish I had.” She pushed out of his arms, and this time, he let her go. She stood, wiping her tear-streaked face on her sleeve. “You see why I can’t do this.” Her finger waggled between the two of them. “It’s not just losing my family. It’s what you do, too. I can’t be with a man who runs into burning buildings for a living. The fear, the constant worry, would be more than I could take.”
    Steve got to his feet. Never once had he wished to be something other than a fireman. He’d wanted to be one since he was nine years old, and the guys from the local firehouse had come out to rescue his sister’s kitten from the big oak tree in their front yard. The men had been in full turnout gear, having just left a fire when they’d gotten the call. Their gear had been covered in soot and smelled of smoke. He’d been in awe of their quiet efficiency and the way they treated a stranded alley cat situation as if lives were at stake.
    “You’re mad at the firemen, too, because they couldn’t save your family.” He got it. He really did, but placing blame where it didn’t belong didn’t sit right with him.
    “Maybe. If they’d gotten there sooner…or made an effort to go in…. But they didn’t. They knew there might be people in the house, and they didn’t go in!”
    He knew someone had explained it to her back when the incident happened, but clearly, she still hadn’t processed the information. “If they didn’t go in, then it had to be too late, Shannon. I wasn’t there, but I can tell you if I had been, and there had been any