Page 76 of Nanny for the Firefighter

Sighing, I close my eyes briefly as I let out the long exhale. As I walk over to my mom, I wrap an arm around her and pull her in for a hug.

“Thank you, Mom. Really.”

She smiles, and my chest pinches just that little bit more. She’s doing the mom thing, taking care of her kid.

And damn, have I missed it.

I sit down on the couch next to her, and Mom throws on a dumb movie. I’m not even really sure what it is, but the lighthearted humor does enough to distract me for a few minutes at a time.

Invariably, though, my eyes flick to the window, watching that black smoke soaring high.

“Honey,” my mother cuts in, “he’s going to be fine.”

I can’t look over at her, my eyes pinned to the window. “It’s just…Mason lost his dad to this.”

Hearing the hiccup in my mom’s breath, I turn to face her, and she nods solemnly.

“Oh, that’s right. I’d…well, shit, I’d forgotten that Mason lost his father to a wildfire that hit town.”

Nodding softly, I look over at Mia, who’s playing on the floor with a few of the old toys my mom keeps lying around for when Juniper visits.

She’s so happy and innocent. I can’t stand the thought of her losing her dad, too.

“I don’t remember much about it, to be honest,” I reply. “Just that he was a firefighter for that big one when Mason was a kid.”

My mother hums in agreement. “He did. Now that the old memory is jogged, I can remember that day. The fire ripped through the town. They hadn’t been able to stop it at the forest. The entire department was out there fighting it, including Mason’s dad, James. I think Mason wanted to be a volunteer firefighter because James was.”

That ache in my chest gets worse, and I vaguely recall Hudson mentioning Mason’s absence from school. They were in the same grade, but I was too much younger than them to understand.

“Red Lodge owes James Hayes a lot. He was a hero that day.”

I turn back to the window, that plume of black still clouding up the sky.

“Mason doesn’t talk about him. I think I can count on one hand the number of times he’s mentioned his dad.”

“I can understand that. But Mason knows what happened. His mother told him. Poor thing, now she’s gone too.”

My eyes burn, and again, I look at Mia. When I speak again, my voice cracks.

“What, umm, what made him a hero?”

Nodding, my mother looks down at the floor, recalling what happened all those years ago.

“Well, James was a volunteer firefighter, too. He got called to a house in town that had caught fire. The forest fire had spread into town, you see, and the house was right on the edge over there.”

My guts churn. Mason’s house is on that side of town, too. Mia and I were in there. We would have stayed if Mason hadn’t called. He saved us.

“James was inside that home helping to get the family out when it suddenly collapsed. The fire had damaged too much of the internal structure. He was trapped.”

Fear licks through my spine as nausea crawls up the back of my throat. I don’t want to picture Mason in that situation, but the intrusive thoughts won’t back down.

“James got those people out. The kids are Mason’s age now and have kids of their own. He died that day, but what he did was beyond heroic. He saw a family like his own in need, and he made the ultimate sacrifice to keep them safe.”

I can’t stop the tears, and my mother isn’t judging me. She hands me a tissue, and I dab at my face as the fear and worry swirl together.

Mason cannot die today. I’ll…he just can’t.

“I didn’t know. I mean, I knew that he’d been a firefighter and passed, but…James really was a hero.”

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