Page 1 of The Fire We Crave

PROLOGUE

QUINN

The dough is warm beneath my hands. It’s pliable, soft, and ready for the cold plunge into the fridge. And every time I place a bowl in there, I think of the person who taught me that cold fermentation is the special sauce for making a great sourdough loaf.

“It gives the yeast more time to work on the dough,” she’d say.

I glance over at the picture of her on the wall. Opening day, twenty years ago. With a cute pixie cut tied back from her face with a wide red-and-white bandana, Mom looks so happy. At seven years old, I look bored. My wide hazel eyes stare off into the distance, utterly disinterested in my father, the photographer. My naturally dark auburn hair is too big for my head. Too thick, too poufy, for my willowy frame. Silas must be eighteen, and you can see just how much my older brother hated this town in his grimace. He left shortly after the photograph was taken and found his way to the oil rigs. But my then twelve-year-old sister, Melody, is holding Mom’s hand and grinning with her.

Baking used to be something they shared.

Before Melody went missing.

Before my parents lost themselves in the fear and grief, so much so that they forgot they had a third child.

Before they relied on me to keep the bakery running, waking up hours before school to start the bread.

Before my brother refused to come home and leave his job as rope access technician on a Dubai oil rig.

Before the divorce, when Dad moved away and forgot we existed.

Before Mom decided the only way out of her misery was a bottle of pills and a large bottle of vodka on my nineteenth birthday.

Now, I’m the only beacon left for Melody.

Should she ever find her way back to us, she’ll find the bakery exactly where she left it. And her bedroom in the apartment above the bakery has never been touched beyond the occasional dusting and vacuuming after the police released the crime scene.

The mess and destruction that led police to think she’d been taken when she was eighteen.

My role is to maintain the shrine, and while it’s horrible to admit, I don’t like this role I’ve inherited. I no longer want to be the one who was left behind. The only person out of the four of us still tied to this place and time.

And yet, I feel like my entire life is a diorama to all the people who left me. A bakery. A bedroom. A grave.

My brother and I speak occasionally. It’s not a bad relationship. It’s simply one that’s never quite received enough sunlight and water to flourish. Or perhaps Melody, and my parents’ grief stripped the relationship of all nourishment. Perhaps the soil our family grew in was tainted. Who knows.

I close the fridge door and begin cleaning up the bakery so I can crawl back into bed and get some sleep. Dreams were thickand fast, leaving me gasping for air and sweating beneath the sheets.

So, even though it was two in the morning, I got up and wandered from my apartment above my bakery to the kitchen in the store. Might as well do something productive and get the bread started for the day.

The clock on the wall tells me it’s now a little after three. I’ll be up in three hours to open the shop, because God forbid the people of this town have to go to work without my pastries and the specialty coffees I brew fresh every morning.

Placing my hands on the counter, I sigh.

My therapist says I should hire a permanent manager, let someone else run the bakery, and go off to do what I want to do. It sounds so simple when she says it, my chest expands wide enough that I feel like I’ll burst.

She asks questions like, “What’s holding you back?”

And, “If there were no consequences, where would you be right now?”

The answers to both are complicated. I’m not sure I even know. But when I leave her office, when I put the key in the lock to trudge up the stairs to the apartment, the shackles reattach, and I’m stuck here.

It’s impossible to think past the question, “What if Melody finally finds her way home, and none of us are here?”

I’ve spoken to others who have a missing loved one. And they all say the same thing as me. We’ve become permanent markers of the time the missing have been gone. Our only purpose is to be the singular place the missing knows to return to.

One person I spoke to in Ohio lost their faith through the whole process. Yet, they still go and listen to the sermon every Sunday, just in case the church is the only thing their child remembers and goes looking for her there.

So, I do what gets done every night, religiously. I clean up.

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