Page 4 of Forbidden Firefighter

What the fuck?

My heart galloped in my chest, nearly leaping into my throat from the shock. Was there someone in the house?

Old houses settle,I told myself.

They made noises resembling ghosts traipsing through the halls and sounded eerily of footsteps in the night. I breathed a momentary sigh of relief, having convinced myself it was nothing for now. Luckily, I didn’t believe in ghosts. Though it definitely didn’t make settling into the house easier.

“It could have gone better,” I finally responded.

“Why? Did she not leave you anything?” Aly asked.

“Rather the opposite, actually,” I exclaimed. “She left me practically everything.”

Silence on Aly’s end of the phone; then she said, “Isn’t that a good thing? I mean, wouldn’t you want something of your grandmother’s to remember her?”

I didn’t need anything to remember my grandmother.

There were some things even time couldn’t erase, I supposed. I certainly didn’t need a house this big. How my grandmother managed to stay here by herself all these years without anyone else around to fill the silence was beyond me. How had she not felt immensely alone in a house that could easily fit three families?

I’d go crazy. I’m already going crazy! Hearing people walking around the house and imagining ghosts slipping in between walls.

Maybe I had just grown accustomed to my two bedroom apartment with Aly. But now, even Aly was gone, and my lease would be up in a couple of months.

“Are you okay?” Aly’s voice chimed in through the phone.

“Yea,” I said. “Sorry. I just haven’t been feeling myself lately.”

“Losing someone you care about is hard. It isn’t something you recover from quickly. You just need to get out of your head, do something productive,” Aly explained. She was no stranger to heartache and loss. The poor girl had lost her father at the age of fifteen and spent years trying to help her mother pay off debts left behind as a result of his medical bills. She knew what it meant to work hard and have direction and purpose.

I had never felt that way. I never felt drawn in one direction or the other. There never seemed to be a reason for it in the past. Instead, I let the wind take me where it did. In every aspect of my life, I let whims and fancy guide me along each path. That’s how I ended up with five different changes to my major and an extra year spent at the university to complete my coursework.

“I don’t even know what to do to be productive,” I said. “I’m not sure what the next step for me should be.”

“What do you want to do? Where did you see yourself after graduating college?”

Nowhere. I saw absolutely nothing. I’d grown so accustomed to living in the here and now, I’d forgotten to prepare for the future. Even my degree afforded me no direction at all.

Independent Studies.

There was no way to be any more vague than that. “I don’t know, Aly. I thought about going back to California and figuring it out from there. But now, there are all these responsibilities to tend to and relatives to piss off.”

“Ooh.” Aly laughed. “Sounds juicy. I may need some details.”

“There isn’t much to tell.” I passed into one of the small guest bedrooms, the one my grandmother had claimed for herself after my grandpa passed away. “My aunt and uncle weren’t very happy with my grandmother’s decision to leave the family business and house all to my parents and me. They were livid.”

“I can imagine,” Aly exclaimed. “But you have a house now. Um...how do you feel about that?”

I trailed a finger along the dresser in grandma’s room. All the same decorations and porcelain figurines from my childhood adorned the top, littered along the surface like shelves in an antique shop. “I don’t know. I feel like I can’t go anywhere. Like this is it. This is my responsibility now. I’m going to die in this house.”

A burst of laughter erupted from the other side of the phone. “Wow. You’re really bent up about this. It’s not as bad as you’re making it out to be. If you don’t want the family home, why don’t you just sell it to your cousins?”

That might work. Even if my cousins couldn’t afford the actual price of the house, I could lower it to a price range that worked for them. That would certainly turn their scowling faces away from me and onto some other poor unsuspecting fool.

Except for my parents.

Mama and Daddy would never allow me to sell Hummingbird Hollow. Not to anyone, and certainly not to my cousins. They would concoct some legal excuse to prevent it from happening. Something excruciating and costly that would completely bankrupt me in the process.

“I don’t know. Things are complicated down here,” I said. “Everyone is at war with one another.”