Fire at Twilight: The Firefighters of Darling Bay 1 by Lila Ashe Page B

feathers and beads hung on one wall. Next to the brick fireplace was a collection of what looked like painted gourds.
    Hippie stuff. The kind of furnishings he would have mocked only days ago. In here, though, it looked good, like he was sitting inside some Western decorating magazine.
    There was something hung above a low blue bookcase that looked like a round box made of metal. A tiny dollhouse? He stood and moved to get closer to it. Not a dollhouse, it was an aluminum open case that held a picture of a saint that had been painted with … glitter?
    “My tin nicho ,” Grace said from behind him. In her hands she held two orange mugs of tea. She’d taken off her canvas beach shoes and her bare feet surprised him, somehow. They looked so vulnerable.
    “Pink toenails,” he said rather stupidly.
    She laughed. Such a pretty sound that was. It was like the sound of dancing. Then she said, “It’s my own little, um … do you know what a hope chest is?”
    “Not really.”
    “It’s something a girl had in the old days. She filled it with the things she made to take with her into marriage. Her hopes.”
    Tox felt his eyebrows shoot upward. “This is your marriage box?”
    “ No. Only the hopes for my life.”
    “That looks like a saint or something.” He pointed at a picture glued inside. “Is that you?”
    She nudged his shoulder with her own, only she was so much shorter than he was, she really just touched his elbow. His arm ached, suddenly, to go around her, but he held himself back.
    “Of course not. That’s just a generic saint I cut out of a magazine.”
    “I’m pretty sure that’s blasphemous to someone. Somewhere.”
    “Nah,” she said easily. “I just think there’s something good and amazing and strong and wonderful in all of us, and part of our job here is to find out what that is.”
    Did she really believe that? That people were inherently good? “Well, you haven’t seen the dregs of humanity, then.”
    She touched her lips. He wanted to do that. Badly.
    “Maybe,” she said. “But I’ve seen more than I would have liked to have seen. My first acupuncture job was in an alcoholic rehab center.”
    “Okay.” He paused. “Maybe you’ve seen a little bit, then. What’s with the saint, then?”
    She said, sounding a bit abashed, “She kind of looks like me. A little bit, I mean. Around the nose, maybe.”
    Heck, she was right. Now that she said it, he could see it. It was as if they’d modeled the whole image on her. The same long toffee-colored hair that curled at the ends—always looking like it had just been caught in a windstorm. And the same big, brown eyes, as light as her hair. Almost clear, really. As expressive as the sun setting at twilight.
    “My sister actually pointed it out to me in the magazine. I thought she was full of it, but I was … I was in a low place, then. Relationship-wise. Later, I dug the magazine out of the recycling and cut it out. Look, even the same dimple.”
    Tox longed to touch that dimple with the very tip of his finger. Instead, he shoved his hand in his pocket.
    “I used glitter glue on her dress, or robe, whatever it is. The thimble was my mother’s, and it reminds me that needles have always been important in our family. After my father died, before she got sick, she took care of both me and my sister as a single mother on just the income she made as a seamstress.”
    There was pride in her voice, a stubbornness that he liked. And recognized. “What’s the matchbook for?”
    She made a murmuring sound in the back of her throat, as if she was trying to decide what, or how much, to tell him. “It’s … to remind me of something.”
    “And is that …”
    “A piece of chain-link fence? Yeah.” Grace straightened her back. “It is.”
    Tox hated it when anyone pushed him, so he wouldn’t do it to her. “I get it.” He accepted the mug of tea from her. “Thank you for this.”
    They sat on the red loveseat. She was so dang close that if