Ride the Fire by Jo Davis

friends, for sure. They all knew he was recovering, and that he planned to stay that way. Christ, he had to get rid of it. Give it to Clay or Jules, today. He’d call one of them.
    First, he peered into the box again, looking for a note or some sort of clue as to who’d sent the damned thing. Carefully, he moved around some of the Bubble Wrap left in the box . . . and saw an envelope in the bottom. Fishing it out, he held it up and turned it over, inspecting both sides. Just a plain, yellow greeting card envelope. Strange. No name on the outside. Didn’t most people automatically write a person’s name on one, even when it wasn’t necessary?
    Wary, he tore into the paper, lifted the flap. At a glance, he could tell the sole contents consisted of a single photograph, and he removed it. An amateur nighttime shot of a fire? Yeah, with people in the perimeter of the picture, a couple of firefighters with hoses. Taken on a hill or rise, from quite a distance, so far you almost couldn’t tell—wait.
    From out of the inferno, on the right-hand side, the nose of a vehicle could be seen. And part of a cab. They belonged to an eighteen-wheeler. Hands suddenly clammy, he scanned to the left. In the flames, the faint outline of a car. Bred to the back end.
    He knew the scene all too well. He saw it in his nightmares, both sleeping and awake.
    “Oh, God,” he moaned, knees almost buckling. He staggered to a chair in the breakfast nook, fell into it. His hands were empty—he’d dropped the photo onto the pile of wrapping paper.
    “Why? Why would anyone do this to me?”
    And who?
    A wisp of an idea seeped into his mind like black smoke, stifling. Deadly. But no, it had been too many years. A lifetime.
    Did you ever ask yourself . . . what if it wasn’t an accident?
    The call. The photo.
    Someone had known about his family’s wreck. Had somehow known enough to stand on a hill in the darkness, undetected, and snap a tangible memory of hell. The hell that had begun his slide into the depths of alcoholism.
    The booze. They knew about that, too.
    The room spun, and he buried his face in his hands. He needed to do something, but he didn’t know what. Couldn’t think.
    So he just sat, frozen.
    Blown apart, all over again.

    Eve sat on Zack and Cori’s sofa between the couple, elbows on her knees, hands clasped to hide their trembling. Cori’s palm was rubbing comforting circles on her back, and Zack was patting her knee, gazing at her in real concern.
    “I’m so sorry to barge in on you guys like this.”
    “Stop that,” Zack admonished gently. “Tell us what’s wrong and maybe we can help.”
    Eve gave a bitter laugh. “That’s just it—you can’t help. I feel so stupid. I mean, I’m tougher than this, right? I should be able to handle it on my own.”
    “Eve,” Cori said softly, “the beauty of having good friends is that you don’t have to be tough. You can fall apart and know you’re safe to do it here.”
    That got her. The tears she’d been suppressing on the drive over filled her eyes, overflowed, ran down her cheeks. “I messed up so bad. I might have to transfer to another station, or put in for the Nashville Fire Department. Or Clarksville, or the fucking West Coast. Anywhere but here.”
    “You slept with Sean, didn’t you?” Zack asked quietly, no hint of accusation in his tone.
    “I’m such a moron.” Eve buried her face in her hands. “I love him.”
    She broke down then. Cried as she hadn’t since she was twelve and a boy at school had called her Oreo—black on the outside, white in the middle. She’d been shocked to the core because her skin wasn’t much darker than his, her eyes blue. But that hadn’t stopped the hateful slurs the scum and his posse had thrown her way for the next couple of years until high school, when she’d outgrown her awkwardness and blossomed. And gained her confidence to boot.
    This hurt so much more, her insides being ripped apart.
    Cori’s voice broke