Elias Voss, 62, retired federal wildland fire investigator, had spent the last eight years perfecting the art of being left alone. Since his wife passed from ovarian cancer in 2015, he’d turned down every invitation to the downtown taproom’s weekly beer garden, called every neighbor who dropped off a casserole overly nosy, and mocked the TikTok teens who’d flocked to the edges of the recent 120-acre wildfire outside town to film “fire porn” for clout. His only consistent companion was a three-legged hound named Smokey, and he liked it that way. The only reason he was even at the beer garden that crisp October evening was his 22-year-old niece had threatened to cancel his satellite internet if he didn’t “get out and talk to a human who doesn’t drool on your work boots.”
He was leaning against a splintered cornhole board nursing an amber ale, scowling at a group of kids holding their phones up to the fire pit, when he heard a low laugh next to him. “I yelled at three of those little shits just yesterday for climbing the fence around my nursery to film the fire line. Almost sprayed them with my hose for tramping my trillium beds.”
He turned. The woman was 58 if he had to guess, streaks of silver in her dark curly hair, mud crusted on the cuffs of her Carhartt jeans, a half-empty hard cider in one hand. A patch sewn to her flannel shirt read *Mountain Native Nursery*—Clara, he remembered, the woman who’d moved to town six months prior, who everyone kept trying to set him up with, who he’d actively avoided at the farmers’ market three weeks running.
He grunted in agreement. “Those kids don’t get that fire doesn’t care how many likes you get. One wrong step and they’d have been another statistic the crews had to dig out of ash.” He held up his left hand, the thick scar across his knuckles pale against his sun-aged skin, from digging through fire debris to find the cause of a 2019 blaze in the Nantahala National Forest.
She leaned in to look, her elbow brushing his bicep as she gestured to the scar. The scent of pine and sage hit him, sharp and warm, no heavy perfume, just the smell of the woods and the lavender soap she used. “I know that scar. I’ve got one just like it on my ankle, from stepping on a half-burned log when I was out collecting milkweed seeds last week.” She tilted her ankle up to show him, the thin silvery line peeking out above her work boot.
Elias tensed up, half ready to make an excuse to leave, half fascinated. He’d spent so long convincing himself he didn’t want to talk to anyone, that any sort of connection at his age was foolish, a waste of time, a betrayal of the life he’d built with his wife. But Clara didn’t push, didn’t ask him prying questions about his ring finger, which still had the faint indent of a wedding band he’d stopped wearing two years prior. She just ranted about the county’s stupid fire mitigation rules, about how they kept tearing out native brush that was actually fire-resistant to plant water-hungry grass that burned faster than paper.
When a drop of cider dribbled down her chin, he grabbed a napkin from the stack on the cornhole board and passed it to her. Their fingers brushed, and he felt a jolt go up his arm, the kind of sharp, giddy spark he hadn’t felt since he was 19, kissing his wife for the first time in the back of his beat-up Ford F-150. He flinched like he’d been burned, angry at himself for even noticing, for feeling like a stupid teenager over a single accidental touch.
Clara didn’t comment on the flinch. She just wiped her chin, smiled, and nodded toward the trailhead at the edge of the taproom’s parking lot. “Wanna walk up to the overlook? You can still see the faint smoke from the fire at dusk. I’ve been meaning to go up all week, but I don’t like hiking alone after dark.”
Elias hesitated, his first instinct to say no, to go home to his hound and his old westerns and the quiet he’d cultivated for years. But he looked at her eyes, hazel flecked with gold, the corner of her mouth tilted up like she already knew he’d say yes, and he found himself nodding.
The trail was gravel, scattered with fallen oak leaves that crunched under their boots. Halfway up, she stumbled over a half-buried root, and he reached out automatically to catch her, his hand wrapping firm around her forearm. She was warm under his palm, solid, she laughed, low and throaty, and said, “I swear I trip over at least three roots a day. Occupational hazard when you spend half your life hunched over looking at wildflowers.” He didn’t let go right away, and she didn’t pull away.
At the overlook, the sky was streaked pink and tangerine, the thin gray line of smoke from the fire fading against the purple mountains. She leaned her shoulder against his, quiet for a long minute, before she said, “My husband was a firefighter. Died of a heart attack four years ago, on a call. I moved here to get away from the constant reminders, never thought I’d end up talking to a fire investigator about burn patterns of all things.”
Elias didn’t say anything for a second, just shifted so he could wrap his arm around her waist, his hand resting light on the soft curve of her hip under her flannel. He didn’t feel guilty, didn’t feel like he was doing something wrong, like he’d expected to. He just felt present, for the first time in almost a decade. When she tilted her head up to kiss him, slow and soft, she tasted like cinnamon cider and mint, no rush, no awkward fumbling, just easy.
He pulled back after a minute, the distant sound of the beer garden’s bluegrass band drifting up the trail. “I got a jar of peach pie moonshine back at my place. My wife made it, right before she got sick. Been saving it for no good reason. Also got a photo album of all my old fire investigation shots, if you’re into that kind of weird stuff.”
She laced her fingers through his, calloused from digging in dirt, fitting perfectly against his scarred knuckles, and nodded. They turned toward the trail, his hound’s faint, excited barking carrying through the cool air from the direction of his house as they walked slow, side by side, no need to rush.
