The sound that yanks me out of sleep is not my name or my phone or a nightmare.
It’s the smoke alarm, a brutal, repetitive scream that shreds the dark.
For a second I lie there, doubtful and disoriented, brain trying to file the noise under “dead battery chirp” from some other decade. Then Tessa’s door slams open and her feet hit the hallway hard.
“Mara!” Her shout punches straight through the alarm. “Up. Now.”
My body moves before my thoughts catch up. I fling the comforter aside, toes hitting the cold floor, the air carrying a faint burned smell that has nothing to do with toast. The alarm’s strobe flashes in the hall, each burst bleaching the doorway white.
“Kitchen?” I call, throat raw.
“No,” Tessa says, already at the front of the house. “It’s the front—”
She cuts off with a curse. I run to her.
The moment I hit the end of the short hallway, I see it: an angry orange glow pulsing through the beveled glass panes of the front door and the narrow sidelight window. Shadows claw up the wall with each flicker. The smell slams into me fully now—burning cloth and something chemical, sharp enough to sting my nose and the back of my throat.
“Fire extinguisher,” I say. The words come out clipped, automatic, like a fire drill script from grade school. “Under the kitchen sink. Go.”
Tessa spins and sprints toward the kitchen. I grab the deadbolt and jerk it open, half-aware of how stupid that is, opening a door when there’s fire on the other side. The alarm shrieks over everything, a mechanical panic that digs into my ears.
Cold night air pours in, bringing the distant hum of the freeway and the faint wet smell of pine and asphalt. The fog is low and dense, hugging the slope of Maple Hollow like a blanket. In that gray, the fire on my steps is shockingly bright: flames crawling up from a small mound near the bottom step, licking at the wood, reaching toward the rails.
A rag burns there, blackening at the edges, soaked with something that makes the fire move fast and uneven. The heat pushes against my shins. Sparks spit where the liquid has spread.
“Jesus,” I whisper.
“Move.” Tessa barrels back in with the red canister. She yanks the pin with her teeth, plants her bare feet, and blasts white foam across the steps with a hoarse war cry that doesn’t match her lanky form.
The foam hisses where it hits, swallowing fire. Smoke rolls up, thicker, acidic. It scrapes down my windpipe when I breathe. The alarm continues to scream from the ceiling. In some other house on the cul-de-sac, a dog starts barking, frantic and high-pitched.
“Bucket,” I cough. “Water. Hose is frozen.”
I dash to the kitchen, grab the metal mixing bowl sitting in the sink, fill it so fast water sloshes over my wrist. My hands shake, cold tap water splattering the front of my shirt. I don’t stop to wipe it off. I run back and throw the water where embers still glow a dull red.
Steam surges up, carrying the bitter stink of burned synthetic fibers and something sweet, almost floral, twisted by heat into something nauseating. I gag, eyes watering.
Tessa slaps the fire extinguisher trigger a final time and then lets the canister hang limp in her hand. The steps are a foamy, dripping mess, the wood charred in a dark crescent near the middle. The rag lies there, barely recognizable, a sodden black knot shot through with gray.
Micro-hook: For a wild second, I picture Caleb sitting on these steps in his hoodie, and the thought is so wrong my knees nearly give.
“Door,” Tessa gasps. “Close the door, keep the smoke out.”
I yank the door mostly shut but keep it open a crack so we can see the porch. The alarm continues to shriek. I jump twice before I remember the reset button and slap it. The sound cuts off mid-wail, leaving my ears ringing in the sudden silence.
We stand there breathing hard, just inside the doorway, bare feet on the cool hardwood. Tessa’s hair sticks out everywhere, a frizzy halo around her head. My lungs burn, and a cough works its way up, raw and insistent.
“Nine-one-one,” Tessa says, pulling her phone from her pocket with fingers that still twitch.
“Do you smell that?” I ask. “That’s not just wood. That’s—”
“Accelerant,” she says. “Yeah. Phone first.”
She dials and starts speaking in her efficient nurse voice, giving our address, describing the fire as “small but deliberate” and “extinguished but still smoking.” The words clatter into the quiet like dropped coins.
I step out again, careful of the wet patches, and lean just enough to peer down. The fog muffles the world; even the streetlights look drowned, halos smeared across the glass of nearby windows. A few houses glow faintly with blue TV light. Rectangles of glass wink at me from across the street, lenses in a wall of anonymous faces.
My own porch looks like a crime scene from one of my old chapters. The scorch pattern begins at a single point—where the rag sits—and fans outward. Foam drips down the side of the step, puddling on the concrete. In the middle of the blackened patch lies a rock, fist-sized, darkened at one corner.
Something white peeks from beneath it, edges charred.
“Don’t touch,” Tessa warns, still on with dispatch. “Seriously, Mara. Wait.”
I stop, heel hanging off the edge of the step. Dispatch’s voice buzzes faintly from her phone. Words like “units on the way” and “stay outside” reach me through the distance.
“There’s a note,” I say.
“Of course there is,” Tessa mutters. “One second. Yes, both occupants are out. No visible flames now. Some residual smoke.”
I swallow and stare at the rock. The freeway hum feels louder, pressing against the quiet street. A car rolls past the end of the block, headlights smeared by fog. Whoever did this picked a night when visibility is low and sound carries weird and flat.
They did not want to burn my house down.
They wanted me to know they could.
The patrol cars arrive faster than I expect, two of them, tires crunching over the wet gravel that gathers near the curb. Red and blue light washes across the houses, bouncing off the windows, making every pane a blinking, distorted mirror. Maple Hollow wakes enough to peek: blinds shift, silhouettes appear for a heartbeat in lit rectangles.
Two officers step out, one stocky with a graying beard, the other younger, tall and wiry. Their breath fogs the air. The older one approaches with a practiced calm that reminds me too much of Navarro smoothing her skirt before saying things like “trauma response.”
“Ms. Ellison?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say. My voice comes out raw. “That’s me.”
“I’m Officer Klein, this is Officer Patel,” he says. “You reported a fire on your porch?”
Tessa hangs back a step, arms folded tight over her chest. “We did,” she says. “Smoke alarm woke us up. There was a burning rag. Smelled like gasoline or lighter fluid.”
“We got it out with an extinguisher and water,” I add. “But we haven’t touched the rag or the rock. There’s a note.”
Klein’s brows twitch. He moves carefully up the steps, avoiding the center scorch, and crouches by the rock. Patel stands a foot lower, shining his flashlight to give a better angle. The beam flares off wet wood, then settles on the small rectangle of warped paper.
Klein slips on gloves and lifts the rock. The note sticks for a second, then peels away with a soft tear. The corner has burned off, but most of the writing remains, thick black marker bleeding into the fibers.
He reads it, lips tightening.
“What does it say?” I ask, although I already know; I’ve read that message in a DM, in a threat, in Evelyn’s corporate smile.
Klein turns the note so we can all see.
The words sit there, blocky and simple: STOP DIGGING OR BURN WITH IT.
My skin goes cold in patches, like parts of me are shutting down to conserve power.
“So.” Tessa’s voice shakes for exactly one syllable before she steadies it. “Still want to call this a random porch fire?”
Patel exhales through his nose. “We never called it random.”
Klein slides the note into an evidence bag, smoothing it carefully. The plastic crinkles.
“We’re going to photograph the area, take the rag and rock as evidence, and canvas the block,” he says. “Do either of you have security cameras?”
“I do,” I say. “But the porch cam glitched during that break-in a few weeks ago, and the replacement is still in the box.”
Patel glances toward Liam’s house, across the cul-de-sac, his gaze catching on the dark row of cameras along the eaves. “Any neighbors you know with cameras pointed this way?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, then stop. I taste ash and something like betrayal on my tongue. “But I don’t have access to his feeds.”
“We can ask,” Patel replies. “Sometimes people volunteer footage to help, sometimes they don’t. We’ll see.”
Klein looks at me more closely now. “You mentioned a break-in,” he says. “Was that reported?”
“Yeah,” I answer. “That, and the threats after my essay went up. Detective Ruiz has the screenshots.”
Recognition flickers in his eyes. “You’re the writer,” he says. “The guardrail piece.”
“That’s me,” I say. “The one with the ‘dissociative episodes’ the internet loves.”
His jaw works. “Right. I saw the statement from the company, and…the online stuff.” He hesitates, then says carefully, “We can’t assume a direct connection between an online backlash and an attempted arson without evidence.”
“They doxxed her two days ago,” Tessa cuts in. “Posted our address and a photo of the house. People wrote they were going to ‘give her something to worry about.’ Now her porch is on fire and there’s a note telling her to stop digging. How much more direct do you need?”
Patel shifts his weight. “It could be a copycat,” he says. “Teenagers on the HOA page, reading about your case and trying to scare you. Kids around the reservoir get creative.”
“Teenagers with access to accelerant and this handwriting?” I ask. “Teenagers who know enough about the guardrail lawsuits to tie it to ‘digging’?”
“Kids read more than we give them credit for,” Patel replies mildly. “I’m not saying that’s what happened. I’m saying we have to look at all possibilities.”
Klein snaps a few photos with his department phone and then looks up at me again, expression softening a fraction. “Look,” he says, “I get that this lands differently for you, given everything. We will write this up as a suspected intentional fire with threatening messaging. We’ll flag it for our detective division. Ruiz will see it. But I don’t want to promise you we can prove who lit that rag tonight.”
“You could at least say the word ‘arson,’” I answer. I hear the thinness in my own voice, stretched too tight.
“We usually reserve that for larger-scale fires,” he says. “This is closer to reckless burning under our code. Legally, the language matters.”
“Emotionally, the porch on fire matters,” Tessa says.
Micro-hook: I watch the two of them, the officers with their codes and boxes to tick, and I have the disorienting sense of standing in front of the guardrail again, watching a system blame physics while metal curls wrong in the dark.
They finish their measurements and walk the cul-de-sac, knocking on a few doors. A couple of neighbors peer out through curtains and only crack their doors an inch, voices muffled and polite. No one saw anything; everyone heard the alarm and stayed inside. HOA rules say nothing about rushing out to help.
When the officers finally step away, Klein pauses at the threshold.
“I’d recommend keeping your doors and windows locked, porch light on all night,” he says. “If you see any unfamiliar cars sitting on the street, call it in. You’re on people’s radar right now. That can be good—lots of eyes—but it can also draw…this.”
“You think I should stop?” I ask. “Stop writing, stop talking?”
He holds my gaze for a long beat. “I think you should stay alive,” he says. “What that means for you is your call.”
After the patrol cars pull away, the red and blue strobes fade, leaving our porch under the weak yellow of the standard issue HOA-approved light fixture. The fog presses in again, swallowing the block. Water beads on the charred wood, catching the glow like tiny cameras.
Tessa nudges the closed door with her hip until it latches. The glass in the sidelights shows two pale women in rumpled clothes, eyes too wide.
“We should go,” she says quietly. “Tonight. Hotel, Mom’s, anywhere with more than one exit and fewer internet screenshots.”
“Mom would tell me this is what I get for making a fuss,” I answer. “And hotels are full of cameras I don’t control.”
She rubs her hand over her face. Her palm leaves a pale streak through the soot smudge on her cheek. “You’re not seriously considering staying.”
“If I leave now,” I say, “I let them decide which chapter I’m in. Crazy woman runs from house she says is under attack. Great headline for Evelyn and her people.”
“Staying on principle is noble right up until you burn,” she snaps.
I step closer to the glass and rest my fingers against it. The pane is cool, humming faintly with the temperature difference between inside and out. Out there, my porch is marked now, part of the story in a way no essay can undo. In here, my lungs still taste smoke.
“They already burned part of it,” I say. “They just didn’t get the ending they wanted.”
Across the cul-de-sac, Liam’s house is a dark, sleek shape, windows blank, cameras unmoving black dots under the eaves. His place is wired, watched, locked down, a fortress built for exactly this kind of war.
I hear Ruiz’s voice from earlier in my head—visibility cuts both ways—and Klein’s warning about staying alive. The word “elsewhere” hangs in the air between me and Tessa, unspoken but solid.
“If we don’t stay here,” she says slowly, following my gaze, “where do we go that they can’t edit?”
I keep my hand on the glass, watching my distorted reflection bleed into the dark rectangle of Liam’s front door, and I have no answer yet, only the creeping knowledge that the safest place may be the one address I swore I’d never run to again.