“Technically I gave you the million-dollar idea,” Amy interjected.
Mia waved again. “More details. I’ll mention you in my Emmy acceptance speech.”
Amy narrowed her eyes. “I want 50 percent.”
Mia narrowed hers back. “Thirty.”
“Forty-five.”
“Thirty-two.”
And somehow, when I’d been so sure that heartbreak had physically severed the muscles necessary for me to smile, the corner of my mouth turned up.
It wasn’t much, but it was something.
And when you were dying from the inside out, not much was better than nothing. It was the only thing left to hold on to.
Sixteen
I woke up coughing.
Being strangled by the very air around me. The air inside my lungs. An invisible hand clutching at my throat.
At first, my sleep-addled mind thought it was a panic attack that had woken me up from a nightmare—something that happened rarely but enough for me to know that it would pass, as long as I realized it was my mind controlling my body’s processes and not my body itself failing. It wasn’t a surprise, since in the nights I had slept in the past week, I had woken up with that same strangling feeling.
But my eyes burned as I tried to blink away the last of my sleep, and a bitter and acrid smell filled my nostrils.
Smoke.
Smoke was filling my room, and I was coughing because it was entering my lungs and I couldn’t breathe through it.
My body worked for me while my mind tried to grasp the reality that my apartment was on fire. Panic clutched at my chest with the same force as the smoke that had filled my bedroom.
The wood of the floor was still somehow cool on my bare feet.
Was that good?
No, nothing was good. My freaking house was on fire. I was going to be burned alive.
Calm down, Lauren. Panic will kill you surer and quicker than the fire. Especially since smoke inhalation is one of the main killers in house fires.
Right. The longer I stayed in one place freaking out, the longer I was letting smoke pollute my lungs and slowly rob me of the ability to breathe and live.
I was attached to the ability to breathe.
Gage’s face entered my mind, and instead of the chaos he usually brought, he urged calm.
If I wanted to be around for his chaos, I needed the calm to keep me alive. I needed to believe what the women had told me that afternoon, that this wasn’t the end of us.
If I was going to live for anything, I was going to live to make sure they were right.
I looked around my bedroom, which was hard to do with all the smoke, but there were no flames which meant the fire hadn’t spread. There was a window directly off my bedroom, and an attached fire escape. It wasn’t in the best condition, rusted and unused; it was more for the aesthetic of a New York-style building than anything else.
My hands fumbled on my nightstand, finding purchase on my phone as everything else tumbled to the floor, including my glasses. But I needed the phone more than I needed to waste time scrambling for them. So I tightened my grip around the device, then rushed over to the window, yanking up my nightshirt to cover my face from the worst of the smoke.
Tears poured down my face as the fumes burned my eyes, and I tried to blink them away furiously, not rub them—that would make it worse.
I fumbled against the window fastenings, yanking at the wood to bring the crisp night air into the room. Saltiness from the ocean battled against the scent of the smoke rushing out to meet it. I sucked in desperate and hungry breaths, my body crying out for clean air. Of course, that made me splutter and cough, and my throat burned, but I could breathe. And that was the most important part.
My vision was still blurry from not picking up my glasses, but I didn’t need to see in order to kick my leg out the window and lay my foot on the chilly iron of the fire escape.
It creaked slightly as I put pressure on it, and I really hoped it would hold my weight. I blinked away the worst of the grit in my eyes and glanced down at my phone, typing three numbers into the unlocked screen—maybe I was wasting time by calling 911 before I was safely out of my apartment, but if the fire escape failed me, I’d go tumbling to the ground, and even though the fall was only one story, I’d likely be injured. Maybe too injured to call anyone.
My area of town was all but deserted at that time of the night. Plus, fire was silent, tearing through the night with only heat and smoke and amber flames to alert anyone of its presence. I was lucky it didn’t just kill me as I slept.