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forced leave, hitting some required counseling even though he’d been working through shit all his life without help, thank you. The season was almost over anyway and someone had needed to feed and walk the dog, so he’d stayed at their house, filling his winter with finishing it. Jacqui had missed Muttley so they’d started Skyping.
    At first, Vin had presumed she was keeping in touch with all her many friends in the area, but it soon became clear he was the only person she was talking to on a regular basis.
    He didn’t know how to take that, so he did what he always did and just accepted it.
    Being the furthest thing from a gossip, he stuck with, “As well as can be expected,” clichés and changed the subject. “You planning any hikes soon? I could use one.”
    They were working out a route and a time when Jacqui came out of Sam’s office.
    She smiled when she saw Tyler and hugged him.
    “We missed you,” he said as he set her on her feet again.
    “I missed you, too. So much, in fact…” She splayed her hands, expression bemused, but kind of glowing.
    Damn she was pretty, Vin was thinking, as he heard the rest of what she was saying.
    “I just asked for my job back. I am back. Here. Staying.” She laughed, hands going to her pink cheeks like she was trying to steady her spinning head. “Sam told me to start as soon as I can.”
    “That’s great,” Tyler said, brow furrowed, but he nodded approval and sounded proud of her. “Really great, Jac.”
    Her smile was as big and beautiful as it could get. Vin hadn’t seen her smile like that in more than half a year. He hugged her with a lackluster arm as she pressed into him, but he was distracted by mixed emotions swirling with such ferocity, he couldn’t pick them apart and identify them.
    One stood out tall and isolated as the jump tower, however. The familiar one of being betrayed by the universe.
    All he could think about was the number of hours he’d put into her house, believing it was going to be his. He had felt like he was finally stamping ownership on his own space.
    Five years in one town was longer than he’d ever spent in one place, ever. Buying his own house—one that wasn’t a shared title like the house with Tori that he was being forced to sell because of their divorce—but a house that would be all his, would have given him the stability and sense of roots he’d always craved.
    But, as usual, he was being yanked back up again.
    Because Jacqui was staying.
    Which wasn’t a bad thing, but still. What the fuck, Jac?
    *
    Jacqui was trembling, really shocked with herself, but it felt right .
    “Sam is just like the rest of you,” she told Vin as he drove. “The minutia of putting together contact lists and updating software and formatting reports so they look pretty is a hairball he’d rather throw up than swallow. But I’m a nutter for whiteboards and paperwork, aren’t I?” She scrubbed Muttley’s ears. “Keeping the office organized is my version of putting out fires. I’m excited,” she confided, sending a grin toward Vin’s profile.
    He wasn’t smiling, which kind of niggled. Was he judging her? Was she supposed to grieve longer and be too broken to return to where her husband had been killed doing his job?
    She had thought she and Vin were friends. When he first arrived as a rookie smokejumper five years ago, he had lived in what she and Russ had called the crew shack. It had been a neglected old farmhouse on the parcel of land where their real house now sat. Russ hadn’t torn it down right away because it had been handy for out of town firefighters who were covered in soot and mud and saw those quarters as a step up from sleeping in the bush. Jacqui had talked to Vin almost daily as she had dropped by to watch her own house progress.
    Vin had eventually taken an apartment in town and she would have only seen him at work, but he started seeing Tori the following winter.
    Jacqui had gone to school with Vin’s ex, not