Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 70097 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 234(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70097 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 234(@300wpm)
The voice on the phone had been low, controlled, unmistakable.
I was too shocked to move for a minute. And I had been a minute too late to react.
Then, there was an explosion.
The sound was the loudest thing I’d ever heard, louder than the thunder I was scared of at night.
It tore through the house like a living thing, shattering windows, splintering walls, and I was thrown backward, the door slamming shut behind me.
The fire came next.
Not slowly, not gradually—all at once, a wall of orange and red that devoured everything in its path. Everything vanished.
Everything between me and the door became an inferno, and I heard them.
My father.
His screams weren’t the sounds of a man in pain—they were the sounds of a man being unmade. Raw, animal, stripped of every layer of composure and dignity. I heard his body hit the floor, heard the wet, crackling sound of flesh meeting flame, and I screamed his name until my throat bled.
“Papa! Papa, I'm here. Please—”
But he couldn’t hear me. Or if he could, he couldn’t reach me. The fire was between us, a breathing monster that consumed everything it touched.
And my brother.
God, Caleb.
His cries were different. Higher, thinner, the terrified wailing of a child who didn’t understand what was happening to him. He had been in the kitchen, where he had gone back to show our father that he had completed the Mario level he had previously been stuck on.
He was six years old. Only six.
His voice rose and fell in a rhythm that I could still hear in my nightmares and would for the rest of my life. Sharp, piercing screams that dissolved into wet, gurgling sobs as the fire found him, as it crawled across his small body and ate him alive.
I heard it. Every brutal, torturous second of it.
The sound of my father and brother burning to death, trapped in the kitchen while I stood on the other side of a wall of flame, helpless, useless, alive.
The smell was the worst part.
It permeated everything—the smoke, the burning wood, the furniture, and beneath it all, something darker, cruel, and utterly horrifying.
The scent of charred flesh, of hair and skin and muscle burning, filled the house with a stench that was so dreadfully wrong that my body rejected it before my mind could process it.
I remembered the way I had gagged at the smell, the retching, and the sickening sound I made while I suffocated.
I remembered pressing my face against the carpet and breathing through the fibers, desperate for clean air, but there was none.
There was only smoke and death and the cruel sound of my family dying on the other side of the wall.
I had watched the fire crawl across the ceiling, blackening the plaster, eating through the drywall with a voracious hunger that seemed almost sentient.
It consumed the curtains, the bedding, everything it touched with a ferocity that was utterly terrifying.
The feeling of the fire licking through my flesh still felt so alive, I could feel it even more.
I had thought that this was it.
In those final seconds of consciousness, I thought this was how I would die. Surrounded by flames, alone, with the screams of my family still ringing in my ears.
Then, I woke up in the hospital, the room white and sterile. Everything smelled like antiseptic and bleach, and the light was so bright it hurt my eyes. My throat had been bandaged, and when I tried to speak, no sound came out. Just a rasp, a whisper of air through damaged tissue.
A nurse appeared. Then a doctor. Then a police officer, his hat in his hands, his expression carefully arranged into something that was supposed to be sympathetic.
“You’re the only survivor,” he said. “The gas stove in the kitchen exploded. Your father must have left the gas on after cooking. It was an accident.”
A terrible, tragic accident, they said.
I stared at him. My mouth opened. Nothing came out.
“Your father and your brother... they were in the kitchen when it happened. You were in the bedroom, farther from the blast. That’s why you survived.”
He truly believed this…
I saw it in his eyes, the genuine sorrow, the quiet relief that he could file this away as a tragedy rather than an investigation. An accident. A gas leak. A family destroyed by a simple, mundane oversight.
Only I knew the truth.
Only I had heard that phone call.
Only I knew of the man with the dark blue eyes standing in our tiny living room, speaking my father's old name like it was a weapon, an order of death he had to fulfill.
“Burn it. All of it. I want no evidence that Angelo Garza ever existed.”
I had carried that truth inside me for six years. Through foster care, through the endless nights of screaming myself awake, through the therapy sessions where I had been told to “process my grief and accept the accident and move forward.”