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“A burning bale dropped right as they hit the floor,” Rob tells me. “It came apart right on top of them. He covered Novak with his back.”

“Hood rode up,” Travis says. “That’s on me.”

“Stop it,” I say. “It is not on you. Don’t say that.”

He looks at me with soot and sweat all over his face, and his gray eyes are steady on mine like none of it matters.

“Honey,” he says. “I’m okay.”

That’s when I start crying. Right there on the black ground in front of Weber County and the power company and God. He wraps his arms around me and pulls me against his chest.

“You got him,” I whisper.

“Rob and I got him.”

“I counted the entire time you were in there.” I hold on to his coat. “I love you. I love you so much.”

“I love you too,” he says into my hair. Then he takes the mask from Alison and settles it back over my face himself.

Past his shoulder, the smoke coming out of the barn is turning white. Weber’s crew is knocking down the fire from their ladder.

Novak pushes himself up on one elbow and looks at Travis.

“Romeo,” he says hoarsely. “You dragged me out of there like a sack of feed.”

“You’re heavier than you look, Pinky.”

“I owe you.”

“You owe me a new hood.”

Novak laughs and coughs and lies back down on the ash with his arm over his eyes. “I’m never checking a loft again. I’m going to be a florist. Lindsey, are you hiring?”

“No,” I say, and wipe my face on my sleeve. Then I laugh, because he’s alive and Travis is alive, and I don’t know what else to do.

They take three of us down the canyon in two ambulances. Novak goes in one for his lungs. Travis and I go in the other, me on the gurney and him on the bench with a wet dressing taped to his neck, because Alison took one look at him and said, “Sit down before I sit you down, Ranger.”

He didn’t let go of my hand on a single curve of that canyon.

At the ER, the triage nurse looked at the two of us and asked him, “Sir, are you family?”

“Yes,” he said. He didn’t even blink.

“Second-degree,” the nurse says now, from the doorway of my room upstairs. “It’s small, and it’s clean. You’ll scar a little.”

“He collects them,” I say.

Travis is sitting in the plastic chair beside my bed, wearing a hospital gown top because they cut his shirt off in the ER. There’s a patient belongings bag on his knee. Alison handed it to him before she went back up the canyon and said, “Your purse, Ranger.” He has a fresh white dressing on his neck and soot still around his eyes.

“You’re staying the night,” the nurse tells me. “Your numbers look good, but your throat took some smoke, and sometimes that swells later. We’ll keep the oxygen on you overnight to be safe.” She points at Travis. “You’ve been treated and released, Mr. Raines. That means you can go home.”

“I’m good here,” he says.

“I figured,” she says, and goes.

“Three minutes,” I say.

“What?”