Smoke
Aria
The alarm screamed through the diner and everyone moved at once.
Margaret grabbed her bag. David grabbed my arm. I grabbed nothing because my brain had gone straight to Caden’s text and the smoke outside the window and the cold understanding that this had not been a coincidence.
“Out the front,” David said, already pulling me toward the door, the waitress waving people past her with the practiced calm of someone who’d done a fire drill before even if she’d never expected to need it for real.
We hit the sidewalk.
The smoke was coming from a dumpster behind the building, thick and dark, and even from here I could tell it had been started, not accidental — too sudden, too contained to one source, the specific signature of something lit on purpose by someone who wanted exactly
