The Next Morning, Everyone Was Calling
I don’t remember the drive home.
One minute I was at the party.
The next I was in my driveway staring at a house that suddenly felt like someone else’s property.
Inside, I destroyed everything that felt like a lie.
Wedding photos.
Frames.
Proof that I’d trusted the wrong people.
I threw his clothes into the yard.
I ripped up anything sentimental.
When there was nothing left to break, I sat on the kitchen floor and cried until my body went numb.
My phone rang.
Mom.
I didn’t answer.
Dad.
I ignored it.
Then texts poured in—cousins, friends, people I hadn’t spoken to in years.
All asking the same thing:
Have you seen the news?
I fell asleep on the couch in the dress I’d worn to the party.
The next morning my phone buzzed so hard it fell off the coffee table.
37 missed calls.
62 messages.
My hands shook as I turned on the TV.
I flipped to the local news station.
The headline at the bottom of the screen made my heart stop:
“House Fire in Elmwood Leaves Two Homeless, One Hospitalized.”
The camera panned across a scorched house.
Second floor gutted.
Black streaks on the siding.
Firefighters still spraying water onto smoking remains.
I knew that house.
Delaney’s house.
The reporter said the fire started around 2 a.m.
Officials believed a cigarette may have been left burning in an upstairs bedroom.
The occupants escaped with minor injuries.
But one had been hospitalized due to complications.
My phone rang.
My cousin Rachel.
“Are you watching this?” she asked immediately.
“Yeah,” I said. “Is that—”
“It’s Delaney’s,” Rachel cut in. “And Mason was smoking in bed, apparently. The whole place went up.”
“Is she okay?”
“She and the baby are fine,” Rachel said. Then her voice dropped. “But Oakley… she lost her house. And all her savings.”
I expected to feel something.
Horror. Sympathy. A shock wave.
Instead I felt… nothing.
Just a calm numbness.
A strange sense of consequences arriving on schedule.
Rachel exhaled. “I know it’s awful to say, but… maybe this is karma.”
Maybe it was.
But karma didn’t end with a fire.
It kept collecting interest.
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