It started with a scent.
Not the usual aroma of cardamom and cumin from Omar's cooking, nor the dusty sweetness of Mira's oil paints. This was sharp, acrid — burning.
Jaya smelled it first. She was halfway through a phone call with her brother in Mumbai when she paused, nostrils flaring.
"Something's wrong."
She dropped the phone and ran toward the kitchen.
---
A towel had fallen onto the stove. Just a small thing — careless, forgotten — but the gas flame had caught it, and now a fire licked up the side of the counter, wild and hungry.
Omar reached it first. He grabbed the fire extinguisher from under the sink and pulled the pin. Liam ushered Mira and Tess out of the house. Jaya opened windows. Smoke poured from the kitchen like a dark memory.
The fire was out in minutes.
But the damage was done.
The kitchen — Omar's kitchen — was blackened. The cabinets charred. The spice rack destroyed.
Omar stood in the center of it, breathing heavily, extinguisher foam clinging to his sleeves.
He didn't speak for hours.
---
The insurance company came. So did a contractor.
Repairs would take weeks. Maybe more.
And the five hearts under that roof were shaken — not just by the flames, but by the reminder of how quickly safety could be undone.
"I should've been more careful," Omar murmured that night, sitting on the back steps, hands buried in his coat.
"You weren't careless," Liam said beside him. "It was a mistake. A moment."
Omar didn't answer, but he didn't walk away either.
---
They adapted — because that's what people do when home falters.
Mira offered her studio space for temporary meals. Jaya set up a makeshift stove using borrowed appliances from her campus. Liam picked up extra groceries and spent long evenings reading aloud to lighten the mood.
Even Tess helped.
She painted a new spice rack for Omar — not functional, not yet, but beautiful. Each jar was a watercolor, labeled in her careful hand: cumin, coriander, cardamom, hope, memory, home.
He framed it and hung it on the wall of the damaged kitchen.
"I'll use it when we rebuild," he said.
---
The fire did something else, too.
It stripped everything back.
Mira wept the day after — not for the kitchen, but for Eloise. For the fire that took her sister, long ago. It wasn't the same, but it brought everything back. The smoke. The helplessness. The finality.
Jaya sat beside her on the floor of the studio and just held her hand. No words. Just presence.
Tess, still shy with touch, left a drawing on Mira's pillow that night: two girls in a field of flowers, holding hands, both whole.
---
One night, when the smoke had cleared and the kitchen sat dark, Mira stood in the doorway and said, "It's still our home."
Everyone looked at her.
"Walls burn. Cabinets break. But what we've built here…" She looked around at each of them — at Omar's tired eyes, at Liam's steady gaze, at Jaya's clenched jaw, at Tess's quiet strength. "That doesn't burn."
It was true.
Because the fire, though frightening, hadn't taken the most important thing.
Each other.