I don't know how long I stood there.
A second. A minute. Ten.
Time stopped meaning anything the moment I saw the house.
The world around me kept moving, smoke drifting upward in thin, ugly trails, ash skittering across the street, something collapsing far off in the city with a dull, distant crash, but none of it felt real. It all seemed to happen behind glass, somewhere far away from me.
My home had been destroyed.
That thought should have landed hard and clean.
Instead it just circled inside my head without settling, like my mind refused to let it touch the ground.
Beside me, Nate said something. I didn't catch it.
I couldn't stop staring.
The roof was gone.
Not entirely, maybe, but enough that the whole top of the house had been torn open to the sky. Jagged beams jutted upward where the structure had given way, blackened at the ends and splintered down the middle. Parts of the outer walls still stood, but only parts, bare sections of stone and framing, the bare bones of the house were left standing after everything that had made it a home had been ripped out.
The front wall had collapsed inward. What had once been the entryway was now a slope of broken timber, cracked stone, shattered glass, and splintered furniture. The left side of the house leaned strangely, one half-caved room exposed to the open air. Bits of curtain stirred weakly in the wind from a broken upper window frame that no longer led to anything.
The place looked less like a house and more like a memory of one.
I took a step forward.
My legs felt wrong, like they belonged to someone else.
Another step.
I heard Nate again, closer this time. Maybe he said my name. Maybe he told me to wait. I don't know. His voice reached me the way voices do in a dream, muffled, thinned out, unable to quite become words.
I kept walking.
The bent iron fence scraped faintly as I passed it. The little path to the front door was gone, buried under rubble. I climbed over a slab of collapsed wall and nearly slipped on loose plaster dust. My hand shot out automatically and caught on a broken beam.
The wood was rough under my palm.
Real.
That should have helped.
It didn't.
I stepped into what had once been the front room.
Or part of it. I had to tell myself that, because for a moment, I genuinely couldn't make the shape of it line up with what I remembered. The walls were broken open. Light fell through cracks where the ceiling used to be. One half of the room was buried under debris and roofing stone. A table leg stuck out from the rubble at an angle, and I knew immediately that it had been ours.
I just stared at it.
That table had never mattered before.
It was just there. Every day. Plates on it. Bread on it. My father's mug on it. My mother's hands braced against it when she was thinking. Me leaning on it when I wanted seconds before anyone else had finished eating.
Now it was a broken leg buried in dust.
Nate was somewhere behind me. I could hear him moving carefully over the wreckage, but I still couldn't make myself turn around.
I took another step.
Then another.
My thoughts had gone strangely slow. Everything was slow. Not calm—never calm—but slowed down into something cold and unreal. I kept waiting for the panic to hit. For the screaming, shaking, breaking part of me to finally catch up.
It didn't.
There was only this numb, suspended feeling, like I had walked so far into shock that emotion couldn't reach me yet.
My boot nudged against something half-buried under a thin sheet of plaster and ash.
I looked down.
A frame.
I crouched automatically and brushed the dust from it with shaking fingers. The glass was cracked across one corner and the wood was scuffed, but the picture inside was mostly intact.
It was us.
Me. My mom. My dad.
Standing outside the house.
For a second I could only stare at the image without understanding why it hurt so much.
Then I remembered.
The day we moved in.
The house had looked almost too small even then, too old, too weathered, with one shutter hanging crooked and the front steps chipped at the edge. But it had been ours. That had been enough.
I could see the whole moment as clearly as if someone had opened a door in my head.
The wagon still half-unloaded behind us. My father standing with one hand on his hip, trying and failing not to grin because he was exhausted and proud at the same time. My mother laughing at something I'd said while the wind kept blowing hair into her face. Me, younger and thinner and trying to stand straighter than I really knew how, because it felt important somehow. The sun had been warm, the kind of warmth that settled on your shoulders and made the whole afternoon feel wide open.
I remembered what the place had smelled like that day too, fresh-cut wood from the repairs my father had done, dust from old boards, the dry sweetness of packed straw, and somewhere underneath it all the faint scent of earth from the little patch of garden out front that my mother had immediately started talking about "fixing."
"We'll make it look nice," she'd said.
Dad had snorted. "We will?"
She'd looked at him, then at me, and smiled. "Yes. We will."
And we had.
Slowly. Imperfectly. But we had.
I stared at the photo until my vision blurred.
My thumb traced the cracked edge of the frame.
For one impossible second, I could almost believe that was all this was—that the house had been wrecked, yes, but empty. That my parents had heard the alarms, grabbed what they could, and run before anything worse reached them. That somewhere out in the city, my mother was angry at the damage and my father was trying to act calm while secretly panicking.
That they were alive.
Of course they're alive, I told myself.
They had to be.
They must have escaped.
The words felt brittle, but I clung to them anyway.
Behind me, wood shifted under someone's weight.
Nate.
I looked up just enough to see him move through what had once been the hall, stepping around debris, glancing into the next room. He didn't say anything. Just kept going, cautious and quiet, disappearing past a half-broken doorway further inside the house.
I barely registered it.
My eyes went back to the picture.