Part 5 – Pain, Promises, and the Page That Burned Away
If the mill was where Sparky taught me what loyalty looked like, the animal hospital was where he taught me what pain costs.
The waiting room smelled like disinfectant and fear. Posters of smiling cats and dogs lined the walls, all bright eyes and shiny coats, like a different universe from the one where my dog lay behind a steel door wrapped in more bandages than fur. A TV in the corner played a morning show segment about “the miracle mill dog” with the sound off, closed captions stuttering across the bottom.
A receptionist with tired eyes and a name tag that said “Tina” looked up when I stepped in. “You Riley?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. Saying my name felt weird, like it belonged to the person in the video, not the kid with ash still ground into his sneakers.
She offered a small, real smile. “We’ve been expecting you. Doctor Chu will bring you back in a minute. Just a heads-up, okay? He doesn’t look like he does on TV. That’s a good thing. It means we’re doing our job. But it can still be a shock.”
I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure anything could shock me more than watching him disappear into fire. I sat in a plastic chair that tried and failed to be comfortable. My phone buzzed with another notification and I flipped it face down.
A door opened, and a woman in blue scrubs stepped out. “Riley?” she said.
“That’s me.”
“I’m Dr. Chu,” she said, holding out a gloved hand. “I’m the one yelling at everyone to move faster when it comes to your dog. You ready to see him?”
No. “Yeah,” I said.
She led me down a hallway that hummed with machines and smelled like antiseptic instead of sawdust. We passed a couple of exam rooms, a cat meowing behind one door, a small dog barking behind another. Everything felt too bright, too clean, like the world had been scrubbed in a way that didn’t fit what was in my chest.
At the end of the hall, she stopped outside a glass-fronted recovery room. “Deep breath,” she said. “He knows your voice. Try to sound like yourself.”
I wasn’t sure who that was anymore, but I tried. When she slid the door open, the smell hit me first—burn cream, saline, something metallic under it all. Then my eyes adjusted.
Sparky lay on a padded mat, wrapped in white bandages that covered most of his back and paws. An IV line ran into his foreleg. A plastic cone circled his head like an embarrassed halo. His spots were dulled, fur shaved in patches, but his chest rose and fell, stubborn and slow.
I’d braced myself for something gruesome. Instead, he just looked… small. Smaller than he’d ever looked sprawled across the mill floor, snoring with sawdust in his ears.
“Hey, buddy,” I said, my voice going high and thin. “You really know how to make an entrance, you know that?”
One ear twitched under the cone. His eyes blinked open, struggling up through whatever pain meds held him down. When he saw me, his tail bumped once against the pad. Then again.
“That’s a very good sign,” Dr. Chu murmured. “Pain meds on board and he still thinks you’re worth wagging for.”
My throat burned. “Is he…?” I swallowed. “Is he going to be okay?”
She didn’t sugarcoat it. “He has significant burns on his paws and flanks, smoke inhalation, some damage to the pads. We’re worried about infection. The next few days are critical. He’s a tough dog, but even tough dogs have limits.”
“What if…” The words tasted like betrayal. “What if he’s suffering too much?”
Her face softened. “We’ll cross that bridge if we get to it,” she said. “Right now, he’s fighting. Dogs don’t fight for the abstract idea of recovery plans. They fight for people. For routines. For smells that mean home.”
She glanced at the chart in her hand. “Right now, you’re listed as temporary contact. We couldn’t get Mr. Cole, obviously. Do you know if there’s family we should add? Someone who has legal authority over the mill, the dog, all that?”
“His daughter,” I said. “Laura. She lives in the city. I don’t have her number.”
“Fire department might,” she said. “We’ll coordinate with them. For now, talk to him. Keep it low-key. You’re part of his reason to stick around.”
I knelt beside the mat. The last time I’d been eye-level with Sparky, he’d been playing tug-of-war with a scrap of shop rag. Now I laced my fingers through the thin fur at the edge of his bandages, careful not to touch the raw-looking parts.
“You really scared me,” I whispered. “Next time you want to go viral, maybe do a funny trick instead.”
He blinked, slow and solemn, like he’d consider it.
Behind me, footsteps clicked down the hall. A woman’s voice said my name, hesitant. “Riley?”
I turned. A woman in her forties stood just outside the door, still in travel clothes, her hair pulled back in a neat twist that looked like it was losing a fight with the day. I recognized her from the one photo taped to the mill office wall—Frank and a younger version of her standing in front of a half-finished bookshelf, both pretending not to be proud.
“Laura?” I asked.
She nodded, eyes already glassy. “The hospital called me. Then the fire captain. Then some reporter asking for a quote about my dad. I figured I should hear things from someone who actually knows him.”
She stepped into the room and stopped when she saw Sparky. For a second, she squeezed her eyes shut like she could will away the bandages. When she opened them, something in her shifted.
“He looks terrible,” she said softly. “And like he’d still steal a sandwich if I left it too close.”
“That’s him,” I said.
She moved closer, hands hovering above his head before she let them rest gently on the cone. “Hey, Spot,” she whispered. “You picked a dramatic way to remind the town you exist.”
“Sparky,” I corrected automatically, then winced. “Sorry. Habit.”
“No, you’re right,” she said. “Dad said the town named him wrong, so he renamed him. ‘You don’t call a dog that sleeps fourteen hours a day anything with the word spark in it,’ I told him. Guess the dog proved us both wrong.”
We stood there for a moment, both of us touching the same dog for completely different reasons and exactly the same one.
Finally she straightened. “The captain says you’ve been helping,” she said. “With the video, with… all of this.”
“I don’t know if ‘helping’ is the right word,” I said. “I took a video because I panicked. Now strangers who never set foot in the mill have opinions about your dad’s wiring.”
She blew out a breath that was half-laugh, half-sigh. “Story of his life,” she said. “People who love the idea of what he does and have no interest in the actual splinters.”
Her phone buzzed. She glanced at it and made a face. “Developers, reporters, extended family who didn’t remember my dad existed last month,” she said. “And this.”
She turned the screen so I could see. A crowdfunding page glowed back at me, Sparky’s blurry hospital photo at the top. “Help Rebuild Cole Mill and Save a Hero Dog,” the banner read. The amount raised scrolled upward so fast it made my stomach flip.
“They didn’t even ask him,” she said. “Just started it. People mean well, but it’s like the internet turned our disaster into a community project and forgot there’s a human being and a dog at the center of it.”
“Derek mentioned a fund,” I said. “Said attention is a currency.”
“Yes, Derek,” she muttered. “He called me, too. Very concerned. Very proactive. Very ready to help us ‘transition’ the property if we ‘decide to move on.’ Amazing how fast some folks show up when they smell smoke and an opportunity.”
I remembered the flash in the video, the way Derek’s face tightened when he saw the evidence bag. “Do you trust him?” I asked.
She didn’t answer right away. She stared at Sparky instead. “I trust him to care about his bottom line,” she said. “Everything else is negotiable.”
When we left Sparky’s room, she stopped me in the hallway. “Captain Ruiz said you noticed something in the video,” she said. “Before the fire really took off.”
“The flash,” I said. “Near the breaker.”
“She wants to show you something,” Laura said. “Said it might jog your memory. You up for that?”
I wasn’t sure my memory needed jogging so much as sedating, but I nodded. “Yeah.”
We met Ruiz back at what was left of the mill that afternoon. The smoke had thinned to thin, ghostly wisps. The caution tape fluttered in a lazy breeze, the whole place feeling less like an active disaster and more like a tomb.
Ruiz had traded her navy jacket for a reflective vest. She led us to a folding table set up on the edge of the lot, where a laptop sat next to a stack of charred debris laid out on labeled tarps.
“Always feels like an autopsy,” she said, gesturing at the mess. “We take a life that used to be whole and figure out how it died, piece by piece.”
She tapped the laptop. “One of my guys pulled the hard drive from your security camera system,” she said. “It was a little toasted, but our tech folks are wizards. Most of the footage from the night of the fire is corrupted, but we got segments.”
My heart kicked up. “You can see inside? From that night?”
“Bits and pieces,” she said. “Nothing cinematic. Long stretches of nothing, a few glitches, some dust floating like it’s auditioning for a ghost show. But there’s one clip I want you to see.”
She hit play. The timestamp in the corner showed a time about an hour before the fire trucks rolled. The shop looked exactly the way it always did at closing—tools lined up, sawdust on the floor, the ghost of our day hanging in the air.
Frank moved through the frame, wiping down a workbench, Sparky shadowing his heels. He flipped off one overhead light, plunging half the frame into shadow. Then he walked toward the back, out of view. Sparky hesitated, looked toward the front door, then followed.
“Nothing special yet,” Ruiz said. “We fast-forwarded through thirty minutes of him doing exactly that. But watch the door.”
She scrubbed ahead. The little timestamp jumped. The image shimmered, glitched, then steadied. For a while, nothing changed. No movement, just the slow shift of shadows.
Then, at a time that made my skin prickle—it was later than we’d closed, but earlier than when I’d come back for my backpack—the front door opened a crack.
A figure slipped inside. Hoodie up. Ball cap brim low. They moved like they knew the layout, stepping around the stacks of boards without pausing. The camera angle only caught them from the side, their face a smear of pixels.
“Who had keys besides your dad?” Ruiz asked quietly.
“Only him,” I said. “And me, but I keep mine on a ring with like six others. If they’d gone missing, I’d notice.”
Laura’s hand went to her mouth. “You’re sure?” she asked me.
“Yeah,” I said. “We never made spares without writing it down.”
On screen, the figure disappeared into the back corner—toward the breaker box. A minute later, the lights flickered. The feed glitched harder this time, lines of digital static tearing across the picture.
When it cleared, the person was headed back to the door. For a half-second, as they passed under the camera, their face tilted up just enough for the brim of the cap to lift.
The image wasn’t sharp. It wasn’t definitive. But there was something about the shape of the jaw, the set of the shoulders, the careful way they didn’t touch anything they didn’t have to.
My brain supplied a name before I was ready to say it out loud.
“Does that look like anyone you recognize?” Ruiz asked.
Laura stared at the frozen frame. Her jaw clenched so tight it shook. “I hope I’m wrong,” she said. “Because if I’m not, then this stopped being an accident a long time ago.”
On the laptop screen, the pixelated figure paused with a hand on the door. For one grainy heartbeat, it looked like they were listening, deciding whether to turn off the lights or leave the dark to finish what they’d started.
Then they slipped out into the night, and the mill was alone with its wires and its ghosts.
Part 6 – A Town on Trial for Its Own Future
If the fire turned the mill into a crime scene, the town meeting turned it into a debate topic.
By the end of the week, every bulletin board, church newsletter, and group chat had the same announcement: “SPECIAL COMMUNITY SESSION – COLE MILL PROPERTY, FIRE RESPONSE, AND ECONOMIC FUTURE.” It sounded like three different meetings stapled into one, which was exactly what it was.
They held it in the high school gym, because that’s where we hold everything we don’t know how to feel about. Graduations, funerals with too many people, emergency weather briefings. The bleachers creaked under the weight of the whole town trying to decide who we were now that our oldest building was a pile of wet charcoal.
Before the meeting, Laura and I went to see Frank.
He looked smaller in the hospital bed than he ever had behind a workbench. Gauze peeked out from under his gown, and there were tubes where there had never been tubes before. The machines beeped in a slow, stubborn rhythm that felt like his personality translated into sound.
“Dad,” Laura said, taking his hand. “They’re having a meeting about the mill.”
His eyelids fluttered. He’d been in and out of a hazy, medicated fog for days, but today he seemed closer to the surface. His fingers twitched around hers.
“Meeting,” he rasped. The word scraped like sandpaper.
“They want to talk about what to do with the property,” she said. “Rebuild. Sell. Develop. All of it.”
His eyes opened, unfocused but fierce. “Not… parking lot,” he muttered. “Not… storage… boxes.”
Laura laughed, and it cracked into a sob halfway through. “That’s your big legal instruction?” she said. “No storage boxes?”
He squeezed her hand a little harder. “Wood… with… hands on it,” he whispered. “Not… just numbers.”
Then he drifted back under, leaving those words behind like a will nobody had notarized.
The gym smelled like floor polish, popcorn grease, and old sweat. Metal folding chairs covered the basketball court, facing a long table at the front where the town council sat looking more tired than powerful. A banner from last season’s homecoming game hung crooked over them, the mascot frozen mid-leap.
Captain Ruiz sat off to one side, stacks of papers in front of her. Derek had a spot near the center, his tie looser than last time, jacket open like he wanted to look approachable. The mayor, still in his work clothes from the hardware store, tapped a microphone that squealed, making everyone wince.
“Thank you all for coming,” he said when the feedback settled. “We’re here to listen, share what we know, and start figuring out where we go from here. Let’s keep this respectful. We’ve all lost something.”
“Some of us lost more than others,” an older woman in the front row called out. “That building was my wedding gift and my kids’ crib and my husband’s favorite chair.”
“And some of us don’t have jobs,” a guy in a delivery uniform added. “We could use more than memories.”
The mayor held up his hands. “We’ll get to open comments,” he said. “First, Captain Ruiz is going to share a preliminary report on the fire.”
Ruiz stood. The room shifted—people straightened, pulled out phones, got ready to record. Even in a town this small, we know when something is about to matter.
“The investigation is ongoing,” she said. “I’m going to say that every time I speak, because it’s true. What I can tell you now is this: the fire originated in the back half of the mill, near the electrical panels. There are signs of electrical activity consistent with an arc event.”
“So it was the wiring,” someone muttered behind me.
“Maybe,” Ruiz said, hearing it. “But we also recovered security footage from inside. That footage shows an individual entering the building after closing, before the fire began. We are working to identify that person. Until we do, I’m not going to speculate on their intentions.”
A wave of whispers washed across the gym, everyone adding their own theory onto the blank face under the hoodie.
“Are you saying someone set the fire?” a man asked from the second row.
“I’m saying someone was in a building where they didn’t belong, at a time they weren’t supposed to be there,” Ruiz replied. “That person may have critical information. If you know anyone who had access to the mill, or keys, or reasons to be there late at night, we need to talk to them.”
Derek shifted in his seat, just enough that his chair squeaked. It wasn’t guilt, not by itself. But I noticed.
“Is Mr. Cole a suspect?” someone else asked.
“No,” Ruiz said firmly. “Right now, he’s a victim and a witness, like the dog and like this town. Let’s not invent villains faster than we find facts.”
After that, they opened the floor.
People lined up at the portable mic like it was karaoke night for feelings. A retired teacher talked about field trips to the mill, how kids who couldn’t sit still for math would stand in absolute silence watching Frank carve dovetails. A young couple said they’d ordered a crib from the new place off the highway because it was cheaper, and now they felt like traitors.
Then the guy in the delivery uniform took the mic again. “Look, I get the history,” he said. “I do. But history doesn’t pay rent. I’ve got a kid on the way and a paycheck that keeps shrinking. If that land turns into housing or a shopping center, that’s jobs. That’s taxes. We can’t keep pretending old wood is worth more than people eating.”
Murmurs of agreement scattered among the clucks of disapproval.
When the line thinned, the mayor cleared his throat. “We also have Mr. Shaw here,” he said. “He’s been in talks with the Cole family about possible development. Derek, you want to say a few words?”
Derek stood with the practiced ease of someone who likes microphones. He buttoned his jacket out of habit, then seemed to remember he was supposed to be “relatable” and left it open.
“First, let me say my heart breaks for Mr. Cole and for everyone who loved that mill,” he said. “This town is built on hard work and tradition. Nobody wants to erase that.”
He paused, letting the sentence hang there like bait.
“But we also have to be honest about where we are,” he continued. “The mill, beautiful as it was, wasn’t keeping up. The fire—tragic as it is—forces us to ask hard questions. Do we pour money into rebuilding the past, or do we invest in a future that gives our kids a reason to stay?”
He clicked a button on a little remote, and the screen behind the council lit up with a rendering we’d seen versions of in his folder. New brick storefronts. Clean sidewalks. People in tasteful coats holding shopping bags. A token tree or two.
“This is one idea,” he said. “Small businesses, apartments, maybe even a community space named after Mr. Cole. We could include elements of the mill. A plaque, salvaged beams, a mural. Honor the legacy while building something sustainable.”
Applause scattered through the room. Not overwhelming, but not nothing.
Laura stood up without waiting for an invitation. “Can I speak?” she called.
The mayor looked relieved and wary at the same time. “Of course, Ms. Cole.”
She walked to the mic like she was walking a tightrope—every step deliberate, like the air was thinner up there.
“I live in the city now,” she said. “I work for a company that mass-produces furniture. The kind you can order online at midnight because your old couch finally gives out and you need something cheap by Friday. I get it. I know why people choose that.”
She looked at the rendering on the screen, then back at the crowd.
“But every time I come home, I walk into houses full of things my dad made with his hands,” she went on. “Tables with knife marks from a thousand family dinners. Chairs with grooves worn into the arms from generations of fingers. You can’t put a price tag on the way that feels.”
She glanced toward me, then toward the back doors, like she could see the mill through the walls.
“I’m not saying we must rebuild it exactly as it was,” she said. “I don’t even know if that’s possible. But I know this: if the only thing we learn from this fire is how to get a better deal on new construction, then we’ve missed the point of what almost killed my father and nearly took that dog with him.”
The room went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with microphones.
“We can build jobs and keep our soul,” she said. “But it’s not going to fit into a neat rendering. It’s going to be messy and slow and involve more splinters than spreadsheets. If you’re okay with that, then we can talk.”
She stepped away before anyone could clap, but they did anyway.
Eventually, someone nudged me toward the mic. “Say something about the dog,” the mayor whispered. “People need hope.”
I hadn’t planned a speech. I barely had thoughts that lasted more than three seconds without looping back to fire. But the crowd was looking, and Sparky’s hospital photo floated in the back of my mind.
“I don’t know much about zoning or economics,” I said. “I know about sweeping up sawdust and holding a leash.”
A couple of tired laughs rippled through the chairs.
“That night, Sparky did the dumbest, bravest thing I’ve ever seen,” I said. “He didn’t run a cost-benefit analysis. He heard someone he loved in trouble and ran toward the heat while the rest of us stayed where it was safe.”
I swallowed, picturing his tail thumping on the vet’s table.
“Now people all over the country are sharing his video,” I went on. “They call this place a ‘hero town’ and talk about ‘small-town courage.’ That’s nice. But what we do next decides if that’s real or just a 24-hour headline before they scroll on to the next thing.”
I looked at the council, then at Derek, then at Laura.
“Rebuilding isn’t just about walls,” I said. “It’s about deciding what we’re willing to run toward and what we’re willing to let burn. If we rebuild something that doesn’t leave room for the kind of loyalty Sparky showed that night, then we’ve learned nothing from him.”
When the meeting broke for a “short recess,” everyone spilled into the hallway, talking louder than they needed to, like volume could organize their feelings.
That’s when Dr. Chu walked in, pulling a small red wagon.
Sparky lay inside, wrapped in his bandages, cone still on, wearing four ridiculous little booties on his paws. Someone had tucked a blanket around him. His eyes were clearer than I’d seen them since the fire. When he spotted me, his tail tapped against the wagon’s side.
“I promised him a field trip if he behaved,” Chu said. “We’re not staying long. Noise isn’t great for him. But I thought people should see the dog they keep turning into a symbol.”
The hallway went quiet, then erupted in whispers and soft exclamations. Phones came out, of course. A kid knelt to take a selfie with him. An older man touched the back of his own hand, like comparing his age spots to Sparky’s.
“He’s smaller in person,” someone said.
“He’s bigger than any of us,” someone else replied.
Derek appeared at the edge of the circle, that practiced smile back in place. “Well, if it isn’t our local celebrity,” he said, stepping closer. “Mind if I say hello?”
Dr. Chu opened her mouth, probably to say “no unnecessary contact,” but he was already leaning in, extending a hand to scratch under Sparky’s chin.
The change in Sparky was instant.
His body went rigid. His ears flattened. A low growl leaked out from somewhere deep in his chest, rising slowly like a warning siren powering up. His head tried to pull back as far as the cone allowed, nails scrabbling uselessly against the wagon’s floor.
“Its okay, boy,” Derek said, freezing his hand. “It’s okay.”
It wasn’t. Sparky’s tail had stopped moving. His eyes were wide, all white and panic, locked not on Derek’s face but on his sleeve, his jacket cuff, like there was a smell there only he could recognize.
“Back up,” Dr. Chu snapped. “Now.”
Derek straightened quickly, color draining from his face. “Guess he’s not taking autograph requests,” he joked weakly.
Sparky’s growl died down as Derek retreated, his body easing by inches. When I stepped forward and rested my hand on the blanket, his breathing slowed. His tail gave one uncertain wag.
I looked up and found Captain Ruiz watching from the doorway.
She’d seen it. All of it.
Her eyes shifted from Sparky to Derek’s retreating back, then to me. No words, just a look that said the investigation had just quietly, decisively, changed gears.
For the first time since the fire, I had the same thought Sparky seemed to have had the second Derek walked in.
He’s not just part of this story.
He’s part of what started it.