Burning Ambition Read Online Free

the family home—which was rambling and empty with just the two of them. No wonder he’d seemed so distraught when she’d come back from San Antonio. He’d been wandering around in the echoing twenty-five hundred square foot house by himself. Her mother had moved into a sterile, colorless, two-bedroom apartment on the mainland.
    “We’re getting a divorce, Faith.” Her mom looked at her with those unwavering dark brown eyes that could scare small children, not telling Faith anything she didn’t know. Just the one fact she didn’t want to accept.
    “Why the rush?” Faith asked, taking a tortilla chip from the red plastic basket in the middle of the tiled table. “You have your whole life to get divorced, if it’s really the right thing. What if you’re making a mistake?”
    “We’re not making a mistake,” Nita said resolutely.
    Her dad was noticeably silent, crunching on chips, eyes on the table.
    “Dad?”
    He only shook his head. “I’m sorry, princess. I know it’s hard on you kids, even though you’re grown up.”
    “It’s because of my career, isn’t it?” Faith asked, desperation clawing at her to somehow find the key, keep them together, make them see reason.
    “What?” her dad exclaimed with both outrage and shock. “No. Your choice to become a firefighter has nothing to do with our marriage.”
    “You guys have argued about it for years,” Faith said, spouting the suspicion that had been gnawing at her since they’d broken the news of their separation. “Ever since I was twelve years old and told you that’s what I wanted to do.”
    “It’s something I will never understand, Faith,” her mom said, repeating the same tired chorus. “It’s not a job for a woman. It’s not safe. I thought maybe when you broke your collarbone it might knock some sense into that head of yours, but you’re back at it. Just waiting until the next injury, God forbid.”
    An unfamiliar uneasiness rolled through Faith’s gut, but she ignored it. The collarbone had healed. The building that had collapsed on her in San Antonio should be a distant memory. “A man would’ve suffered the same injury I did if he’d been standing in that exact spot when the roof caved in. It had nothing to do with ovaries or breasts.”
    “Faith.” Her dad held his palm up, as he so often had, and waited until she pressed hers to it out of habit. That it was something they’d done for as long as she could remember, a sign between her and her dad. “Your mother will always worry about you. Can’t change that. You scared us when you got hurt.”
    “So does that mean you think I shouldn’t have gone back to the career I love?”
    “No,” her dad said, avoiding her mother’s steely gaze.
    “Did you raise me to quit when bad things happen, Mom?”
    This wasn’t at all what Faith had planned for their evening together, but she couldn’t stop the anger and disbelief from spilling out. It’d been festering for several years since her last big blowup with her mother on the topic.
    “I’m not going to dignify that with an answer.”
    “This is my career. It’s what I love doing and want to do for the next twenty or thirty years. I plan to earn several more certifications, promotions, become an officer—who knows how far I can go? But not if I run away because of a broken bone.”
    “I hope the next time it’s not worse, Faith.” Her mom’s eyes shone with unshed tears that almost got to her. Almost.
    Again her dad held his large, work-roughened palm out, and when Faith completed the action, it soothed her enough to take a deep breath and realize she was about to ruin this evening. She had them together at one table, creating the opportunity for them to talk about inane things—anything but her career—and remember what they’d had in common forty or so years ago, when they’d fallen in love.
    She opened her menu and scanned it, even though she knew it by heart. “What are you guys