Things You Save in a Fire

Things You Save in a Fire is a 2019 novel by best-selling American novelist Katherine Center. A bittersweet romance about courage and forgiveness, Things You Save in a Fire centers on the story of Cassie Hanwell, a highly competent firefighter and paramedic, as she relocates to a fire station that has never welcomed women and tries not to fall in love with the kind and charming rookie. By employing many of the classic tropes of contemporary romance, Center explores the importance of forgiving yourself and those around you and emphasizes that falling in love is an act of bravery.

This study guide refers to the Thorndike Press large print edition of the text.

Content Warning: This text features recurring discussions of sexual assault, sexual harassment, addiction, thoughts of suicide, sexism, death, loss of pregnancy, and various medical emergencies.

Plot Summary

As Things You Save in a Fire begins, Cassie is preparing to accept an award for her valor and bravery in service of the Austin fire department. Yet her big night takes a turn for the worse when she discovers that the award’s presenter is the man who sexually assaulted her when she was 16. When she goes on stage to accept the award, he gropes her, and she beats him unconscious with the plaque she has just received.

Later the same night, Cassie gets a call from her mother, who tells her that she has gone blind in one eye and needs Cassie’s help. Helping her mother would mean moving from Texas to her mother’s home in Rockport, Massachusetts. Cassie has no desire to do this, as she has been estranged from her mother ever since her 16th birthday, when her mother abandoned her and her father. The next morning, however, she learns that she is on the verge of being fired because she refuses to apologize for what happened at the award ceremony. Instead of getting her contract terminated, Cassie asks to be relocated instead, and her captain soon finds her a position near her mother in Lillian, Massachusetts.

Station two of the Lillian fire department is far less progressive than Cassie’s old station in Austin, and she quickly realizes that, as the first woman to work at the department, she will face an extreme degree of sexism. All the other firefighters doubt her capabilities, excluding the rookie who begins the same day as Cassie. To her dismay, Cassie finds herself falling for Owen Callaghan, the rookie, from the very beginning, even though she knows that dating another firefighter could ruin her career. Though she is far more qualified than he is, the crew is far more accepting of the rookie than of Cassie, and she is forced to prove herself time and again to let them know she can be “one of the boys.”

Cassie attempts to avoid the rookie just as she attempts to avoid Diana, but they are continually forced together by work. One day, the rookie asks a favor of her: to pretend to be his date at an important family party where he is expected to show up with a girlfriend. Cassie knows this is a bad idea, as she could easily be caught and accused of dating the rookie, but she says yes anyway and finds herself kissing him at the end of the night. Yet when Cassie gets to work the next day, she sees that someone has graffitied her locker, and over the following weeks, she gets similar but increasingly concerning threats telling her to quit the fire department. When this stalker throws a brick through her mother’s window, she confronts the crew about it and forces them to take her seriously.

Later that morning, Diana has a seizure. Cassie rushes to the hospital, where she learns that her mother has a brain tumor and has, at most, months to live. Diana has been keeping her illness a secret from Cassie, wanting to spend time with her daughter without the cloud of her imminent death hanging over them. When she learns of the diagnosis, Cassie realizes how much time she has wasted being angry with her mother and knows she can’t take any more of her time with her for granted. Cassie has a few days off from work after learning about Diana’s diagnosis, and during this time, the rookie visits her nightly to check in on her. One night, he tells Cassie that he is quitting the fire department. She is happy for him, as it was never his dream, but also deeply hurt that he is abandoning her. After an argument, the rookie tells Cassie he has fallen in love with her, and they spend the night together.

Cassie and her crew are called to a dangerous fire. DeStasio, one of the firefighters, thinks he sees a child in the building and rushes inside against the captain’s orders, forcing Cassie and the rookie to follow after him. Inside, the rookie gets cyanide poisoning from the fumes, and the ceiling collapses on him. Cassie pulls him out, and she and other medics begin trying to resuscitate him before he is rushed to the hospital. After the fire is put out, she learns from her captain that DeStasio has filed a report claiming that she was the one who recklessly rushed into the building and put his life and the rookie’s at risk.

In addition to blaming her for what happened in the fire, Cassie determines that DeStasio is the one who has been stalking her, but her feelings about him become more complicated when she realizes he has an addiction. Newly committed to forgiveness because of her mother’s illness, Cassie begins to reconcile with DeStasio. She saves him from an overdose and takes him to rehab, where he confesses to their captain everything he has done. Cassie’s crew is deeply apologetic for how they have treated her, and they rush her to the hospital to see the rookie, who has just come out of his medically induced coma.

At the hospital, the rookie asks Cassie to marry him, and she agrees, as she has come to understand the importance of love and letting go of her past. Cassie and the rookie marry the following year, just before Diana passes away. She leaves them her house in Massachusetts, where they raise two children together.