Some fires you can't outrun. Some you carry inside you.
Phoenix Cole spent a year believing the fire inside her was finally gone - and finally, for the first time in her life, at peace. Then it came back. Smaller. Unpredictable. A stranger wearing her own skin.
She's rebuilding a life on campus, falling for a smokejumper who understands fire the way she does, and trying to convince herself that this time, control will hold. But when the man she loves goes missing in the wilderness, Phoenix does the one thing she swore she'd never do again: she lets her fear burn.
The fire she starts saves no one. It costs two innocent lives - and a grieving father's entire world.
What follows isn't a villain's story. It's a father's, and it collides with Phoenix's own in a confrontation neither of them will walk away from unchanged. In the wreckage, Phoenix has to decide whether isolation is the only responsible choice left to her - or whether the people who keep choosing to stay, despite everything, are trying to tell her something she's too afraid to hear.
Phoenix Rises is the second book in the Phoenix series - a story about grief that doesn't apologize for itself, love that keeps showing up anyway, and the long, unglamorous work of learning to trust yourself again after you've proven you can't.