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She cannot help it. All control of etiquette is lost. What's the point anymore? He is gone, and nothing else matters.
"I loved him," she sobs, taking only little comfort in the embrace of her parents. They accept her love for Wade only now, in the end, when it is too late. What's the point?
Her wails echo dully in the damp ruins of the shop and the ruins of her life, the rescue crew not daring to make a move or sound.
No sound comes from the furnace either, where Wade Ripple had evaporated, his particles slipping through the debris-filled chimney and up into the atmosphere.
***
Months pass, but she doesn't count them. Keeping track of time would be admitting that any had passed since he evaporated.
Ember had never been so committed to studying anything as she was now, falling asleep every night atop a pile of books about the biology of water people, meteorology, and oceanography.
Every morning, she heads out to search for needles in haystacks, except this was infinitely harder. She was searching for drops of water, somewhere in a world full of entire bodies of the stuff. Wade's droplets could have come down anywhere.
Her parents worry but cannot dissuade her from her quest.
Her bedroom walls are plastered with maps of the continent, tracking weather patterns since the... incident.
Every morning, she searches what water she can find, any and all of it. She enlists all the cloud people she can either rally to her cause or pay to help out. She begs them to search the upper atmosphere, and they humor her out of pity if nothing else. She doesn't care that they pity her. Whatever gets them to help is good enough for her.
Clod has the decency to halt his romantic advances after the… incident, though Ember wonders if he plans to resume them again after a "suitable mourning period." Whatever that meant.
Ember is not completely unarmed and aimless in her quest to find Wade. After all, her mother had once gotten a whiff of Wade's signature love scent during their ill-fated reading. At Ember's behest, the old woman had turned her memory of Wade's scent into actionable search parameters, describing it in as much detail as possible to her daughter.
Ember had never shown so much as a passing interest in learning the art of personal scents from her mother until now, because it had never mattered until now. Now it mattered more than anything. And so Cinder had imparted onto her daughter the ancient ways, in the faint flickering hope it would help her in her quest.
Every day, Ember takes a whiff of all the water she can find. Faucets, fountains, anything. Every evening at sunset, she walks the beach, taking comfort in the memory of when he had called her beautiful there, and breathing in the scent of the waves for any flicker of familiarty.
For a month in late summer, Ember's family is certain she is lost at sea. Ember had borrowed Gale's sailboat to chase a storm as it left the mainland and headed out to sea. Sailing straight into the torrential rains wrapped in the heaviest ponchos she could find, she calls Wade's name until her flame is hoarse.
And then she chases the weather system back to land, watching it downpour on Element City and knowing that in the coming days, she'd search every puddle it had imparted onto the streets, carrying a water dropper everywhere she went, as always, just in case.
Wade's family helps search the ocean when they can, including the genderfluid pair Ghibli and Lake, but they all have lives and Brook is grief-stricken to the point of inaction, while Ember's grief motivates her every second of every day. Not that she calls it grief, because to call it that would be to admit he was gone.
Bernie, in worse health than ever, had almost convinced his daughter to finally give it a rest in a tearful heart-to-heart, when the impossible happened not a day later.
She found a drop.
It was just one drop, but it was unmistakably Wade.
It had interacted strangely with the rest of the water in the puddle she'd found it in, on the sidewalk in front of a customer's condo. Ember had been making deliveries again, to get back out into the world, when she had caught the scent of Wade's love for her.
Ember still carried her water dropper with her wherever she went, just in case, and now that the case had come, she cried tears of joy as she sucked Wade's molecules into the syringe.
She felt awful for almost giving up. Like she had betrayed him. It wouldn't happen again.
They are her first tears of joy since it had happened, but far from her first tears. And as the utterly confused tree customer watches the fire girl caress a vial of water lovingly, the tree could swear he hears the vial cry in return.