One night of shooting stars. Then the hills were orange.

In early September 2020, Jacob and Jamie Hyland took their young son, Uriel, to family land near Omak in Okanogan County, Washington. Jacob later remembered five shooting stars. It was a beautiful night. They slept.

He woke to orange on the horizon. The Cold Springs fire — already running on hard wind — had closed the only road out. They tried for the Columbia. The fire was faster. They soaked themselves and pressed into a cleft of rock, and they prayed, and they told each other they loved each other, because they believed they were going to die there.

Searchers found them. Jacob and Jamie were flown to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Uriel did not survive. Jamie, who had been pregnant, lost that child in the hours after. Both parents were badly burned. Jacob’s hands took the worst of it; he had tried to be a shield.

An ICU nurse told him the only true sentence that still works: one day at a time, one hour at a time. Some people do not leave. Everyone who does, does it that way.

The years since have been surgeries, therapy, grief, and the strange work of living in a burned person’s body. They have also been love, faith, and — after a long road — the laughter of a daughter, Shiloh, born with help from a surrogate. Jacob has said that a child’s laughter is healing, and that before her he did not always know why they were living.

Healing is not a finished tense. The fund is for that unfinished work: the care a body still needs, the quiet of recovery, the writing of a journey that is still happening. And then, when he is able, for people whose fire looked different but whose after looks the same — burn survivors, trauma survivors, anyone walking out.