In the tumultuous early hours of the Eaton fire’s eruption, Rhea Cruz Magpantay and 12 others hid in her 500-square-foot office on Foothill Boulevard. Sat atop her desk, a disoriented Magpantay, 46, counted everyone huddled on the carpet floor: family members, friends, three pets — a fraction of those she’d consider herself responsible for over the next harrowing months.

Her young niece broke the silence. “Tía, what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know. I actually don’t know,” Magpantay replied.

The distraught faces of loved ones, her mother silently cradling their patriarch’s urn and the deafening lack of an answer would remain vivid among Magpantay’s flurried blur of memories in the fire’s wake.

“Why? This is the first time I don’t have an answer,” she’d later say, her parents’ eldest

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