When my family woke up last Thursday, we learned that our friend Arthur Simoneau was missing.

The day before, when the Palisades Fire was heading toward the neighborhood where I grew up and where he still lived, my mom had texted his ex-wife, Jill, to ask if she knew where he was—he’d stayed behind to defend our road from fire before. Jill thought he was out of town, at a hot spring. But the next morning, she called to tell us that he’d raced back to his house, and no one had heard from him since.