Stranded by My Island Billionaire Husband novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Eye

Lena and Abel ride out the cyclone in the stone cellar, and in the eye of the storm she sees the helicopter burning on the beach with its pilot still alive.

The cellar had been dug into the hill a hundred years ago by men who knew what a cyclone could do.

Its door was oak as thick as my wrist, and Abel dropped the bar across it.

Then the noise began.

It wasn't wind the way I understood wind.

It was a freight train that never finished passing, and it shook dust out of the stone ceiling onto Junie's blanket.

I held her against my chest and rocked on my heels on the packed-earth floor.

She was ten weeks old and she should have been asleep in a nursery with a mobile of paper whales.

Instead she screamed, and I let her, because her lungs were the one thing in that cellar I could hear working.

"That's good," Abel shouted. "That's a good set of pipes. Keep her loud."

"Why?"

"So I know she's breathing."

He had spread the first aid kit on an upturned crate and lit two lanterns, and in their light his face looked carved.

He sat down hard on a sack of rice and pulled his trouser leg up over the bad knee.

It was swollen to the size of a grapefruit.

"You've been walking on that all day," I said.

"I've been walking on it thirty years."

"Sit still."

I laid Junie in the crook of one arm, knelt in front of him and pressed my free hand around the joint.

Eight years of emergency room had taught my fingers to read swelling.

The kneecap had slid sideways and was trying to stay there.

"It's dislocated," I said. "I can put it back. It'll hurt."

"Everything hurts. Get on with it."

I braced his heel against my hip and pushed.

He made a sound I will not repeat, and the bone clicked home.

When he could speak again, he said, "Your husband picked well."

"What?"

"A wife who can do that. Pity he isn't here to see it."

I opened my mouth to defend Rhys, and found I had nothing to defend him with.

Instead I wrapped the knee with the elastic bandage from the kit and kept my eyes on my hands.

At midnight the roof of the house went.

We heard it through the earth, a long tearing groan, then a crash that made the lanterns jump on the crate.

"That's the east wing," Abel said. "The veranda's next."

"Rhys loved that veranda."

"He built it himself, the first summer," Abel said. "Wouldn't let the crew touch it."

I didn't answer.

I hadn't known that, and I didn't want to learn it about him down here.

The water came an hour after that.

It slid under the door in a thin black tongue, and then there was an inch of it, then three, cold and tasting of salt.

"Surge," Abel said. "Up on the shelves. Everything that matters."

We dragged the crates and the rice onto the stone shelves along the back wall.

I climbed onto the highest one with Junie inside my jacket and the baby bag across my knees.

My hand found the folder through the lining, flat and hard against the zipper.

I left it where it was.

The water stopped at my shins on the floor, and began, slowly, to go down.

I tried the satellite phone.

It lit up, gave one bar of signal, and I got through four rings of Rhys's voicemail before the screen went white and died in my hand.

Water had got in.

I held the dead phone for a long time anyway.

Some hours later the noise stopped.

Not faded, not softened.

It stopped.

Junie went quiet against me and I felt my own pulse in the silence.

"Eye," Abel said. "Maybe forty minutes. Then the other wall comes through, and it'll come from the other side."

"I'm going up."

"Lena."

"Just to see. Just a moment."

He shook his head but he lifted the bar for me.

I climbed the steps and pushed the oak door open on a sky full of stars.

Warm air, still as a held breath.

The house stood roofless on the hill above me, its windows black.

The palms had been stripped to poles.

And down on the north beach, past the jetty, something was burning.

It was the helicopter.

It lay on its side on the black sand with its tail snapped off, a small fire licking up its belly in the dead calm.

It had not gone to the mainland.

It had never gotten out of sight of the island at all.

Something moved beside it.

A person was dragging himself up the beach on his elbows, leaving a long dark line behind him in the sand.

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