Chapter 4: Dry Count

I made it back to the cellar with moments to spare.

Abel slammed the oak door behind me and dropped the bar, and the second wall of the storm hit the hill.

I didn't sleep.

I held Junie and listened to the island being taken apart in the dark.

Sometime before dawn the wind dropped from a roar to a howl, and then to a long, ragged moan.

Abel put his ear against the door.

"It's going," he said. "It's going."

I nursed Junie on the shelf with the pouch under my knee.

She fed hard and fell asleep with milk on her chin.

I looked at the cream envelope in my lap for a long time.

*Open when it matters.*

I thought about what a man writes when he plans to leave his wife in a cyclone and wants to be forgiven first.

I put it back in the pouch.

"Not now," I said, and Abel didn't ask what I meant.

When we climbed out at first light, the world was the wrong color.

The sky was a clean, hard blue, and the sea beyond the reef lay flat and glittering.

On the hill, nothing was left of the house but the stone ground floor and the chimney.

The roof had gone, and the walls of the east wing lay across the lawn in neat slabs.

My dresser sat upside down in the garden, with the bottom drawer hanging open and empty.

I touched my shoulder where the folder lay under my jacket, flat against my ribs.

It was still there.

"Water first," Abel said. "Then everything else."

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