Chapter 1 #3
The villa is dim. Someone has already taped the windows and the light comes through in watery strips.
I grab my laptop bag, my sketchbook, shove in chargers and my passport and Weston’s passport because no one else will think of it.
I zip the bag and swing it over my shoulder and I am almost out the door when I realize I left my prescription in the bathroom — the anti-anxiety medication I take at a low dose and do not talk about because Crenshaws do not discuss medication, they discuss strategies.
The bathroom is marble and glass, the kind of excessive that resort developers mistake for luxury. I open the medicine cabinet, grab the orange bottle, drop it in my bag. Turn to leave.
The door does not open.
I pull the handle. It moves but the latch does not release.
I pull harder. The mechanism is stuck — the lock has seized in the humidity, the salt air corroding whatever cheap hardware the resort installed in a bathroom that costs eight hundred dollars a night.
I jiggle the handle. I slam my palm against the door.
The sound is flat and dead and goes nowhere.
“Hello?” My voice bounces off marble. “Hey — is anyone out there?”
Nobody answers. The villa is empty. The wind outside is louder now, a sustained moan that has replaced the gentle rustle of an hour ago. I press my ear to the door. Nothing. No footsteps, no voices, just the wind and the creaking of the villa’s frame.
I slam the door with my shoulder. It does not give. The frame is solid — ironically, the best-built thing in this overengineered resort. I slam it again. Pain shoots through my right shoulder and I step back and look at the door and I think, clearly: this is not happening.
I pull my phone out of my bag. Two bars of signal. I call Weston.
It rings four times and goes to voicemail.
I call again. Voicemail. My thumb is shaking. I clench my hand, force it steady, and text: I’m locked in the bathroom at the villa. The door is stuck. Come get me.
I wait. The little “delivered” tag appears. No reply. I stare at the screen and count the seconds by the pulse in my throat. Ten. Twenty. Thirty.
Through the bathroom’s small window — frosted glass, sealed shut — shouts carry from the direction of the dock. Engines starting. People yelling to each other in the urgent, clipped tones of people who are leaving.
I call Nash. Straight to voicemail. I call Weston again. Voicemail. I text him: Weston I am stuck in the villa bathroom. I need help. Come now.
Delivered. No reply. He is on the boat. Or at the dock. Or on his phone with the charter captain. Or with Sabrina, checking names off the list. The list I was never on.
I bang on the door until my hands ache. I scream until my throat goes raw and my voice cracks into something unrecognizable.
I try to break the frosted window with the soap dispenser — it is bolted to the wall.
I wrap my hand in a towel and punch the glass.
It cracks but holds, a web of fractures that lets in the sound of the wind but not escape.
I slam my shoulder into the door again and again and the frame shudders but holds and outside the wind is a roar now, not a moan, and the shouts from the dock have stopped.
The shouts have stopped because there is no one left to shout.
I slide down the wall and sit on the cold marble floor and I hold my phone and I watch the signal bars drop from two to one to nothing. The last text message sits on the screen. Delivered. Not read.
The hurricane hits at four seventeen in the afternoon.
I know the exact time because my phone still has battery when the first wall of wind strikes the villa like a fist. The building groans, the beams, the roof joists, the whole structure flexing in ways it was not designed for.
Something outside — a tree, a fence, a piece of the world — tears loose and crashes against the exterior wall.
The lights go out. The window cracks further and through the fracture lines the sky turns a color I have never seen before, a green-gray that looks like a bruise on the atmosphere.
I press my back against the interior wall, the one farthest from the window.
I wrap my arms around my knees and I make myself small and I listen to the world tear itself apart outside this marble box.
The noise is beyond anything I have a frame for — not just wind but a physical force, a weight of air moving so fast it sounds solid.
Rain hits the building sideways. Something structural fails on the villa’s second floor and I hear the crack of it, the slow grinding collapse of load-bearing timber giving way.
A piece of debris punches through the bathroom wall.
It comes through the drywall beside the door, a section of framing or fence post, and plaster showers the floor and something sharp opens a gash along my left forearm — fast, deep, the kind of cut that bleeds before it hurts.
Then it hurts. Blood runs between my fingers, warm and fast, and I press my right hand against it and I hold the pressure and I sit in the dark on the floor of a bathroom on an island in the middle of a Category 4 hurricane and I understand, with a clarity that will never leave me, exactly where I stand in Weston Crenshaw’s world.
I am not even on the list.