Chapter 13
NATALIE
Iwoke to rain and the shape of his hand still printed on my skin.
Not literally—no finger marks, no bruises. Just a memory pressed into muscle and nerve so thoroughly that when I rolled over, the sheets whispered and my body answered like he’d said my name from the doorway.
The room had gone silver-dark with the storm. The blinds showed thin slats of wet sky. My phone hummed on the nightstand with the jittery cadence of too many notifications.
I lay still for one beat, then two. The afterglow from Ethan wasn’t a glow anymore—it was a new baseline.
I felt different from the inside out—loosened, sharpened, rewired.
Multiple orgasms with an actual man had apparently rearranged the furniture in my head.
I could barely keep from grinning at nothing.
And then I thought of him—not his last name, still a blank on my mental form, just Ethan, dog tags and bear claw and that voice—and the grin turned molten.
Forward only, he’d said.
The phone buzzed again. The city intruded the way it always did, the way I always let her. I thumbed the screen.
Texts stacked from Owen, two from Kimmy, a thread from Huck that had accumulated half a dozen replies since I’d fallen asleep: First outer band skirting Folly.
High tide 5:42 p.m. King-plus. Reports of ponding already on Huger and Morrison.
Public Information Officer wants to hold until we have video.
I squinted at the clock. I’d been down maybe an hour. Long enough for the first band to drag a wet fingernail across the peninsula and remind us who we were.
I sat up too fast and the room tilted. My thighs protested in a language I liked a dangerous amount.
I laughed into the heel of my hand, then sobered and swung my legs out of bed.
T-shirt, soft shorts, hair knotted into a workable bun; I scrubbed my teeth and tasted him, anyway.
The towel I’d abandoned by the bathroom door was still damp.
My pulse went low and honey-thick with the memory of his mouth and the way my own body had betrayed me right into joy.
I had to brace my hands on the sink and breathe twice before my brain decided to let me work again.
The city first, I told my body.
I padded into the kitchen and poured water.
The rain had settled into a steady pour—not a theatrical sheet, just the kind of rain that accumulates while everyone tells themselves it isn’t that bad.
The sky had lost definition. The live oaks at the curb looked like charcoal sketches.
Somewhere, a car hissed through a shallow pond.
I texted Owen: Here. What’s real?
He replied in a blink: Outer band grazed us. Another behind it. Huck’s stalling comms. City Hall’s “monitoring.” A second ping: You okay?
I typed, erased three versions that either sounded like I’d been hit by lightning or like I was trying to hide I’d been hit by lightning, and settled on Fine. On my way.
“On my way to what?” I asked my empty kitchen, then answered myself, “On my way to get someone in a chair.”
I’d spent years telling crowds there was no single fix for water, that leadership was a thousand small acts done early.
Mayor Evelyn Hart had been removed in disgrace a few months ago.
The interim council president was technically acting mayor, but “technically” didn’t move cars off Lockwood or open a sandbag depot.
The city had plenty of managers. What it didn’t have, right now, was a voice.
And this was the Lowcountry—marsh-born, barely above sea, famous for pretending water was just scenery.
We’d gotten away with that lie when there were fewer people and fewer eyes, but with rooftops multiplying, tourists flooding in, and the climate tilting the odds, it was past time to face the fact that high tide wasn’t a glitch—it was our baseline.
I grabbed my field bag—the new flyers, spare batteries, a roll of caution tape out of habit—and paused. My phone blinked with one unread text, time-stamped an hour ago.
Had to step out. Back later. Move your car if you haven’t. —E
No flourish. It loosened something in my chest in a way longer messages never did.
Okay, I wrote. Be safe.
I hovered, then added: Forward only.
The dot blinked. Stopped. Blinked again. Forward.
It was ridiculous how much steadier I walked after that.
Outside, the rain dampened sound and sharpened edges.
A gull coasted low over East Bay, angling toward the Market where vendors were rolling plastic over baskets of sweetgrass.
My feet turned toward Meeting on their own.
City Hall sat at the corner, like a bride who’d skipped town—white, perfect, vacant.
Inside, the foyer echoed with the sort of quiet that says nobody important is here on a Sunday. A security guard I knew by face but not name looked up from his stool, relief flashing over him like a porch light. “Ms. Kennedy,” he said, lowering his newspaper.
“Natalie,” I corrected automatically. “Anyone home?”
He shook his head. “Council President’s remote. Says if it gets bad, he’ll come in.” His mouth did the tired twist of a man who’d seen “if it gets bad” too many times.
“Is Emergency Ops stood up?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“Public Works is in their shop. Police and Fire have supervisors in place. But the Emergency Operations Center? Not formally. They’re saying we don’t hit thresholds until the next tide.”
Thresholds. The word made my molars grind. Water did not care about a binder’s tabs.
“Let me use the steps,” I said.
He blinked. “The steps?”
“Outside,” I clarified. “If the city won’t speak, I will.”
He hesitated, gaze flicking to the rain, to the empty marble, back to my face. Something in the set of my jaw must have convinced him. He lifted a shoulder. “You always do right by people,” he said. “Don’t make me regret it.”
I was already pushing through the doors. The steps of City Hall had watched speeches about wars, weddings, and water. They could hold one more.
The rain misted my face. Tourists flattened themselves under overhangs, their ponchos crinkling like grocery bags. A carriage rattled past slow, the mules patient and unimpressed.
I texted Owen: City Hall steps in 15. Bring cones. Then Kimmy: Live stream. Tag Huck. Tag the Public Information Officer. Tag the world.
Kimmy’s reply was a heart, then: On it. Tilt your chin. No raccoon eyes.
I smiled despite myself and finger-combed my hair into a smooth knot, then lifted my phone, scrolling to the Notes app where the bullets we’d sent Huck sat like a sermon.
I added two: EOC should activate and Sandbag pop-ups at Harmon, James Island, and West Ashley by 1700.
It wasn’t my authority to promise. It was, apparently, my day to decide not to care.
People gathered because people always do when someone looks like they’re about to say something true.
A tourist mom with a stroller, a chef in a soaked apron, three college kids with skateboards, a mounted officer easing his horse close, rain beading on the leather of the saddle.
Owen hustled up with a traffic vest thrown over his button-down, his grin tight with both pride and alarm.
“Tell me I’m not insane,” I muttered.
“You’re insane,” he said. “And also right. Kimmy’s live. You’ve got … eight hundred watching? Twelve hundred. Two thousand. Oh, Nat.”
“Keep me in frame,” I said, hands not shaking until I noticed they weren’t.
Kimmy’s voice came through my earbuds as the stream connected. “You’re hot,” she said. “In the good way. Go.”
I stepped to the top stair. The rain softened just enough to be dramatic.
“Charleston,” I said, and the microphone of a hundred phones sent my voice out in slick little echoes.
“We’re not in a crisis yet. We are in a window.
The next forty-eight to seventy-two hours will be wet—on top of high tides that already push our drains to their limits.
That math adds up to flooded streets in the usual suspects and a few places where you’ll swear it’s never happened before.
It has. You didn’t see it. That’s okay. I did. ”
A chuckle rippled—nervous, appreciative.
“Here’s what you can do today before the worst of it: move your car to higher ground.
Not closer. Higher. Don’t park in low garages because they’re convenient.
Clear the drain in front of your house—gloves, broom, ten minutes.
Check on neighbors who can’t lift a bag of yard debris.
If you own a business in the Market, on Lockwood, on the Eastside, stage sandbags at your doors before close. ”
I glanced at Owen. He gave me a little thumbs-up that I felt.
“I’m asking the City to activate Emergency Ops now,” I said, calm and clear as if I’d been granted the power in the last five minutes.
“Not at ‘threshold’—now. We’ll need coordination to keep ambulances moving.
Public Works is ready. Fire and Police are ready.
Give them a room and a board and let them go. ”
A man in a golf umbrella shouted, “Who put you in charge?”
“Physics,” I said, and laughter scattered like birds from a tree. “Also, my job. I’m Natalie—Kennedy & Neilson. If you don’t like hearing it from me, you can wait for the press conference that’ll use these exact words.”
Owen coughed into his fist to hide a smile. My phone vibrated: Public Information Officer wants to join. Two minutes. Another: Huck says Emergency Operations Center standing up ‘informally’ now. A third, from a council aide I barely tolerated: Can you send your bullet points? Prez will ‘consider.’
I talked for five minutes. Ten. The more I spoke, the steadier the crowd got, as if laying out tasks stacked sandbags in their chests.
When I finished, the mounted officer touched two fingers to his brim and the chef clapped once, then again, and the rest of them followed in a ragged little applause that embarrassed me and set something right at the same time.