14. Kate #2
She found him on the front porch, leaning against a railing where his cup was balanced, the deep line back between his brows as he listened. As soon as he saw her, the line disappeared and he held out an arm, inviting her into his side.
“Right,” he said, planting a kiss on her hair. “Right. And the model home? Okay. Okay, that’s good, Doug. Send me the photos when you can. You can count on Acacia to help expedite that. Yep, I’ll call you when I’m back in Destin. Stay safe on the roads.”
Ending the call, he lowered the phone and looked at her. “Lakeside took some roof damage on the homes that weren’t buttoned up, and there’s water in the model, but the structure held. Not bad at all, I’d say.”
“Have you heard from Maggie and Jo Ellen?” she asked.
He nodded. “They’re fine. They were up too late, I think, because Mom was asleep when I called her this morning. But all is well. Jonah, too, who checked in by text.”
“And the Summer House?”
The line came back between his brows. “Waiting for a report.”
Sighing, she pressed into him. “We made it through the storm,” she said.
He kissed her head again. “Long night and an even longer day ahead, but we’ll do it.”
Peter opened the front door. “I got the substation report. Come on in and hear.”
Eli picked up his cup and walked in with his arm around Kate, while everyone stilled to listen.
“Destin proper came through better than the early models said,” Peter started. “It tracked east of us at landfall and, just like Hurricane Michael, Panama City and Mexico Beach are the worst. As for us, there’s damage, there’s flooding in the low spots, the beach took a beating.”
“Any word on Miramar Beach?” Dusty asked.
Peter winced. “Lotta storm surge. I hope your sandbags held.”
“So do I,” Tessa said, looking at her husband.
“Gulf Shore Drive?” Eli pressed. “How high was the surge?”
“Over five feet, but we don’t know what that’ll look like. They haven’t cleared the road yet, both sides are blocked by downed trees. No power to speak of but crews are pouring in. No one I know has been on the beach, so we don’t know if the dunes held.”
Eli closed his eyes. “They held,” he said, as if saying it made it so.
“The thing is, for us,” Peter continued, “it’s not the catastrophe they were calling for on Thursday.”
The room quieted a notch, everyone saying their own internal form of gratitude. Even Olive’s story trailed off.
“Eli, you built that house like a fortress,” Vivien said. “And we will find out it stood like one.”
Kate slipped away to the kitchen, back to the stove with a smile of gratitude to Meredith who, no surprise, had made a perfect scramble.
“Breakfast is almost ready!” Meredith called.
The chatter rose again, and Kate cheerily helped serve, but when everyone had a full plate and had dispersed to places to eat, she realized she wasn’t hungry.
With no one noticing, she slipped out to the back deck for air and the chance to take in the yard she hadn’t examined yet.
It was, indeed, a wreck, but oddly beautiful.
She walked to the railing to survey a world stripped by the storm—branches lay everywhere, scattered and broken.
The oaks had been pulled half-bare, their leaves torn off, green and plastered now in chartreuse patches against the side of the house, the fence, the firepit area.
One maple had come up at the roots entirely and lay along the ground with its ragged, torn underbelly showing, like something not meant for human eyes.
The light came in low from the east under the edge of the cloud, moving across the soaked and battered yard. The sun found every wet surface, turning silver pools to hammered metal, the plastered leaves lit one by one like small green lamps, the torn roots of the fallen maple gone gold.
The whole ruined backyard held the light up and somehow became lovely. Not in spite of the wreckage, but because of it.
Kate knew exactly what she was looking at. She could have written it on a board and taught it to a lecture hall full of freshmen. The angle of light, the scatter of clean, rain-washed air, the simple physics of water bending rays. She knew exactly how this picture was painted.
She just didn’t know who did the work.
Was it the same creator of the cells she saw under a microscope? The one who somehow made sure that stained glass cathedral windows perfectly matched the shape and symmetry of the top cross-section of human DNA? Oh, that article she’d read about it in her research had kind of wrecked her.
She thought about the wall her studies had run into, and how the road stopped short of what Eli wanted from her. How he loved her and believed a thing she could not believe, and how neither of them knew the end of their story.
And Kate Wylie, who had never considered this before, who had no form for it and no faith behind it and would have been embarrassed to be caught doing it, looked at the light on the shattered beauty of the morning and opened her mouth, taking in a breath.
“Okay,” she said into the air. “If you’re there, if you’re real, if you’re any of what they say you are—then I need you to do the thing I can’t do for myself. I’ve looked as hard and as honestly as I know how, and I’ve hit the end of what I can find on my own.”
She drew another breath and let it out with a shudder.
“So prove it,” she said to the light. “Prove to me you’re real. That’s the whole thing. That’s my, uh, prayer. I don’t know how to make it fancier. Prove it, and I’ll go wherever that leads. But I can’t take the last step in the dark. You’ll have to turn on a light and make it obvious.”
That bird—probably the one they heard this morning, a hearty little sparrow—flitted around some stripped oaks.
The water lay silver in the low places. The light kept moving across the wreck of the world, and Kate stood in it and waited, the way a scientist waited for an experiment to reveal a result… and got nothing back.
No proof. No answer. No nothing.
Well, she’d asked and, honestly, that wasn’t easy.
The sliding door opened behind her.
“There you are.” Eli came out, two mugs in his hands, and gave her one without asking. “What are you doing out here?”
If she told him…no. It would give him hope he shouldn’t have.
“Breathing,” she said instead.
“Fair.” He stood beside her and looked out at the messy yard, and for a moment neither of them said anything.
“Bridges should be open by noon,” he said after a few beats.
“They’re clearing Gulf Shore Drive now. We can head down in a few hours after Peter’s office maps out a route of side roads that don’t have downed trees.
Then we’ll see what we’re dealing with. I won’t rest till I’ve put eyes on that house. ”
“Then we’ll go put eyes on it.”
He looked at her—grateful, worn, hopeful in the particular way that still, after everything, made her chest ache. “Thank you,” he whispered.
She stared at him, thinking, for a moment, that he’d heard her pray. “For…what?” she asked haltingly.
“For staying through this storm,” he said. “For all you’ve done and all you are and all you put up with from me this week.” He leaned down and gave her a light kiss. “I love you so much, Kate.”
She leaned into him and said the only thing she could—the truth. “I love you, too, Eli.”