Chapter 11
Eleven
SAM
The first thing I do after giving Brooks my wedding ring is nearly staple my own finger to a plywood board.
Not on purpose, obviously. I’ve never been that dramatic, and there are easier ways to make myself feel something than this crushing numbness.
But right now, I’m kneeling beside a stack of broken window frames outside The Funnel Cloud, trying to tack up a sign that says CHECK-IN LIST INSIDE, when the staple gun kicks sideways in my hand.
“Careful,” Hershel says behind me.
“Now you tell me.”
“You were staring at your left hand.”
“Was not.” Was I?
I start to shove my hand into my pocket to hide it from Hershel, as if that would fix anything.
The pale circle of skin where my ring used to sit is glaring. Will it always look like that? Ridiculous to even dwell on it, considering how recently I took it off. Still, I can’t help wondering if I’m always going to carry that mark.
“I was reading the sign,” I say.
“It’s four words.”
“So is shut the fuck up.” I feel a momentary ping of guilt, but if anyone can take it, it’s Hershel.
He makes a sound that’s not quite a laugh and takes the staple gun from my grip. “Go inside before you attach yourself to city property.”
“What would Ozzy do?” I ask.
“He would go inside. And maybe yell at Sharon.”
“Can I call you Sharon?”
“If it makes you feel better. And given how your thumb’s probably gonna be smartin’ after a few, you might want to start now. Go ahead. I’ll mumble something incomprehensible if that helps.”
A breath of a laugh escapes me as I look down.
There’s a thin red welt along the side of my thumb. Nothing serious. Barely anything at all. Still, for one stupid second, all I can see is Brooks’s hand closing around my ring. His face when I told him he blamed me.
His mouth forming my name like he had no air left. Was he upset that I’d finally spoken the truth?
I turn away before Hershel can see that this tiny cut might be the thing that breaks me.
Across Main Street, Muncie is trying to pull itself upright. One of the most incredible parts of a disaster isn't the wind speeds or the destruction; it’s watching a community pick itself up and pull together.
Still, we’re drowning in chaos. The hardest part has been the blackout. A nearby cell tower took a direct hit, and with so many downed lines, even landlines are useless.
What the town needs more than anything is a working communications network.
I wipe my thumb on my jeans and turn back to Hershel. “We’re losing too much time.”
He looks up from the sign. “You’ve been going nonstop, Sam.”
“Doesn’t matter.” I gesture toward the bar, then the blocked road beyond it.
“Cell service is garbage. The deputies have their radios, but half the volunteers don’t know who to report to.
We’ve got weather updates coming from three different directions, check-ins on Petra’s wall, damage reports scribbled in my notebook, and families who still haven't found their people.”
Hershel’s expression shifts.
I know that look. It’s the same one he used to get when I caught rotation on radar ten minutes before anyone else in the truck.
“What?” I ask.
He glances toward the row of Storm Posse vehicles parked behind the bar. “Might have something.”
“Hershel.”
He nods toward the lot. “Come on.”
He leads me past the green beast, past the chase truck Brooks was showing Tom last night, straight to a matte-gray support rig. Despite knowing our fleet inside and out, I don’t recognize this one. It must have blended into the background of the caravan.
Hershel unlocks the side door.
Inside, radio consoles sit mounted in sleek, organized banks. There are labeled slots for field tablets, battery backups, weather radios, and satellite Wi-Fi terminals. A massive central monitor sits dark above a narrow workstation.
It’s a mobile command center. Not for tracking storm cells. We have enough tech in the primary chase trucks for that. This is built specifically for disaster relief, engineered for field triage and hard-hit towns cut off from the grid.
Hershel flips a master toggle. The screens wake in sequence, bathing the interior in cool blue light.
A system graphic pulses to life on the center display.
SAM. Storm Awareness Monitor.
For a second, the breath leaves my lungs.
“That’s my name.”
“Never could sneak one past you,” Hershel murmurs.
I turn to him slowly. “Tell me that’s a coincidence.”
He scratches at his gray beard. “I could, but I’ve been trying to cut back on lying. Doctor says it’s good for my blood pressure. Besides, I'm no good at it.”
My chest feels tight.
I reach out, gripping the cold metal frame of the van door until it bites into my palm.
“You’re telling me Brooks named this after me?”
“You know he did, Sam,” Hershel says gently, like he’s explaining something obvious to a stubborn child. “He started sketching the schematics right after the accident.”
My mind refuses to assemble the pieces. He named this after me. Not the baby.
Yet he blamed me for the crash. For the loss. Why build a monument out of my name if I’m the one he holds responsible for tearing our lives apart?
“Make it make sense,” I whisper, more to the empty air than to Hershel.
He doesn’t offer false comfort. Instead, he steps in and starts running through the technical specs, and I let him, desperate for anything concrete to anchor me.
“It routes ground positions straight over radar sweeps, emergency pings, GIS maps, road closures, the whole picture,” he explains.
“Short-range radio mesh if towers collapse, with an auto-switching satellite uplink. Brooks started it because he never wanted the team stranded without rescue again if we got pinned down. But over time, he re-engineered it for town relief after the front passes. He knew how much that side of the job mattered to you.”
I stare at the glowing letters.
SAM.
My name, codified into a lifeline.
For two years, I believed Brooks looked at me and saw only negligence. A liability. The reckless wife who insisted on chasing that afternoon and returned from the hospital with empty arms.
This console makes a mockery of everything I told myself to survive the silence. He poured hundreds of hours and engineering into a system designed to protect field ops and rebuild ruined communities simply because he knew it was my heart.
Why?
I step closer to the console, forcing my brain toward execution rather than emotion.
“We can route the missing persons registry through this terminal. If we sync the satellite link to the tablets, we can hand them out to the search teams on the north side. It’ll map live power line hazards in real time so nobody drives straight into a washed-out crossing. ”
Hershel’s mouth quirks at the corner. “Figured that’s where your head would go.”
“Best thing I can do right now is focus on what’s fixable,” I say.
Because looking at my left hand, I have no idea if my marriage is one of them.
By late afternoon, The Funnel Cloud looks less like a dive bar and more like a town hall with beer taps. Which, to be fair, probably isn't all that different from Muncie's regular town council meetings.
Petra has search-and-rescue check-in lists taped across the mirror behind the bar.
Tom sits in the corner with a tablet, updating colored pins on the municipal grid with the lethal focus of someone defusing a bomb.
Hershel runs dispatches between the SAM rig and the county deputies.
I have a new terminal, courtesy of the SAM system, but I'm still clutching my battered spiral notebook.
For almost ten solid minutes, I manage not to think about the missing ring.
Then Luci slides into the booth across from me.
Somehow she still looks fresh. I have no doubt that, compared to her, I look like I’ve spent the afternoon rolling through mud and windblown debris.
“Sam,” she says softly. “Can we talk?”
“No.”
Her lips part in brief surprise.
I keep writing. “Sorry. Was that supposed to be one of those questions where social etiquette forces me to say yes?”
“I know things are hard right now.”
The pen stills against the paper. The urge to snap it clean in two surges through my fingers. What I’d like to do with the jagged plastic half doesn’t require further self-examination.
“I never wanted things to get this complicated,” she says.
I exhale slowly and look up. “Then what did you want?”
Her lashes flutter. They look flawless. “I care about Brooks.”
“Not what I asked.”
A flush climbs her throat. “He’s been carrying a lot. More than you know.”
More than you know. The plastic under my fingers bends dangerously.
“In the field, after the accident, I was the one there,” she presses, lowering her voice. “We went through things together that people don’t understand unless they were in the cab beside him.”
Breathe, Sam. It’s the only way both of you walk out of this bar alive.
I set the pen flat on the table. “Luci.”
She leans in, treating this like an intimate confession rather than a confrontation in the middle of a disaster zone over a beer-sticky table. “When you left, somebody had to be there for him.”
“Can we skip to the honest part, Luci?”
“Of course, Sam.”
“I don’t like you,” I say evenly. “Everything about you makes my skin crawl. The only real parts of you are the sharp edges someone could cut themselves on, and quite frankly, I’m done bleeding.”
Her mouth opens, then snaps shut. It looks like the very first time in her life anyone has handed her an unvarnished truth. It might even be entertaining if I weren’t so exhausted from picking my way through the wreckage she helped create.
I stand up, gathering my supply tallies. “If Brooks wants you, you don’t need my permission. And if he doesn’t, then you’ve spent the last six months humiliating yourself chasing a married man who’s never going to look twice.”
Her face hardens with a vicious speed I almost respect.
“You don’t know what he wants.”
“No,” I say. “But I know what you want. And it’s embarrassingly obvious.”
A pint glass tips over her shoulder.