Chapter 13
Thirteen
SAM
I don't remember the last night I had a full night's sleep. Life in Muncie had begun with running from the hurt with Brooks and has commenced into putting the town back together after the storm.
By noon, The Funnel Cloud has become command central again, mostly because Petra has coffee, a working generator, and the ability to scare grown men into washing their hands before touching the sandwich trays.
The SAM rig sits behind the bar, doors open, screens glowing whenever we can keep the connection steady.
Every time I climb inside it, those three letters hit me right in the chest.
SAM.
My name, built into a machine designed to keep people alive.
I still don’t know what to do with that.
So I do what I understand. I work.
I route volunteers around washed-out county roads.
I match missing-person check-ins against Petra’s wall of sticky notes.
I talk Deputy Callahan through a better staging route for the north search grid.
I send three linemen to the wrong side of town and catch my mistake before they waste more than five minutes, which means I’m either brilliant or exhausted enough to need adult supervision.
Despite all the chaos, the town is slowly getting back on its feet.
Windows downtown aren't magically fixed, but they're boarded up so rain doesn't wash out what remains of the insides of the stores.
Some areas have restored power. Communications aren't fixed, but people are finding their way around.
It should feel good.
It does feel good.
It feels like life should with the exception of a broken heart and no real way to fix it yet, if ever.
Tom sits on the curb near the SAM rig with a tablet balanced on his knees, moving little colored pins across the town map. He’s been at it for over an hour, quiet and intense, one sneaker tapping against the asphalt in a steady rhythm.
I crouch beside him. My knees object. Loudly.
“You need water?” I ask.
He doesn’t look away from the screen. “I drank seven ounces twenty-six minutes ago.”
"That's good," I say, not remarking on the specificity of it because that's Tom's superpower. I suspect that Jimmy Olsen must have stopped remarking on Superman's ability to lift cars off people, too.
“The red pins are blocked roads. Yellow is caution. Blue is confirmed safe access.” He zooms in with two fingers. “The map app is wrong about Mesquite. It says open. It isn’t.”
“Mesquite floods if somebody spits too close to the ditch.”
Tom nods, accepting this as useful hydrological data. “You sounded like Brooks just then."
My fingers tighten around the clipboard.
I glance toward the street before I can stop myself. Brooks is across the way, helping Hershel unload plywood from the back of a truck. His hair is a mess. His jaw is bruised from Tony’s punch. He moves carefully, protecting his injured arm, but he keeps working anyway.
As if he feels me look, his head lifts.
His eyes find me immediately.
Not wandering. Not eventually.
Immediately.
I look away first because apparently I enjoy being a coward in new and creative ways.
Tom moves another pin. “He does that a lot.”
“Helps out?”
“Looks for you.”
For a second, I think I've misunderstood him.
“What?”
Tom taps the tablet. “Brooks. When he enters a room, he looks for you first. If somebody says your name, he turns his head. If you leave, he notices. Yesterday, when you went behind the bar, he watched until you came out again. When the deputy asked if you were going to the north side, Brooks stopped talking to Hershel.”
My mouth goes dry.
Tom continues, calm as a weather radio. “He tracks you like radar.”
I almost laugh, but it gets caught somewhere behind my breastbone. “That sounds intense.”
“It’s just a pattern.” He finally looks at me. “People miss obvious patterns when they don't pay attention."
Well.
If that came from anyone other than Tom, I'd say it was rude. With Tom, it's just truth.
Across the street, Brooks lowers a huge sheet of wood onto the sidewalk. Someone says something to him. He answers, but his gaze cuts back toward me again, quick and helpless, like checking my position is built into his muscles.
For two years, I thought I had become something he looked past. Something he moved around. A problem he managed from the corner of his eye while Luci sat beside him in the truck and the world decided she belonged there.
But Tom doesn’t say Brooks loves me. He doesn’t make it pretty. He simply hands me an observation like a weather reading.
Pressure falling. Wind shifting. Husband watching.
It doesn’t fix anything.
But it does make the sky look different.
By late afternoon, I've moved from SAM to inside The Funnel Cloud, taking up residence at the bar while I update the increasingly weathered notebook that's become my most used fashion accessory.
Bonnie Raitt is on the jukebox, and, in all honesty, that should have been my first clue that things were about to go sideways.
I’m at the end of the bar updating the check-in list when Luci appears beside me.
She looks less polished than usual. Still pretty. Still blonde. Still wearing her storm-team jacket like it means something more than employment. But there’s a tightness around her mouth that wasn’t there yesterday.
“Sam,” she says.
"Whatever you're about to say, don't."
Her eyes narrow. “You don’t even know what I was going to say.”
"I'd prefer to keep it that way."
“This is important.”
"However important you think it is, I suspect that there's a hundred other issues that are more important. Like storm recovery and cat memes."
She steps closer. “Brooks and I need you to stop making this harder than it has to be.”
My fingers curl. It's not that I'm really thinking about punching her. As far as I recall, I've never punched anyone.
It's just that my hand wants something to do.
I turn to her. “Brooks and you.”
Her chin lifts. “You know what I mean.”
“I’m pretty sure I don’t, but I have a feeling you’re dying to explain.”
A few people nearby keep talking, but quieter now. Petra’s eyes flick to us from behind the bar.
Luci lowers her voice. “You left him long before you packed a bag. You know that, right? He talked to me, Sam. After the accident. After you shut down. After you kept trying to force your way back into a field that almost destroyed both of you.”
My stomach gives one hard twist.
She sees it. Her eyes sharpen.
“He was lonely,” she says softly. “You made him feel like the villain for wanting you safe. Do you know how much guilt he carried? Do you know how many nights he stayed awake because he couldn’t talk to you?”
I think of the SAM rig humming behind the bar. Brooks’s hands designing something with my name on it. Tom’s voice. He tracks you like radar.
I think of Brooks standing in this very room, telling Tony not to touch me. Telling Luci not to touch him.
My fingers loosen around the pen.
“You’re right about one thing,” I say. “Brooks and I were broken.”
Luci blinks, thrown.
“He stopped talking to me. He took me out of the field. He let you sit in my seat. He hurt me.” My voice stays steadier than I feel. “You don’t get credit for knowing where the wound is when you’re the one pressing on it.”
Color rises in her cheeks. “You think you’re so special because you were there first.”
“No. I think I’m his wife.”
“Barely.”
The word cracks across the bar.
Now people are definitely listening.
Luci seems to realize it too late, because stopping now would be like trying to stop a train that's barreling down the tracks. “You don’t know what it was like being there with him every day while he was trying to survive you. You don’t know what he said when you weren’t around.”
My throat tightens despite myself. “Then say it.”
“He said the marriage was over in every way that mattered.”
For a second, bile rises in my throat because I'm primed to believe it. After all, it hasn't been that long since I walked in to find her in his arms.
She was scared.
Because isn't that the thing I'd really feared? That the man I loved had left me in every way except the one that was final? It sounds like my nightmare made real.
But it also doesn’t fit.
Not with his face when I gave him my ring.
Not with SAM.
Not with Tom’s patterns.
Not with the way Brooks’s eyes keep finding me like he can’t help checking whether I’m still there.
“You’re lying,” I say.
Luci’s mouth tightens. “You don’t know that.”
“No,” I say. “But I know you.”
Her face changes.
I take one step closer. “You wanted my seat. Then you wanted my team. Then you wanted my husband. And somehow you’re still standing here pretending this is concern.”
“I earned my place.”
“You earned a job. You mistook it for a life.”
A low sound moves through the room. Someone mutters, “Damn.”
Luci’s eyes flash. “You don’t deserve him.”
Finally, the truth comes out. And boy, is it ugly.
“You got him when he had nothing,” she says, voice rising. “Before the money, before the sponsors, before everyone knew his name. You got it all because you got there first. That's all. And, unfortunately, it's inconvenient because you got his name, too."
Some parts of the nightmare are true. Like the woman who's ten years younger than me standing before me and telling me the only reason I have the thing she doesn't is because I got there first.
Still, it doesn't make sense.
“What did you think?” I ask quietly. “That if you pushed hard enough, he’d erase me?”
“He already had,” she snaps.
The front door opens.
Cold air moves through the bar.
I know before I look.
Brooks stands just inside, mud on his boots and bruising along his jaw. His gaze moves from Luci to me, then back again.
Luci sees him and changes faces so fast it would be impressive if it weren’t disgusting.
"What's going on here?" he asks, his eyes darting from me to Luci. And still, his gaze keeps coming back to me.
"Luci was just telling me that the only reason she's not taking my place in every way that's meaningful is because I got there first."
"That's not what I said," she says, but her voice is small. Suddenly, everything is becoming clearer. She's been pushing me, trying to get me to make this easier on her. Because if I just completely severed the ties, it would all be hers.
At least in her mind.
"According to her, the only thing keeping the two of you out of each other's beds is the fact that I'm still hanging around. After all, again, allegedly, you've told her that your marriage is over, so I'm the only one keeping the two of you apart."
"Brooks, I?—"
He steps forward. “Nothing romantic has ever happened between us. Nothing physical has ever happened between us. I never told you my marriage was over. I never promised you a future. I never wanted one with you.”
Luci’s face drains.
The words should make me feel triumphant. They don’t. They make my hands shake.
Because while they're nice now, I needed them earlier.
In the clinic. In the truck yard. In my kitchen. In every moment I stood there bleeding quietly while he said nothing.
“You relied on me,” Luci says, voice cracking. “You trusted me. You chose me for the field.”
“I trusted you as a member of my team,” Brooks says. “That was my mistake.”
Her eyes dart, fast and frightened. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know enough.”
Something passes over her face.
If I didn't know better, I would think it was fear.
“You've talked to Tony,” she spits, and then stops as if she can shove the words back into her mouth.
My whole body goes cold.
Tony.
Brooks’s jaw tightens.
Luci looks between us. “I mean, whatever he said, he’s trying to save himself. He’s pathetic. He was always pathetic.”
I hear Tony’s voice from yesterday.
You don’t understand what went down.
Brooks doesn’t look at me. “Lucinda Becker, you are no longer part of Storm Posse.”
Her mouth falls open. “You can’t fire me in a bar.”
“I can fire you anywhere I want. Especially when you're harassing my wife.”
“You need me.”
“No,” Brooks says. “I needed honest people around me. I needed a team I could trust. You manipulated people under my authority and interfered in my marriage. You’re done.”
A flush crawls up her throat, blotchy and furious. For one second, I think she might slap him.
Petra sets a glass down behind the bar a little too hard.
Luci thinks better of it.
She turns on me instead. “You’ll never be good enough for him."
I step closer. Behind her, I can see Brooks readying himself, as if he can protect me from this one last injustice.
"And you're not even good enough for the peanut dust on Petra's floor."
Her eyes shine with furious tears. She grabs her bag from the back of a chair and storms toward the door. No one moves to stop her. The bell over the entrance gives one pathetic jangle when she shoves outside.
The silence she leaves behind is worse.
People start pretending not to stare. Badly. Chairs scrape. Someone coughs. Petra's the only one who bothers not to move. Her face is losing a battle with a smile.
Brooks remains a few feet away from me.
He looks at my left hand. At the bare finger where my ring used to be. Pain crosses his face before he hides it.
“Sam,” he says.
I stare at him, trying to arrange the pieces.
Luci lied.
Tony was involved.
Brooks knows.
And somewhere in all of this, my husband believed something about me that made him look at me like I was the one who had betrayed us.
My voice is quiet when I finally ask, “What did Tony tell you?”