Chapter 18
Eighteen
brOOKS
The first mile with Sam back in the passenger seat feels like driving with a live wire coiled beside me.
She's quiet, one boot braced against the floorboard, tablet balanced on her thigh, hair pulled back in a knot that's already losing the fight against the wind coming through the cracked window.
Behind us, the rest of the team follows in a loose line down the two-lane road, headlights catching in the haze.
Sam reaches for the radio without looking down. “Unit Two, give us a little more space,” she says. “If this thing turns right, I don’t want you on our bumper.”
Hershel’s voice crackles back. “Copy that. Backing off now.”
Sam’s jaw tightens, and my hands grip the wheel.
For two years, I've kept her out of this seat. I told myself a dozen lies about why. Safety. Timing. Operational necessity. Common sense. Every one of them sounded better than the truth. I was scared, and I'm scared now.
The storm builds ahead of us, ugly and green-gray along the western horizon, the base lowering with the kind of slow confidence that makes every nerve in my body sit up straight.
The light has that bruised tint to it, flattening the fields and turning the fence posts black.
Wind pushes dust across the road in thin, restless sheets.
Sam glances from the tablet to the windshield. “Surface winds are backing harder than they should be.”
“I see it.”
“Do you?”
The question lands soft enough that anyone else might miss the edge.
I don’t look at her. “Yeah, Sammy Girl. I see it.”
The old name leaves my mouth before I can stop it, and for a second, the truck goes dead quiet.
Then her gaze drops to my wrist. I know the moment she sees it. Her eyes lock on the brown leather band, on the worn place near the clasp where my thumb has worried it all afternoon. I should keep both hands on the wheel, but the skin under the bracelet feels too tight.
“You didn’t have to put that back on for me,” she says.
My throat goes rough. “I didn’t.”
“If this is supposed to prove you’re willing to take a chance on us again...”
“It’s not.”
The road hums under the tires. A hawk lifts from a fence post, fighting the wind for height.
Sam looks back out the windshield, her voice dropping lower. “Then why?”
I draw in a breath that scrapes all the way down. Because I should've told her two years ago.
“It had your blood on it.”
Her head turns.
I keep my eyes on the road. If I look at her, I might drive straight into the ditch.
“After the accident,” I say. “It was on the bracelet. On my hands. My shirt. Everywhere. I cleaned it when we got home from the hospital, but it didn’t matter. Every time I looked at it, I saw you in the back of Hershel’s truck. I saw you going in and out on me. I saw you bleeding.”
The radio pops with static. Someone behind us says something about inflow. Neither of us answers right away.
“I thought you were going to die,” I say. “And then we lost the baby, and I kept thinking about the road. About you telling me to go east. About me not listening. That bracelet got tangled up in all of it.”
Sam’s fingers curl around the edge of the tablet.
“I almost threw it in a lake,” I say.
Her breath catches.
“I stood there with it in my hand. Hershel was by the truck pretending he didn’t know what I was doing. I raised my arm and everything.” My voice drops flat. “Couldn’t do it.”
“Why not?”
The storm flashes faintly ahead of us, a dull pulse inside the clouds.
“Because before that day, it was you in a booth at The Funnel Cloud, looking at me like you hadn’t just given me the best thing I owned.
” My thumb moves over the clasp. “It was cheap motels, busted cameras, and you fastening it because I kept fumbling on purpose. It was you saying it was something to keep you with me.”
She looks down at her lap.
“I couldn’t wear it,” I say. “But I couldn’t destroy it. So I put it away.”
Sam is silent long enough that I hear the rattle in the dashboard I still haven’t fixed.
“I didn’t know,” she says.
"Yeah. And that's on me. I should have told you."
“When you stopped wearing it, I thought…” She presses her lips together. “I thought it meant you didn’t want anything from before anymore. Us. The baby. Me. I thought you were putting pieces of me away.”
“Sam.”
“You never told me.”
"I was afraid to. I was afraid of a lot of things."
“You never told me anything.”
And that, right there, was the whole crux of the problem.
"I did a lot of things wrong," I say. "Didn't tell you things. Tried to protect you by hurting you. But one thing's never changed. I never stopped loving you."
Her eyes shine when she looks at me. “Honestly, that was another thing I didn't know."
Before I can answer, Hershel’s voice breaks through the radio. “Lead, you seeing that lowering at your eleven?”
Sam shifts instantly. Her spine straightens and her expression changes. Not colder. Sharper.
“I’ve got it,” she says, already leaning toward the windshield. “Brooks, slow five.”
My foot eases off the gas before my brain catches up. She notices, and so do I. The old rhythm slides into the cab like it's been waiting just outside the door.
“Velocity couplet’s tightening,” she says. “Not warned yet, but it’s trying.”
“Road options?”
“North-south blacktop in three miles. Gravel east before that, but I don’t like the low-water crossing.”
“Rain last night.”
“Exactly.”
I nod. “We take the blacktop, stair-step northeast.”
“That keeps us too close if it turns.”
“It hasn’t turned.”
“It wants to.”
We argue for ten seconds, quick and clipped, the way we used to when the storm was eating up miles faster than we could account for.
Then I look at the inflow bands pulling into the base. “Blacktop, then hard east if the motion shifts.”
Sam says it at the same exact time.
“Copy that, Lead,” Hershel mutters over the radio. “Good to hear you two in sync again.”
Sam lets out a low exhale, and my chest aches with it.
I've missed this so badly I don’t have a place to put it.
Her beside me. Her eyes on the sky. The way she reads radar, road, and wind all at once.
Not behind a desk. Not filtered through a headset.
Right here, where she wants to be, where she belongs because she chose it.
The wind hits the truck broadside, and I correct without thinking.
“Crosswind’s picking up,” Sam says. “Out of the southeast.”
“Feeding hard.”
“Wall cloud’s getting better organized.”
“I see the rotation.”
“No,” she says, leaning forward. “Look under the rain curtain.”
I look. There. A darker notch wrapped in the gray, tucked lower than I first thought. Every protective instinct in me tries to take over. Slow down. Pull back. Get her out. Put distance between Sam and anything that could take her from me.
Her hand moves to the radio, steady and capable. “Unit Two, Unit Three, stay with us for now, but tighten up. If Brooks calls a turn, you take it immediately.”
Hershel comes back at once. “Copy.”
Sam looks at me. “We need to adjust east sooner.”
I don’t ask if she’s sure. I just turn the wheel.
The truck swings onto the next county road, gravel spitting beneath the tires. Behind us, the team follows as dust kicks up and gets shredded by the wind. The sky ahead lowers another notch.
Sam’s eyes flick to me, quick and searching. “What?”
“You didn’t hesitate.”
“No.”
“You would have, once.”
“I’m trying not to be that man anymore.”
Her throat moves, and she looks away first. “Road jogs right in half a mile. Watch the ditch.”
“I've got it.”
She keeps her eyes fixed on the horizon, but the tension in her jaw eases just a fraction. For half a second, I'm twenty-six in a beat-up blue truck, broke as hell, with the smartest woman I know sitting beside me while the sky comes apart.
Then the radio crackles hard.
“Lead, we’re getting debris crossing behind you,” one of the camera guys says. “Small stuff. Sheet metal, branches.”
Sam checks the radar, her face going still.
“What do you see?” I ask.
“That circulation’s tightening faster than it should.” She pinches the image wider. “Brooks.”
The way she says my name turns my blood cold. Ahead, rain drops like a curtain across the road, cutting visibility in half in the space of a breath.
“Tell me,” I say.
“Our east option may already be compromised.”
I glance at the road grid mounted near the dash. “We’ve got another mile.”
“We may not have another mile.”
A hard gust slams into the truck. The tires slip, catch, and slip again. Sam braces one hand against the dash, and for one terrible second, her palm there sends me spiraling backward.
Road slick with red mud. Metal screaming. Sam’s hand pressed to her belly. Blood on leather.
My lungs lock up.
“Brooks.”
Her voice is right beside me. Not a memory. Not fluorescent hospital light. Not the back seat of Hershel’s truck. Here.
I force air in through my nose. Ozone and charged dust blow through the cracked window, cold against the heat in my throat. “I’m here.”
She watches me for a split second. No pity, and no softening into panic because I'm rattled. Just Sam, sitting where she always should've been, trusting me to stay with her.
Then she points through the windshield. “Left edge of the rain shaft. See the motion?”
I see it. “Damn it.”
The planned road disappears into a smear of water and dust ahead of us. Debris skitters across the gravel, fast and erratic. A road sign, or what's left of one, cartwheels through the ditch and slaps against a fence post.
The radio spits static.
“Hershel,” I call. “Status.”
Nothing but wind.
“Hershel, copy?”
A broken burst of sound comes back, then cuts out completely.
Sam reaches for the second radio, changes the channel, and tries again. “Unit Two, do you copy?”
Static.
The rain hits all at once, turning the windshield silver while the wipers thrash uselessly.
The truck rocks under another violent gust. I grip the wheel hard enough that my injured shoulder complains.
Sam keeps one hand on the dash and the other on the tablet, her eyes moving faster than mine can follow.
“Road bends south ahead,” she says. “If we take it, we drive closer to the core.”
“If we don’t?”
“We get cut off.”
Behind us, headlights blur in the downpour. One set, maybe two. It's too hard to tell.
I bite the inside of my lip and taste copper. The part of me that ruined us wants to bark orders, shove her back from the windshield, and tell her to duck. It wants to take over completely to keep her out of the storm.
Instead, I look at her.
Sam looks back. Water streaks the glass between us and the sky, and the leather bracelet digs into my wrist as my hand tightens on the wheel.
“What do you see, Sammy Girl?”
Her eyes flash, not with surprise this time, but with recognition. She leans over the radar, then looks past it to the road, the sky, and the ragged black lowering swallowed in rain.
“We’ve got seconds,” she says. “Maybe less.”
The truck shudders, the radio screams static, and ahead, the road vanishes into gray.