Chapter 20
Twenty
brOOKS
The storm is leaving, but my body hasn’t caught up.
Rainwater runs from my hair into my eyes. My boots are sunk half an inch in mud. Somewhere beyond the torn-up field and the busted line of trees, thunder drags itself east, low and tired, as the sky finally runs out of wind.
Sam is still in my arms. Not because I grabbed her or held on too tight. Because she stepped into me.
Her fists are locked in the back of my soaked shirt, and mine are spread carefully over her, one hand between her shoulder blades, the other at her waist. I can feel her shaking. Or maybe that’s me. Maybe there isn’t a difference right now.
For a few seconds, neither one of us moves.
The world around us is wreckage: the farmhouse roof peeled open, a splintered tree blocking the road, the truck sitting wrong near the ditch with the passenger side caved in where the utility pole came down.
The sharp, acrid bite of snapped power lines and wet copper hangs heavy in the damp air.
Sam’s cheek is against my chest, and every breath she takes hits me like proof.
“You’re bleeding,” she says, voice muffled by my shirt.
“So are you.”
“I’m muddy.”
"Again, so are you."
Her fingers tighten once. A laugh tries to come out of me and doesn’t quite make it, turning into something rough enough that I have to drop my chin against her wet hair and breathe through it.
I nearly lost her. Again.
Only this time, she was exactly where she chose to be. Beside me. Reading the sky better than anyone alive. Making calls I trusted because I should’ve been trusting them all along. No part of me knows what to do with that yet.
Sam pulls back just enough to look at me. Her face is streaked with rain and dirt, her hair plastered to her cheeks, her mouth pale from cold. There’s a bruise blooming near her jaw that makes something in me go sharp.
I lift my hand, then stop before I touch it. She sees me stop. Her eyes flick to my hand, then back to my face.
The space between us changes. Not forgiveness, not yet, but something warmer than the rain. I think about kissing her. God help me, I think about it so hard my whole body leans toward her.
Then a voice tears across the field.
“Brooks! Sam!”
Hershel.
Sam jerks back, and I turn toward the sound so fast my bad shoulder lights up.
Headlights bob through the rain. Boots slap mud.
Hershel comes over the rise first, jacket open, hair plastered to his forehead, face twisted with a kind of fury that’s mostly fear.
Behind him, two camera guys, Riley, and Mark from Unit Three scramble through the debris.
Hershel reaches us and grabs my shirt in both fists. For one wild second, I think he’s going to hit me. Instead, he yanks me into a hug hard enough to make me grunt.
“You stupid son of a bitch,” he says into my ear. “You absolute, hardheaded son of a bitch.”
“I’m glad to see you too.”
He shoves me back and looks me over. “Don’t start. I’m too old for this.” Then he turns to Sam, and his whole face changes. “Girl.”
Sam’s mouth wobbles. “Hey, Hershel.”
He pulls her into a hug, gentler than the one he gave me but no less fierce. “Don’t you ever scare me like that again.”
“I won’t.”
“Damn right you won’t.”
After that, everything happens at once. Riley checks Sam’s knee.
Mark radios our position. Someone swears at the crushed truck, and someone else swears louder when they see the live wire snapping near the ditch.
Hershel keeps asking the same questions in three different ways, like maybe if he rearranges the words he’ll believe the answers: Are you hurt? Can you walk? Did you hit your head?
Sam answers every one with more patience than I deserve to witness. I stand close enough to catch her if she sways, but I don’t put my hands on her again. She notices that, too.
When the medic from the volunteer crew finally reaches us, Sam lets him shine a light in her eyes and check her scraped knee.
I do the same, mostly because Hershel looks ready to shove me down into the mud if I argue.
The whole time, the storm moves farther away.
The whole time, I can still feel Sam’s weight against me.
By the time everyone is accounted for, my hands won’t stop shaking.
I hide it by pretending to inventory equipment near the ruined truck.
It’s a poor lie. The truck’s done. The beacon case survived, half the dash cameras are probably dead, and the tablet Sam carried out is sitting safe in her bag because she knew what mattered even while everything was coming apart.
Hershel finds me beside the driver’s door. “You look like hell.”
“I feel worse.”
“Good. Means you’re alive enough to feel it.”
I glance over at him. He’s got mud up one leg, a shallow cut across his knuckles, and the expression of a man ready to tear into me the second we’re alone.
I look past him. Sam is standing near Unit Two, wrapped in somebody’s dry jacket, talking with Riley about whether the barometer reading before the turn was steady enough to log. Alive. Bruised. Brilliant. Exactly where she belongs because she decided to be there.
My throat tightens. “I need to talk to you,” I say.
Hershel’s eyebrows lift. “What’s on your mind?”
“Something that should’ve happened a long time ago.”
He follows me a few yards away, out of the cluster of voices and flashing lights. We stop near a fence line that’s been stripped clean in places, wire sagging between broken posts.
I take a breath. It shakes on the way in. “I want to hand the operation to Sam.”
Hershel stares at me. Then he blinks once. “Run that by me again.”
“Storm Posse. Field calls. Team structure. Who goes where, who leads, who stays back. All of it.”
“You’re serious.”
“Yes.”
He studies my face for long enough that I start to feel the cold seeping straight through my wet clothes. “This about tonight?”
“It’s about every night before tonight.” I look down at my hands. Mud is dried in the creases of my knuckles. “I built the whole thing so everything ran through me. I decided who got in the lead truck, who stayed behind, which job made sense for who. It felt efficient. It felt like leadership.”
“It was leadership.”
“It was too much control in one place.” I look back at Sam. She listens to something Riley says, nodding quietly, and the sight of her hits me square in the chest. “It let me take her life away because I thought I was protecting her.”
Hershel’s jaw works.
“I don’t want to put her back on the team,” I say. “Not like I’m doing her a favor. Not like I still get to decide she belongs.”
“Brooks.”
“She makes the calls. If she wants me in the lead truck, I’m there. If she wants me somewhere else, I go. If she wants me off the road, I get off the road.” My voice drops. “If she wants me gone altogether, that’s her call too.”
Hershel lets out a slow breath. “And if that’s exactly what she wants?”
“Then I live with it.”
He says nothing.
“I’m done taking choices away from her because I’m scared,” I say. “I can’t tell her I trust her and still keep the setup that let me overrule her whenever fear took over.”
Hershel looks toward Sam, too. For once, he doesn’t deflect or try to soften it. “About damn time,” he says.
I almost laugh. “That’s all you’ve got?”
“That’s plenty.”
The motel parking lot looks like the aftermath of an evacuation.
Vehicles sit at odd angles beneath buzzing exterior lights.
Mud cakes tires. Hoods are up. Someone has a folding table covered in laptops, water bottles, foil-wrapped burgers, and a bag of chips.
Radios murmur in the background. Every few minutes, an argument breaks out over radar captures, road choices, wind speed, or whether Mark hesitated before the hail started.
No one says much about the shelter, not directly.
They clap me on the shoulder hard. They check in with Sam.
They ask if she needs food, water, aspirin, dry socks, or a ride back into town.
They keep orbiting us, watching without making it obvious.
It feels familiar in a way I forgot I was allowed to miss.
No Luci. No Tony. No tension hanging underneath every sentence.
Sam stands near Hershel’s truck, wearing a motel towel around her shoulders like a shawl. Her hair is damp and tangled. There’s a paper plate in her hand she keeps forgetting to eat from because she’s explaining something to Hershel with quiet intensity, eyes bright despite the exhaustion.
She looks like herself. Not the wife I pushed behind a desk. Not the woman I left wondering if she’d been replaced. Sam. The woman who once stood beside my truck after an eighteen-hour chase in the middle of nowhere and told me she’d stay with me as long as we were honest with each other.
She glances over. Our eyes catch.
I forget what I’m holding. Coffee, maybe. It tilts until hot liquid burns my thumb. I hiss under my breath. Sam’s mouth tightens slightly, holding back a reaction. Then Hershel says something, and she looks away.
This happens four more times across the parking lot, between people, over the roof of Unit Two, through the steam rising from wet asphalt as the night cools around us. Every time she looks at me, my chest goes tight. Every time she looks away, I let her.
Then she hands her plate to Hershel and walks toward me.
The space around us seems to drop away. She stops a few feet away, close enough that I can see the small tremble in her fingers before she tucks them into the sleeves of the oversized jacket someone gave her.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.” My voice comes out too stiff, but it’s the best I have.
Sam looks toward the line of damaged trucks. “You avoiding me?”
“No.” I pause. “Trying not to crowd you.”
“That’s new.”
“I’m learning.”
Her eyes come back to mine. There’s enough softness there to give me hope and enough hurt to keep me careful.
“I’ve been thinking about what you asked me,” I say.
Her face stills.
“What happens next time.” My fingers tighten around the paper cup. “What happens the next time I get scared and decide I know what’s best for you.”
She swallows.
“I have an answer.”
Someone laughs near the supply table. A motel door opens and shuts along the second floor. I keep my eyes on Sam.
“I don’t want to put you back on the team.”
Her expression shutters before I can get the next words out.
“Because that still makes it mine to give,” I say quickly. “It still leaves me standing there with the authority to decide whether you belong in the life you helped build.”
Her lips part.
“I talked to Hershel. Nothing’s done. Nothing’s signed. I didn’t make a decision and come tell you after.” I make myself hold still. “I want to hand control of the operation to you.”
Sam stares at me.
“You make the field calls. You decide the team structure. You decide where everyone belongs. Including me.”
“Brooks.”
“If you want me in the lead truck, I’m there. If you want me running base, I’ll stay behind the screens and do the work. If you want me consulting from three counties over, I’ll do that too.”
Her eyes shine in the motel light.
“And if the first thing you do is fire me,” I say, my voice going rough, “then I’ll hate every second of it. But I’ll accept it.”
She doesn’t move.
“That’s the only answer I’ve got,” I say. “There can’t be another time where I get afraid and take your choices away. So I’m stepping down from the position that let me do it.”
A muscle jumps in her jaw.
“I’m not doing this to force you back to me,” I add. “I’m doing it because I should never have had the power to push you out in the first place.”
For several seconds, Sam says nothing. The silence stretches long enough that I can hear my own pulse.
Then she steps closer. “You’re an idiot,” she says, her voice catching.
I blink.
She grabs the front of my shirt and pulls me down into a kiss.
For half a heartbeat, I’m too stunned to move. Then the paper cup hits the asphalt, and my hands lift to her waist, careful, shaking, there only because she put me there. Sam kisses me like it's the first time all over again. And I let her choose every second of it.