4. And the Thunder Rolls
Chapter four
And the Thunder Rolls
The storm came on a Thursday.
I'd been watching it build all afternoon, the way you watch something inevitable approach.
The sky went grey first, a flat slate color that pressed down on the town like a lid.
Then green, that particular sickly yellow-green that meant hail was possible, tornadoes were possible, the kind of weather that made everything go quiet and watchful.
Then dark purple-grey, bruised and heavy, clouds stacking on clouds until the horizon disappeared entirely.
By evening, the rain was coming down in sheets so thick I could barely see the magnolia tree.
The wind made its branches sway and dip like it was dancing to music I couldn't hear, white blooms tearing loose and scattering across the yard like fallen stars.
Lightning cracked across the sky in jagged white lines, and the thunder that followed shook the walls of my apartment, rattled the windows in their frames, made my coffee cup vibrate on the desk.
I was trying to focus on the Morrison project, but my attention kept sliding to the storm. There was something mesmerizing about it, something that felt almost personal. Like the weather was putting on a show just for me.
Louisiana storms are different, Lila had warned me. They mean it.
The lights went out mid-keystroke.
Complete darkness. The hum of the refrigerator cut off mid-note. My laptop screen became the only light in the room, casting blue shadows on the walls that made the space feel suddenly unfamiliar, suddenly strange.
"Power outage," I said to no one, because apparently I was becoming the kind of person who talked to herself. "Great."
The silence was louder than the storm. Without the white noise of electricity, every sound amplified: the rain hammering the roof, the wind howling around the corners of the building, the creak of old wood settling. The darkness pressed against the windows like something alive.
I grabbed my phone and shook it to activate the flashlight. The beam cut through the dark, showing me the familiar shapes of my furniture, my boxes still half-unpacked, the lamp from the flea market sitting on the counter where I'd left it.
The landlord's email had mentioned something about the breaker tripping in storms. Something about the old wiring being "temperamental," which I'd filed under things I'll deal with when relevant and promptly forgotten.
Relevant had arrived.
I pulled on a windbreaker and headed for the door. The breaker panel was probably in the main house, or maybe in one of the outbuildings. I'd figure it out. I was capable. I could handle a breaker in a storm.
I was halfway down the exterior stairs, rain soaking through my cardigan in seconds, when I saw the light.
Not lightning. A flashlight, steady and deliberate, coming from the landing below. Someone was standing at the bottom of my stairs, pointing a proper flashlight upward.
I stopped. My heart lurched—that old threat-response my body produced at any unexpected presence, any strange man appearing where I hadn't expected one.
"It's Eli," said a voice from behind the light. Calm. Measured. "The breaker trips in storms. I came to check."
The flashlight lowered, and I could see him now. Or the outline of him, anyway.
Tall, like his brothers, but holding himself differently. Eli embodied stillness—not passivity but choice, a deliberate absence of motion rather than having nothing to move toward.
"That was very thoughtful," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I expected. "I don’t know where the breaker box is."
"I know." He said it simply, without elaboration. Just acknowledgment of a fact. "Come on, I’ll show you where the panel is."
Eli Voss was not what I'd expected.
Which was unfair, because I hadn't known what to expect.
I'd barely glimpsed him in the past few days, a figure in the background, a door closing as I came around a corner.
He'd been a gap in the pattern of brothers, the one I hadn't met, the one Jasper described as taking notes on pie and thinking about things that happened three hundred years ago.
Now he was standing on my landing in the rain, holding a flashlight and a toolbox, wire-rimmed glasses spotted with water droplets, dark hair plastered to his forehead because he'd apparently walked over without bothering to find an umbrella.
He was leaner than his brothers. Not less strong, just built differently, precision instead of power.
His features were sharper, more angular, the kind of face that would age well because it was already made of interesting planes and shadows.
Behind those glasses, his eyes held a quality of focused intelligence that made me feel simultaneously seen and studied.
Like I was a document he was reading, a pattern he was trying to understand.
He wore a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, the fabric soaked through and clinging to shoulders that were broader than I'd expected.
His forearms were defined in ways that surprised me for someone Jasper had called the bookish type.
There were scars on his hands, small ones, the kind you got from working with tools or paper or both.
"The breaker panel is in the shed," he said. "I can show you where."
"You came out in a storm to fix my power?"
"I was watching the weather. I knew it would trip." He said this matter-of-factly, as if everyone monitored storms and predicted electrical failures. "The wiring in these old buildings is connected to the original estate lines. It doesn't handle the load well."
"The original construction," I repeated. "From 1832?"
Something flickered in his expression. Surprise, maybe, that I'd done my research. Or something more complicated.
"Earlier, actually. The estate predates the town. The main house was built in 1798." He paused. "The electrical was added in the 1920s, of course. But the infrastructure follows the original layout. It creates inefficiencies."
"You've been meaning to upgrade it?"
"For a few years now." He almost smiled. "I have a lot of projects."
I followed him through the rain to the shed, which turned out to be less "shed" and more of a small outbuilding with a locked door and surprisingly sophisticated contents. Eli produced a key, and the door swung open to reveal something between a workshop and a laboratory.
The breaker panel was on the far wall, but that wasn't what caught my attention.
Tools hung on pegboards in precise rows, organized by function and size.
Labeled drawers lined one wall, each label handwritten in neat block letters.
A workbench dominated the center of the space, its surface clean enough to perform surgery on, scattered with restoration equipment: soft brushes, archival tape, a magnifying lamp.
And books. Stacks of them, some clearly ancient, leather spines cracked and faded. Arranged on shelves with the kind of care that suggested each one was irreplaceable.
"This is very organized," I said.
"Callum's doing. The tool organization." Eli moved to the panel with practiced ease. "He can't stand disorder in functional spaces. Jasper's spaces look like a tornado hit them. Mine are somewhere in between."
"Organized chaos? Everything has a place, but only you know where?"
He glanced back at me, and something shifted in his expression. Interest. Recognition.
"Yes. Exactly that."
He fixed the breaker in five minutes, explaining each step as he went.
His hands moved with careful precision, the same way they'd probably move across ancient pages.
When he reached past me to flip the last switch, his scent hit me: old books, cedar, something darker I couldn't name.
His shoulder brushed mine, and I felt that strange warmth again, that hum at the edges of my awareness.
My fingertips tingled where they’d grazed the panel’s old iron casing, and for half a second, the shadow my hand cast on the wall seemed to stretch longer than it should have—reaching, almost, before the lights flickered on and it snapped back to normal.
The power came back with a flicker and a hum.
I thought that would be it. That he'd nod politely and disappear into the main house, interaction complete.
He didn't.
"The storm's still bad," he said, glancing at the sky. "You could wait it out here. Or on the porch."
I should have said I needed to get back to work. The Morrison project was waiting. I had deadlines, responsibilities, a life I was supposed to be building.
Instead, I said: "The porch sounds good."
We ended up on the steps, under the overhang where the rain couldn't reach, watching the storm spend itself against the landscape. The lightning had moved east, flickering on the horizon. The thunder came softer now, delayed, counting the distance.
He asked about my work. Not polite surface questions, but precise ones. He wanted to understand something, and he waited for the answer like it mattered.
"You're a designer," he said. "What kind?"
"Graphic design. Branding, mostly. Logos, visual identity systems."
"The part of a company that people see first."
"Yes. First impressions. The visual promise of what they're going to get."
"And you like it?"
I thought about it. Really thought, which I didn't usually do when people asked.
"I like the problem-solving," I said. "Taking something complicated, a company's values, their goals, their personality, and finding a way to communicate it in a single image. It's like translation. Finding the visual language for something that exists in the abstract."
He was quiet for a moment. The rain drummed on the roof above us, steady now, almost peaceful.
"That's a good way to think about it."
"Most people's eyes glaze over when I start talking about visual semiotics."
"Most people aren't paying attention." He said it matter-of-factly, without judgment. "They hear 'design' and think decoration. They don't understand that it's a language."