Chapter 3
JUNE
Holt had his back to her, the phone pressed to his ear, one hand braced on the counter. His shoulders were set in that way they got when he was carrying something and had decided to try carry it without letting it show.
“When did the system change?” Holt asked, and then there was a pause. “What’s the last confirmed contact?” Another pause, it was longer this time. “All right. We’re on our way.”
He ended the call and turned around.
One look at his face and June’s stomach dropped cleanly through the floor. “Tell me,” she said.
“The storm intensified faster than the models predicted,” Holt said. “The coast guard has upgraded the warning for the offshore areas. Sandy Shore Island is inside the affected zone.”
June kept her voice level. “Have they made any other contact with the group on the island?” She swallowed. “Have they…” She cleared her throat. “Have they got any news about Willa or Ace?”
“Grace got a call through to Zane.” Holt was already moving with June toward the door, picking up his jacket and reaching for the keys with the contained, purposeful movement of a man who processed fear by immediately converting it into action.
“Grace’s call said they were moving to the secondary shelter,” he said carefully.
“There’s a cave on the eastern side. That’s all Zane got before the signal dropped. ”
June nodded once. She picked up her jacket from the back of the chair and put it on, her hands perfectly steady as she did, which she noted with a distant, clinical sort of awareness.
The steadiness was not calm. It was the body’s emergency response to something that was too large to process all at once, like a circuit breaker, shutting down certain things so that others could keep functioning.
She wasn’t going to be useful to anyone if she came apart now. June didn’t even realize they’d move to the car until she found herself pulling on the seat belt.
The coast guard station sat at the harbor’s northern edge.
It was a low, functional building that smelled of salt and machinery and the particular institutional quiet of a place that was always waiting for something to happen.
By the time June and Holt arrived, Carmen and Zane were already there, and Dean Parker was standing near the operations board with his arms folded and the expression of a man who’d been told something he refused to accept.
Carmen turned when they came through the door.
She crossed the room in four steps and took June by both arms, not gently, the way Carmen had always held her when something was serious, firmly, as if she were making sure June understood she was not alone in the room.
“The younger group is safe, and Becky is with Mina,” Carmen told her, and June at least felt relieved that her one grandchild was safe.
June let out a breath she had not fully realized she was holding.
“And Willa’s group?” She kept her eyes on Carmen’s.
Carmen’s grip on her arms didn’t change. “Their last confirmed contact was Grace’s call to Zane. They were heading for the cave. That’s all we know right now.” She glanced at where Zane was, and Holt had walked over to join that group.
“No contact since?” June’s eyes searched her sisters, looking for a glimmer of hope. “Has anyone heard if Willa and Ace are… are safe?”
“No,” Carmen said it plainly, which June appreciated. Her sister had always understood that the kindest thing she could do in a crisis was to tell the truth cleanly rather than dress it up. “The satellite signal is down across the affected area. That’s the storm, not necessarily anything else.”
June nodded, and Carmen released her arms.
They crossed to where Zane and Holt were already bent over the operations board with one of the Coast Guard officers, a compact, efficient woman named Lieutenant Reyes, who spoke in the clipped, information-dense sentences of someone who dealt in facts and had no patience for anything else.
“The current conditions over the Sandy Shore area are making a launch inadvisable,” Lieutenant Reyes was saying. “Wind gusts are sitting between fifty and sixty knots, with sets coming in at irregular intervals. Visibility is under a quarter mile.”
“How long until conditions ease enough for a launch?” Holt asked.
“The earliest estimate is two to three hours,” Lieutenant Reyes said. “Possibly longer depending on how the system moves. The storm is tracking northeast, which means it should clear the island zone, but the timing is not precise.”
“There are children on that island,” Dean said, “Teenagers and two adults.” He glanced at the Lieutenant. “My daughter-in-law and grandkids are included in that group.”
“I understand that, Mr. Parker,” Lieutenant Reyes said, not unkindly. “Which is why we have two crews standing by and ready to go the moment conditions allow.” She didn’t flinch or avert her eyes. “Going out in this won’t get anyone safely home. It will just give us more people in the water.”
Dean looked at the operations board. His jaw worked once.
June understood exactly what was moving behind his eyes.
Dean had lost his son in a fire ten years ago.
He had spent a decade learning to live alongside that loss, and now his grandchildren were on an island he could not reach, and there was nothing he could do except stand in a room and wait.
June knew that particular helplessness. She knew its exact weight and moved to stand beside him.
June didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say that would make it smaller. She simply stood close enough that her shoulder was near his arm, and Dean looked sideways at her, and whatever passed between them in that look was enough.
“They’re going to be alright,” June said at last, quietly, only for him.
Dean’s throat moved. “I know.”
“They’re very capable,” June said.
He nodded slowly. “I know.”
They stood together and watched the operations board.
Carmen had found coffee from somewhere and pressed a cup into June’s hands twenty minutes later without asking whether she wanted it. June drank it because Carmen was right, as Carmen usually was about practical things, and because having something to hold gave her hands a purpose.
Zane was on the phone in the corner, his voice low, coordinating with the search-and-rescue team.
He caught June’s eye once across the room and gave her a brief, clear nod, which she read as confirmation that everything on that side was under control.
Carmen was beside him, one hand resting on the back of his chair, listening.
June glanced out of the window.
The harbor outside was unrecognizable from the pleasant, sun-washed place it was on an ordinary day.
The water was black and broken, the boat lights in the marina swinging wildly on their moorings, the rain driving against the glass in sheets that ran and merged and made the world outside into something blurred and shapeless.
June watched it and made herself keep breathing evenly.
She felt Holt come to stand beside her before she heard him. There was no sound that announced him specifically, only the shift in the air beside her and the particular quality of a presence she had known for too many years to mistake.
They stood side by side, looking at the storm.
“Two to three hours is not forever,” Holt said.
“No,” June agreed. “It isn’t.”
“Ace will find Willa,” Holt continued. “They’re going to be okay.”
“Yes.” June nodded
“Rad and Margo will also find them,” Holt assured her, trying his best to placate both her and himself.
June looked out at the water. “I know they will.” She was just parroting words now as her mind seemed to have stopped working.
June was trying hard not to think about the gap between the last confirmed contact and now.
She was not going to construct scenarios in her mind.
Her mind was good at constructing scenarios, and not all of them were ones she could afford to entertain right now in a room full of people who needed June to hold it together.
Willa had trained for emergencies her entire adult career.
She had walked into burning buildings, administered treatment in conditions that would have sent most people in the opposite direction.
June’s daughter had led people through situations where panic would have cost lives and had never, not once in all the years June had watched her work, succumbed to panic herself.
June knew where Willa had learned that quality, because she recognized it.
She had spent her own career in rooms where the stakes were enormous, and composure was not optional, and she knew the discipline it took to keep it when everything inside you was screaming to do otherwise.
Willa had learned it by watching June and Carmen her entire life.
That thought hit her somewhere entirely unexpected, and she had to look away from the window for a moment.
Holt’s hand came to rest beside hers on the window ledge.
Not on her hand. Beside it. Close enough that the warmth of him reached her, and she was aware of it in every nerve ending she had apparently forgotten she still possessed. She didn’t move her hand away.
They stood like that, not speaking, watching the rain drive against the glass, and June thought about all the things she had never said to Holt.
The years they had taken to not say them in, and June kept every single one of those thoughts behind the place inside her where she’d always stored the things that were true but dangerous.
She had made a habit, a long, practiced, deliberate habit, of not examining certain truths too closely.
It wasn’t dishonesty, or so she’d told herself it wasn’t.
It was survival of a different kind than the kind Willa was exercising right now on a storm-battered island two miles offshore. But survival nonetheless.
There were things she should have said a long time ago to two people who were everything to her.
June pressed the thought back down and kept her face turned toward the window.
She moved her mind away from dangerous thoughts to Rad and Margo, who had gone out into the water in a storm in a small motorboat because Willa, Ace, and four teenagers were on an island with no way off and no contact.
Her heart pulled, realizing just how different small-town life was from big-city life.
What Rad and Margo had just done was what you did when the people you loved were in danger, and you hadn’t any means at all of reaching them. She looked at Holt.
“Your son is just like you,” June told Holt quietly. “You did a great job raising him.”
Something moved across Holt’s face that she was not going to look at too directly.
“He really is,” Holt said simply. “I got so lucky with a son like him.” A pained expression crossed his face. “It could’ve been completely opposite. He could’ve turned out like his mother.”
“You would never have let that happen,” June said and gave a soft laugh. “And I’m more than sure Mina would not have tolerated that.”
“Oh, no,” Holt said, a smile touching his lips as they spoke about his mother. “She would’ve stepped right in and put Rad back on the right track.”
Dean had moved to the other side of the room and was talking to Lieutenant Reyes again, his voice low and focused, asking about conditions in specific terms that told her he was calculating a flight path in his head and waiting for a window he could reasonably argue was safe enough to use.
Zane had finished his call and was standing with Carmen, the two of them with their heads close together in the way they had developed over the past weeks, that quiet, shorthand intimacy of people who had discovered they thought about things similarly and found it remarkable.
June turned back to the window.
The storm had not eased. If anything, the rain against the glass was heavier than it had been ten minutes ago, and the lights of the marina were swinging in wider arcs than before.
Lieutenant Reyes had told them two to three hours.
June looked at her watch. They were not yet forty minutes into that window.
She was going to stand here for the full length of it, and she was going to keep herself together for every minute of it, because that was what the situation required and because there was no other option available to her.
The Coast Guard crews were ready. Zane and Carmen were coordinating.
Dean was doing what Dean did: looking for every possible avenue and testing them all until he found one that worked. Holt was beside her.
There was nothing to do but wait.
June had always been poor at waiting.
She had filled every waiting room of her life with preparation, with notes, with questions, with the construction of arguments and the anticipation of complications.
It was the thing that had made her good at her work and difficult to live with in the specific way that driven people were difficult, the inability to simply be still and let time pass without trying to make it move faster through sheer force of thought.
Tonight, there was no argument to prepare. No brief to write. No strategy to build that would change what the weather was doing two miles offshore.
June looked at the black water beyond the glass.
“I wish there was more that we could do,” Holt hissed, his eyes scanning the control area.
“We just have to wait and believe that they’re all right,” June advised him.
It was something she was choosing to hold onto because the alternative was not something she could afford right now.
“They are all in that cave, and they are all right, and in two hours the Coast Guard goes out, and we know that for certain.”
Holt didn’t argue with her. He didn’t offer false comfort or empty agreement. He simply stood beside her, as he had always, when something was hard, with the particular steadiness of someone who understood that presence was sometimes the only thing available and that it was enough.
Outside, the storm pressed against the glass and the harbor lights swung, and the rain ran in rivers down the window, and June kept her hands still and her breathing even and waited.
Everyone on that island is alright! June clung to the thought as if willing it to be so would make it true.