19. I Would Survive This , Too -Libby #2
“Did he just say he owns an island?” Lily looked between us with the alert, assessing expression that meant she’d caught the tail end of something and intended to catch the rest.
“Apparently,” I said.
“Like—a whole island?”
Finn rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s not what you’re picturing. No resort, no beach chairs. Two hundred acres of dense forest and decent farmland on a rock in the Atlantic with a dock I built myself and a compound I put together over seven years, every rotation home.”
“What kind of compound?” Lily stepped closer to the map, head tilting as her eyes tracked across it.
“It’s a main cabin with four outbuildings, all constructed to withstand nor’easters, featuring reinforced walls and steel-core doors.
Power comes from solar and wind, backed up by a diesel generator.
The root cellar is currently stocked for one person for over two years, so we’d need to recalculate for four.
There are also two greenhouses.” He paused.
“I used to have chickens, ducks, goats, pigs, two cows, and a bull. They’re likely gone by now, with no one to tend them. ”
He tapped the map, indicating a cluster of small islands off the Maine coast. “It’s right here. Far enough offshore that you need a proper boat and the skill to operate it, but close enough that supply runs to the mainland were manageable.” He glanced up. “Before.”
“But won’t the island have the same problem?” Lily asked, her voice echoing my own unspoken worry. It was the same familiar frequency I’d recognized for years, as she articulated the questions I hadn’t yet formed. “Those things are everywhere. What makes a small island different?”
“I’m the only person who’s ever lived there,” Finn explained.
“No residents, no population, no infrastructure that would have attracted anyone or anything. The surrounding islands are the same—just uninhabited rock and trees. The nearest populated landmass is about fifteen nautical miles southeast, and even that’s barely a village.
Maybe two hundred people in a good year. ”
He paused.
“Or it used to be.”
The implication settled over the kitchen, understood by everyone, with no one rushing to break the silence it left.
“I won’t guarantee anything,” he said. “I won’t insult you by trying.” He held my gaze, not as a challenge, but as a plain fact delivered to someone he’d decided deserved the unvarnished truth.
I genuinely hated how much I respected that.
“So, how do we get there?” I crossed my arms, unintentionally mirroring his posture. “Because the streets aren’t exactly conducive to a straightforward road trip.”
“That’s the problem I’ve been working on.
” He turned back to the map and traced a line northeast from the small X marking our current position—back roads, avoiding highways and population centers.
“Four hundred miles. Six hours before. Now—” He lifted his hand.
“I have the beginning of a plan. You’re not going to love all of it. ”
“Shocking,” I said.
The corner of his mouth twitched. He let it go without comment.
“They hunt by sight and sound—I’m certain of that much.
They track movement, respond to noise, and cover ground fast enough that outrunning them on foot isn’t a viable strategy for any real distance.
But as you noticed yesterday, during the worst of the initial surge, when the rain came in heavily and the thunder started rolling through—they pulled back.
Not completely, not all of them. But enough to matter.
The rain disrupted their ability to track, and the thunder buried ground-level sounds.
They didn’t disappear.” He looked up. “But they hesitated. And hesitation is a gap, and gaps are what you move through.”
I straightened. “You want to move during a storm.”
“I want to move during a storm.”
“It’s a desperate plan, but it might actually work.”
We stared at each other across the counter, the map a neutral ground between us. Neither of us intended to cross it.
“There’s a front moving in,” Finn said, his voice dropping slightly as he nodded toward the ceiling, toward the sky beyond it. “You could see it from the roof this morning. The pressure’s already dropping—the wind shifted northeast about an hour ago. That system is coming, and it’s moving fast.”
“How fast?” Lily asked.
“Tonight. Tomorrow morning at the outside.” He turned back to the map, pressing his thumb against the coastline with the certainty of someone who’d spent years reading weather and terrain as a single language.
“We load up, wait for it to hit hard enough that visibility drops and the noise covers our movement, and we drive. No stops, no detours, no hesitation. We push northeast until we reach the town where my boat is moored.”
He dragged his finger along the coastline and stopped at a small indent I couldn’t identify from where I stood.
“We make it back to my boat. Or we find something seaworthy, something manageable with a minimal crew. And we sail to the island. Hell, we could paddle a rowboat; the point is we get in something that floats and we make it work.”
“A sailboat,” I said.
“Once we’re on the water, everything changes.
Those things more than likely don’t swim—nothing I’ve observed suggests they do.
The open ocean offers none of that. Just water and wind and distance between us and everything trying to kill us.
” He straightened. “We sail up the coast, navigate to the island, and disappear off the grid entirely.”
Lily looked up from her notebook. “Do you actually know how to sail?”
“Yeah.”
“Like—actually sail? Or YouTube-video sail?”
A ghost of a smile, brief and genuine, crossed his face. “Navy, Lily. I can sail. Fiona can too; our dad made sure of that.”
She held his gaze for a beat, then nodded once and returned to her notebook, satisfied. The trust she gave him so readily—a thing I had spent seventeen years earning—sent a sharp, ugly spike of jealousy through me. I pushed it down. I didn’t have time for it.
“What about the drive?” I kept my voice level, clinical, as two people discussing logistics across a map and nothing more. “Four hundred miles on back roads in a deteriorating storm. That’s considerable ground to cover and considerable opportunity for things to go wrong.”
“Agreed.”
“So what happens when something does? What if the storm breaks halfway through and we’re exposed on some county road with no cover and no fallback?”
Finn said nothing for a moment, his gaze steady, like a man checking his math before he signed something.
“Then we take shelter. Wherever we are—a house, a barn, a gas station, or under an overpass if that’s all there is. We go dark, stay silent, and wait for the next window of opportunity.”
“And if the next window doesn’t open?”
“It will.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” he admitted, leaning forward with palms flat on the counter. “I don’t. But staying here isn’t an option. I know this house is yours, Libby—I know what these walls mean to you. But this city is dying, and with every hour we stay, the safe perimeter shrinks a little more.”
I started to speak, but he continued.
“Yesterday we made it home because circumstances broke in our favor. That’s not a strategy; luck has a shelf life, and it doesn’t announce its expiration. It just runs out, and you find out after the fact. When that happens, a deadbolt and a back garden won’t hold against what’s coming.”
The kitchen fell silent. Fiona’s pen had stopped, and Lily stood in the doorway, bag on her shoulder, watching us.
“Staying here isn’t a plan,” Finn said, his voice dropping to a quiet intensity that was more impactful than anything he’d said before. He looked down at the map, then back up at me. “It’s a countdown. And we’re already into it.”
I met his gaze.
He held mine.
And I hated—with every stubborn, exhausted, still-aching part of me—that he wasn’t wrong. Not even slightly.
I looked down at the map, at the thin pencil line threading through back roads, bypassed towns, and long, empty stretches of nothing.
It terminated at a coastline where a sailboat we hadn’t found yet would carry us to an island I’d never seen.
Hundreds of miles of uncertainty, held together by one man’s conviction that the worst-case scenario was always worth preparing for.
It wasn’t a good plan.
But standing still wasn’t a plan at all. It was just a slower way of losing.
“Lily,” I said, without looking up from the map.
“Yeah, Mom?”
“Finish those bags. Nothing useless.” I paused.
“We’ll need a vehicle.” I straightened, an idea clicking into place.
“The Hendersons, three doors down. They have a Suburban. Jim’s a retired cop, paranoid about everything but car theft.
He always keeps a spare key in a magnetic box under the driver’s side wheel well.
He left for California on Saturday; the car hasn’t moved. ”
And just like that, across a worn paper map in a kitchen that smelled like yesterday’s coffee, we had a plan.