Chapter 5
chapter
five
Hope
The rain started a little after four, and it has not let up, and I have spent the whole afternoon proving to an empty house that I am completely fine.
I’ve got candles lined up on the kitchen counter in a tidy little row, wicks trimmed, matches beside them, because a competent adult prepares. I’ve got both flashlights out and tested. I moved my small bookcase away from the window in case it leaks.
I am a woman with a plan, and I do not need anyone, and I keep telling myself that in exactly those words, which is maybe how I know I’m a little bit scared.
Because here’s the thing nobody warns you about a house at the back end of a county road: when the weather turns mean, it turns out the walls are thinner than you thought.
The rain comes down so hard it stops sounding like rain and starts sounding like hands, a thousand of them, slapping the roof all at once, nails scraping against the windows.
The light outside has gone that sick green-gray, and every so often the whole house shudders and my whole chest shudders with it—a quick, silly little flutter-skip.
I know it’s just nerves. It’s nothing. I didn’t even have any caffeine this morning.
Still, I won’t even have a report of this minor arrhythmia because the watch is sitting on its charger by the toaster, blinking its little charging light, useless.
I stand at the window with a dish towel I’ve twisted into a rope.
I watch the dip in the yard fill up. Not puddle.
No, this is more of a small pond at this point.
The even lower spot by the fence went under an hour ago.
It’s still not close enough to the house for me to worry, but flash floods in Texas are not the kind of thing you want to ignore.
Besides, my house sits on a strip of property along Farm Road 12, which has low-water crossings at both ends.
All these dry creek beds that seem harmless most of the time, but get enough rain in a short amount of time and those creek beds become raging rivers.
That’s when headlights swing into my drive.
For one absurd second my heart does something that has nothing to do with my bening murmur.
It swoops and I hate it. Then the truck door slams and a shape jogs across my flooding yard, enormous even hunched against the rain, and I’ve got the door open before he reaches the porch because of course it’s him, it is always, without fail, him.
He’s soaked through. Uniform this time, dark and heavy with water, hat gone or never worn, hair flattened, green eyes finding me through the downpour. Those eyes rake down my form, and my body responds as if that gaze was a touch.
My mouth goes off before my brain can stop it.
“I’m not even wearing it,” I blurt, holding up my bare wrist like evidence at a trial. “The watch. It’s on the charger, I swear, it didn’t call you, I didn’t—I have not fallen off a single thing today, so whatever it told you, it’s lying—”
“Hope.” Just my name, low, cutting clean through all of it.
He never calls me Hope. It’s always Ms. Bailey, clipped and careful, and hearing him say the other thing stops me flat.
“The watch didn’t call me. I came because the creek’s over the road and I need you in my truck in the next two minutes. ”
I blink at him. Rain pours off the porch roof behind him.
“You—what?”
“Flash flood watch changed to an official warning an hour ago. County-wide.” His jaw’s tight.
I wish I knew if it was from annoyance or something else.
“I’ve been closing crossings since five.
Yours is the last house on this stretch, and it sits low and I couldn’t—” He stops.
Starts over, flatter. “I didn’t like the idea of you out here not knowing.
Grab your purse. Anything you can’t leave. Now, please.”
I have spent my entire adult life ready with a no thank you, I’ve got it. I have that no loaded and chambered at all times. It’s the most consistent thing about me.
But in that moment I don’t even consider saying no. I just grab my purse.
I don’t fully understand why the thing that finally moves me isn’t the water in the yard. It’s that he said I didn’t like the idea of you out here. No alert. He just… thought of me. Drove into a flood because he pictured me alone and it bothered him.
I don’t have time to wallow in that. Instead, I let it brush past me like a hand at the small of my back. I file it somewhere to investigate and feel later. Along with my purse, I grab my phone and, at the last second, the watch off its charger. Then I follow the sheriff out into the rain.
The water has already washed out a portion of my driveway.
Not surprising considering it’s mostly gravel and dirt.
I think, for the most part, my house will be safe.
Maybe some water will get up to the screened-in porch, but the rest should be good.
That’s the thing about Texas floods though, you never know how bad things will get.
He half-lifts me up into the cab like I weigh nothing, slams my door, comes around. Rain drips off his Stetson; the damp hair not covered by the cowboy hat curls rebelliously.
The windshield wipers are losing the battle, barely sliding water away before its replaced.
He’s got his police radio going, and I catch the tail of a voice through the static—Tate, I think, one of his deputies, I met once at the library.
Griff answers in that clipped emergency cadence, all confirmations and no wasted words.
He backs us down the drive with one arm slung across my seat and his head turned to see through the rear glass.
The rearview camera view is nothing but water sluicing down the screen.
We make it maybe a half mile down the highway.
The signs for the upcoming low-water crossing seem ominous, given the amount of water rushing on both sides of the road. His truck crests the small hill and already it’s clear the road is no longer passable. Instead, there’s a brown river moving fast and churning over where the road should be.
Griff stops the truck well back from it and just looks at it for a second. “Shit.”
The radio crackles. I can only hear the deputy’s half in bursts, but I hear Griff’s clear.
“Yeah. I’m looking at it.” A pause. “No. It’s already over.
We’re not getting through here and the other way’s lower.
” His hand flexes on the wheel. “Tate. Tate. Listen to me. Close it from your side — both barricades, and get the signage up on twelve before somebody drives into this in the dark. I’ll take the crossings on this end, nobody’s coming through behind me anyway. ”
Another burst. I catch the shape of a question in it. What about you?
Griff’s already reaching for the door handle, already shrugging deeper into the soaked collar of his uniform.
“I’m going to get the barricades up on this side of Bear Creek crossing, and then I’m going to shelter in place.” His eyes cut to me, one second, unreadable. “There’s a house.”
Then he’s out in the storm.
I watch through the streaming windshield as he hauls the barricades across the mouth of the flooded crossing, moving through calf-deep water like it’s an inconvenience and not a thing that could take his legs out from under him, methodical, unhurried, closing the road against the dark.
He does the same at the second low spot.
He is the calmest thing in the entire drowning world, and I sit in his warm truck with my purse in my lap and my useless watch in my fist and I think a whole tangle of things at once, and the one that rises to the top, clear and quiet and not funny at all, is:
He came before it could call him. This time, he just came.
When he climbs back in he brings half the storm with him, water running off him in sheets, and he doesn’t look at me. He puts the truck in reverse and turns us around in the road, headlights swinging back the way we came, back toward my little fixer-upper.
“Looks like you’ve got a house guest, Ms. Bailey,” he says.