CHAPTER EIGHT
July 25, 2025
9 Days Left
The rain starts on a Friday morning, and unlike our usual summer storms, it doesn’t peter out after half an hour or so. It begins early, before I’ve even left my trailer. Not the hard pounding of an afternoon thunderstorm, but a steadydrip-drip-drip, off the eaves of the inn, pattering on the ocean waves, dimpling the sand and soaking the baskets of begonias on the front porch. It sounds soothing, and a different woman would take it as an invitation to stay in bed, settle in with a good book and mugs of tea until the skies cleared.
Unfortunately, I’m not that kind of woman.
By lunch, the whole first floor of the inn smells like the ocean, and not in a pleasant, sea-breeze kind of way. It’s a dank, rotted scent that brings to mind slimy seaweed and dead fish tangled in plastic.
There are only three other groups staying at the inn besides Lo and August: a family of four from Tennessee who spend theafternoon arguing over a game of Monopoly in the lobby, an older couple on their honeymoon who stay in their room, and a pair of girls in their twenties who, as I see when I glance out the big windows, are filming TikTok dances on the beach, rain be damned.
“They shouldn’t be out there,” Edie says, coming to stand next to me, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. Her fingernails are painted turquoise, and they’re bright against her black shirt but ragged and a little raw, like she’s been biting them. “Unless getting struck by lightning is some new internet challenge.”
“It’s not even thundering,” I tell her, only to be made a liar literally two seconds later when a boom rattles the windows and makes the girls on the beach shriek.
“Okay, so yeah, they probably should come in,” I amend, turning away. “But I’m not their mom, and they’re adults, so—”
“GIRLS!”
I flinch as Edie’s voice booms out the back door; she has one hand cupped around her mouth. “LIGHTNING!” she shouts, and they wave, gathering up their soaked towels and clear plastic beach bags.
“Whoooo, I forgot the set of lungs you have on you!” Lo says, coming down the stairs.
She and Edie have still barely interacted, but I guess she’s decided there’s no sense in pretending they don’t know each other now that I’ve been filled in.
I can tell by the way Edie’s shoulders tense up that she would’ve been perfectly fine ignoring Lo and their history forever, but she turns to face Lo now, scowling.
“Yeah, I get loud when people are putting themselves in danger. Learned the hard way on that one.”
Now Lo is the one who flinches. Barely, almost imperceptibly,but I see it. Then her customaryain’t we havin’ funexpression reappears, and she continues down the stairs, a pair of leather mules flapping on her heels.
“Maybe if this book doesn’t work out, I can do whatever it is those young ladies were doing. Dancing for the internet?”
“When has anything ever not worked out for you?” Edie mutters under her breath, and Lo’s head snaps around quickly.
Her smile never wavers, but there’s venom in every word as she says, “Oh, I don’t know, Frieda. Maybe when I sat in a jail cell for over a year waiting to go to trial for something Ididn’t do? Ooh, or maybe it was when Igotto that trial and saw the same girl I’d once called a blood sister telling a bunch of fucking lies about me that could’ve gotten methe electric chair.I feel like that’s probably a time that things didn’t really work out for me.”
The girls are up on the porch now, giggling and talking over each other, but in the lobby, all the air seems to have been sucked out of the room, the three of us frozen in place as Edie and Lo stare each other down.
“Everything good?”
August appears at the top of the stairs, and even though he’s holding himself loosely, one ankle crossed in front of the other, a casual hand on the banister, I see him taking it all in and wonder how much of Lo’s outburst he overheard.
“Peachy keen!” Lo singsongs back, and Edie takes a sharp inhale before saying something about checking the weather and vanishing into the office.
“Sorry about that,” Lo says as soon as she’s gone. “Guess I’d been holding that in for a while.”
I’m still too shocked to respond, but luckily, August changes the subject, nodding out the windows.
“Any idea when that’s clearing up?”
“Apparently not until this evening, at the earliest,” I say. I’dchecked the weather report just an hour ago myself. “But that’s not unusual for this time of year. And it’s supposed to be pretty tomorrow.”
“This is how it was back in eighty-four,” Lo says, moving closer to the window. “I thought it would never stop raining that July. But then, of course, it turned out that July was just the appetizer. Therealrain was biding its time way, way out in the ocean, building itself up into Marie.”
I follow her gaze out toward the water and think about how even now, miles and miles away, there’s a storm churning out in the Caribbean, gathering speed, getting hotter. I saw that in the weather report, too, and I know it’s the same system that Edie’s been keeping her eye on. It could fizzle away to nothing, or it could build itself into a monster. Either way, there’s nothing we can do about it.
