Torie blinked rapidly. “I don’t. You can’t. This is . . .” She stopped, clearly frustrated. She took a breath. “I don’t remember who was there, but I do remember a ribbon hitting my cheek. People were screaming, the sign fell, it was chaos.” She rubbed her temples. “I just know she was there and then she wasn’t.”
“I think we’re all scared,” Harmony said. “Scared people make mistakes.”
Mary returned with a bottle of whiskey and a handful of plastic cups. “Storm’s biblical,” she said. “Might as well confess our sins while we wait.”
Cass forced a shaky smile, her teeth chattering. “I already do that daily.”
“Then you’re ahead of the rest of us,” Mary said, pouring.
They drank, the thunder fading to a distant growl. Each flash of lightning carved different expressions into their faces—guilt, dread, denial.
Outside, the rain thinned to a drizzle. The world felt hollowed out, the air too thin. Avalon lay in a blackout, the kind of quiet that came right before something was finally uncovered.
Harmony stood by the window, watching waves crash against the pier. Her reflection stared back, her eyes dark, her jaw set.
“The storm’s not finished.”
Cass joined her. “Do you mean Candy?”
“I mean all of it.” Harmony touched the glass with her fingertips. “It’s already asking for another offering.”
This was the reason no one left to go home. They didn’t want to be alone and vulnerable, where they could then end up being the next body found.
Later, when most had drifted into uneasy sleep on lobby couches with borrowed blankets, Harmony sat alone, notebook open, pen hovering. The clock on the wall had stopped. She wrote.
The night the island screamed, it wasn’t thunder that frightened us. It was the silence that followed.
She paused, listening. For once she didn’t know what she expected to hear.
Torie’s voice broke the quiet. “You don’t think that she’s alive, do you?”
Harmony looked up. “I think her death has been summoned.”
Torie shuddered. “Why? Why is this happening?”
Harmony shook her head. “Whether we like it or not, there’s a price for living in paradise. Maybe that’s sacrifice, maybe it’s not. I have no doubt, there’s more to come.”
No one said a word, the fear too real.
Chapter Twenty-Three
After the Thunder
The storm had calmed, but it still lingers, sulking around the hills like an audience refusing to go home. Rain whispers now instead of shouts, lightning flickering behind the clouds in quiet pulses.
The island has been hollowed out.
The airfield lies before me, shining with the baptism it just received.
The diner sits dark, windows blind, neon gone cold.
The sign lies on the ground—half face down, half still clinging to the wall, letters warped and burnt at the edges. The smell of ozone hangs in the air, sharp and holy. Only I’m here, now—me and the wind, and the steady rhythm of water dripping from broken gutters.
I climb the hill by memory, the path slick, but familiar.
They all sleep down below in town, dreaming of rescue, pretending that morning will fix what they ran from. They believe that storms end because the sky grows weary.
The storm has only shifted.
