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. “Theyareall in that cave, and theyareall 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.
4
HOLT
The coast guard operations room had a particular kind of energy that Holt recognized from years of working in spaces where everything depended on the next decision being the right one. It wasn’t panic. Panic was useless, and the people in this room knew better. It was the compressed, humming quality of people holding themselves at a specific level of readiness, not moving until there was somewhere useful to move to, not speaking unless the words served a purpose.
Holt understood that energy. He had lived inside it for most of his adult life.
Tonight it was harder to inhabit than usual.
Holt stood at the operations board with Lieutenant Reyes and worked through the coordination sequence for the third time in forty minutes, because the conditions had shifted twice since they arrived, and each shift required a reassessment of the launch window, the approach route, and the extraction order. The Coast Guard had two crews standing by. Local search and rescue had a third unit at the harbor’s southern dock. Dean had been on the phone with every private pilot and charter operatorwithin range, and Zane had been coordinating with the fire department’s water rescue unit, which had the equipment for a shallow-water extraction if the boats couldn’t get close enough to the island’s eastern shore.
It was a solid response. Well-organized and properly resourced.
But none of it could launch until the weather allowed, and the weather wasn’t allowing.
“The system is tracking northeast at approximately eighteen miles per hour,” Lieutenant Reyes said, her finger moving across the screen. “If that track holds, the worst of it clears across the Sandy Shore zone in roughly ninety minutes. And we can only launch at the first safe window. I won’t risk it beforehand.”
“Ninety minutes is the optimistic read,” Holt said. It wasn’t a criticism. It was the same calculation he had already run in his head twice.
“It is,” Lieutenant Reyes agreed. “The conservative read is closer to two and a half hours. We’re watching it in real time, and we’ll move the moment we can move safely.”
“Understood.” Holt looked at the screen. Two miles of water between the harbor and the island. In ordinary conditions, a twelve-minute crossing. Tonight, in the dark, in these seas, it might as well have been the open Atlantic.
Holt stepped back from the board and pulled out his phone.
He’d called Rad’s number seven times since they’d arrived at the station. Each call had gone straight to nothing, not even a voicemail connection, just the flat digital silence of a signal that didn’t exist. He tried again, now out of the same stubborn,irrational compulsion that made a man check a door he already knew was locked, just in case this time something had changed.
Still nothing.
Holt put the phone back in his pocket and turned toward the window.
Carmen was at the side table with a coast guard officer, going through the medical supply inventory for the extraction boats, working with the quick, methodical efficiency of someone who dealt in emergencies the way other people dealt in ordinary days. She’d already called the clinic and arranged for Lucy to have two trauma bays cleared and ready.
She caught his eye as he moved toward her.
“Does Lucy know about Rad and Margo going out?”
Carmen looked at him steadily and nodded. “Yes, Lucy has been informed.”
Holt nodded. “That’s good, at least she can be prepared.”
