“I agree,” Carmen said. Then, after a beat, more quietly. “How is June?”
Holt looked across the room.
June was standing near the far window. She’d been standing there for the better part of an hour, not pacing, not on her phone, not performing the restless, displaced energy that most people defaulted to when there was nothing to do and everything to fear. June was simply standing. Still and composed, and looking out at the storm with the expression of someone who was thinking rather than merely enduring the wait.
Holt had watched June do this in the past. Not in circumstances like these, nothing quite like these, but in other high-stakes moments, in courtrooms and depositions and the compressed, pressurized hours before a verdict came in. June, under pressure, wasn’t June falling apart. June, under pressure, was June distilled down to her most essential self. Quiet, precise, and enormously, quietly strong.
It was one of the first things Holt had ever loved about her.
The thought arrived without warning or invitation, and he let it stand for a moment before he filed it back behind everything else.
“She’s holding up,” Holt told Carmen. “You know, in typical June style.”
“She’s terrified,” Carmen replied.
“Yes,” Holt agreed. “She’s doing both at the same time.”
Carmen looked at him with an expression he couldn’t entirely read. Then she went back to the inventory list.
Dean appeared at his elbow twenty minutes later with the particular energy of a man who had exhausted every option in the room and was working his way back to the beginning to try them all again.
“There’s a break in the southern approach,” Dean told Holt without preamble. “Lieutenant Reyes won’t see it yet because the modeling lags the actual conditions by about twelve minutes. I’ve been watching the anemometer readings. The gusts are spacing out.”
Holt looked at him.
Dean wasn’t a man who exaggerated. He was also not a man who had come this far by reading situations recklessly. Dean had spent his entire career making decisions in dangerous conditions and had the record to show that those decisions were, more often than not, correct.
“Show me,” Holt said.
They crossed to the monitoring station, and Dean walked him through the wind speed data, pointing to the pattern he had identified in the gust intervals, the slight but measurable increase in the time between peaks. It wasn’t dramatic. It wouldn’t look like much to someone without Dean’s specific background or experience. But, to Holt, who had spent many years learning to read the difference between the evidence and the story people wanted the evidence to tell, it looked like a man who knew exactly what he was talking about.
“I’m taking this to Lieutenant Reyes,” Holt said.
“That’s why I came to you first,” Dean told him. “She’ll listen to you.”
Holt wasn’t certain that was true, but he took the data to Lieutenant Reyes anyway, and the conversation was precise and professional. She looked at the readings for a full two minutes without speaking before she turned to her second in command and said something in a low voice that Holt didn’t catch. Then she turned back to him.
“We’ll reassess in twenty minutes,” Lieutenant Reyes said. “If the interval pattern holds, we’ll move the launch window forward.”
“Thank you,” Holt said.
He walked back toward the window.
June turned when Holt was still a few feet away, as if she’d heard him coming despite the noise of the room and the storm beyond the glass. June looked at him with a question on her face that she didn’t put into words.
“Dean spotted a possible break in the southern approach,” Holt told her. “Lieutenant Reyes is reassessing the launch window.”
Something moved through June’s expression. Not relief, not yet, but the slight easing of someone who had been holding a weight at arm’s length for a long time and had just been told they might be able to put it down soon.
“Dean has good instincts,” June replied, her voice flat and devoid of emotion.
“He does,” Holt agreed and stood beside her at the window. The rain was still heavy against the glass, but he could see what Dean had been talking about in the intervals between the hardest gusts. The harbor lights were still swinging, but the arc had reduced slightly, almost imperceptibly, just enough to be real.
“I can’t believe after everything that’s going on in Sandpiper Shores, now we’re dealing with this.” June’s jaw clenched and her eyes never left the window as if she was trying to find some hope there. “They’ve all been through enough already.”
“I know, it’s like life is trying to make things exceedingly difficult for us right now,” Holt said. “But, like the investigation, we’ll get through this too.”
June didn’t look at him as she continued to stare out the window.
