June glanced out of the window.
The harbor outside was unrecognizable from the pleasant, sun-washed place it was on an ordinary day. The water was black and broken, the boat lights in the marina swinging wildly on their moorings, the rain driving against the glass in sheets that ran and merged and made the world outside into something blurred and shapeless. June watched it and made herself keep breathing evenly.
She felt Holt come to stand beside her before she heard him. There was no sound that announced him specifically, only the shift in the air beside her and the particular quality of a presence she had known for too many years to mistake.
They stood side by side, looking at the storm.
“Two to three hours is not forever,” Holt said.
“No,” June agreed. “It isn’t.”
“Ace will find Willa,” Holt continued. “They’re going to be okay.”
“Yes.” June nodded
“Rad and Margo will also find them,” Holt assured her, trying his best to placate both her and himself.
June looked out at the water. “I know they will.” She was just parroting words now as her mind seemed to have stopped working.
June was trying hard not to think about the gap between the last confirmed contact and now. She was not going to construct scenarios in her mind. Her mind was good at constructing scenarios, and not all of them were ones she could afford to entertain right now in a room full of people who needed June to hold it together.
Willa had trained for emergencies her entire adult career. She had walked into burning buildings, administered treatment in conditions that would have sent most people in the opposite direction. June’s daughter had led people through situations where panic would have cost lives and had never, not once in all the years June had watched her work, succumbed to panic herself. June knew where Willa had learned that quality, because she recognized it. She had spent her own career in rooms where the stakes were enormous, and composure was not optional, and she knew the discipline it took to keep it when everything inside you was screaming to do otherwise.
Willa had learned it by watching June and Carmen her entire life.
That thought hit her somewhere entirely unexpected, and she had to look away from the window for a moment.
Holt’s hand came to rest beside hers on the window ledge.
Not on her hand. Beside it. Close enough that the warmth of him reached her, and she was aware of it in every nerve ending she had apparently forgotten she still possessed. She didn’t move her hand away.
They stood like that, not speaking, watching the rain drive against the glass, and June thought about all the things she had never said to Holt. The years they had taken to not say them in, and June kept every single one of those thoughts behind the place inside her where she’d always stored the things that were true but dangerous.
She had made a habit, a long, practiced, deliberate habit, of not examining certain truths too closely. It wasn’t dishonesty, or so she’d told herself it wasn’t. It was survival of a different kind than the kind Willa was exercising right now on a storm-battered island two miles offshore. But survival nonetheless.
There were things she should have said a long time ago to two people who were everything to her.
June pressed the thought back down and kept her face turned toward the window. She moved her mind away from dangerous thoughts to Rad and Margo, who had gone out into the water in a storm in a small motorboat because Willa, Ace, and four teenagers were on an island with no way off and no contact. Her heart pulled, realizing just how different small-town life was from big-city life. What Rad and Margo had just done was what you did when the people you loved were in danger, and you hadn’t any means at all of reaching them. She looked at Holt.
“Your son is just like you,” June told Holt quietly. “You did a great job raising him.”
Something moved across Holt’s face that she was not going to look at too directly.
“He really is,” Holt said simply. “I got so lucky with a son like him.” A pained expression crossed his face. “It could’ve been completely opposite. He could’ve turned out like his mother.”
“You would never have let that happen,” June said and gave a soft laugh. “And I’m more than sure Mina would not have tolerated that.”
“Oh, no,” Holt said, a smile touching his lips as they spoke about his mother. “She would’ve stepped right in and put Rad back on the right track.”
Dean had moved to the other side of the room and was talking to Lieutenant Reyes again, his voice low and focused, asking about conditions in specific terms that told her he was calculating a flight path in his head and waiting for a window he could reasonably argue was safe enough to use. Zane had finished his call and was standing with Carmen, the two of them with their heads close together in the way they had developed over the past weeks, that quiet, shorthand intimacy of people who had discovered they thought about things similarly and found it remarkable.
June turned back to the window.
The storm had not eased. If anything, the rain against the glass was heavier than it had been ten minutes ago, and the lights of the marina were swinging in wider arcs than before. Lieutenant Reyes had told them two to three hours. June looked at her watch. They were not yet forty minutes into that window.
She was going to stand here for the full length of it, and she was going to keep herself together for every minute of it, because that was what the situation required and because there was no other option available to her. The Coast Guard crews were ready. Zane and Carmen were coordinating. Dean was doing what Dean did: looking for every possible avenue and testing them all until he found one that worked. Holt was beside her.
There was nothing to do but wait.
