“What if they’re already in the backyard?”
Finn looked at her. For just a moment, something moved across his face that didn’t belong to the man running numbers—and then it was gone.
“Then we’ll deal with it,” he said simply. “But we don’t go outside unless there’s no other choice. Right now these walls are the safest place any of us have got.”
He turned to me.
“The toolbox. Where did you say it was?”
“Basement,” I said. “Behind the water heater.”
He nodded once and headed back toward the basement door.
I watched him move through my house—my house, rooms he’d never stood in before today—with certainty and quiet purpose.
My body relaxed; I realized I’d been tense since he walked through the door.
Fiona appeared at my side, her eyes fixed on her brother’s back as he disappeared down the basement stairs. A complicated expression, something built over years and not easily named—a mix of pride and worry—moved across her face.
“He’s always like this, sorry,” she murmured. “He built a whole compound himself, designed it from the ground up to survive exactly this kind of scenario: total collapse, total isolation. Self-sustaining, off-grid, the whole thing.” She paused, her voice dropping quieter. “I used to think he was paranoid; probably part of it relates to the Teams.”
“The Teams?” I asked, skipping over everything else she’d said.
“SEALs.” She said it the way people say things they’re proud of but have learned not to lead with. “Ten years. Multiple deployments.” She stopped, then started again. “You know how some people fall apart when everything goes wrong? He’s always been the kind of person who gets calmer when things fall apart. The Navy just—gave that somewhere to go.” She paused. “He was one of the best in his unit.”
Navy SEAL.
I stared at the empty basement doorway.
That explained all of it.
From the staircase, Lily spoke without lifting her face from her knees.
“I like him,” Lily said.
She said it the way teenagers say things they mean completely—not looking for a response.
From below, the toolbox opened. Metal dragged against metal, hinges complained, and then there was the deliberate sound of someone sorting through what was useful and setting aside what wasn’t.
Then, from somewhere down the block, something screamed.
Not a person. Something that used to be one.
The sound was wet and shredded, completely wrong in a way that bypassed the thinking part of the brain entirely—climbing, and then cut off so suddenly the silence after it was worse than the scream had been.
Nobody moved.
Then Lily pressed her face hard into her knees.
I turned away from the window.
Later. There would be time for all of it later—the grief, the sitting somewhere quiet trying to reconstruct how a normal Wednesday had become this. There would be time to mourn every ordinary thing that had existed on the other side of this morning.
Not now.
Right now there were windows to board and doors to reinforce and a man in my basement who was the only reason any of us had a chance of seeing tomorrow.
I went downstairs.
