“Okay…”
“Head for the coast. Stay off main roads if you can. If things go bad, ditch the car and keep moving on foot. Don’t stop for strangers. Don’t stop for anything.”
Lily was completely still beside me, her breathing shallow, watching them both with wide, unblinking focus.
“Finn…” Fiona whispered.
He reached out and gripped her shoulders.
“Listen to me. Get to the water. Find a boat—anything that floats—and go north along the coast. Once you’re past Gulch Point, twenty miles up is the island. You remember how to get there?”
Island?I pushed it back for later thought.
Her chin dipped once, twice. “Yeah…”
Her lips pressed together, then parted. “You’re talking like—”
“I’m talking as if I need you prepared,” he said.
Something in the way he said it made the room go still. Not the words—the words were almost nothing. It was the quietness beneath them. He held her gaze, didn’t look away, and said nothing else.
Nobody spoke. The clock on the wall ticked once, twice.
Fiona threw her arms around him.
He caught her immediately, his body absorbing the impact without shifting an inch, one hand cradling the back of her head, the other locked across her shoulders. He just held her there.
“I don’t like this,” she whispered into his chest, her voice muffled against the fabric of his jacket.
“Me neither.”
“You’d better come back,” her voice, unsteady yet fierce, shook against him. “You don’t get to show up here to die on me. I love you, Zeus.”
A low chuckle rumbled in his chest. “I love you too, Coolwhip.”
A faint smile ghosted across his mouth at that.
Fiona let out a broken laugh against him, half sob and half surrender. She pulled back slightly, searching his face.
“I’m serious, Finn.”
“I know.”
He brushed a hand over the back of her head, then stepped back.
Fiona turned away quickly, pressing the heel of her palm hard against her cheekbones.
But Lily already understood.
Lily’s eyes fixed on Finn. She quietly mumbled, “Don’t let anything happen to Mom.”
Something shifted in Finn’s expression—there and gone.
I stepped forward and pulled her against me, my chin resting on the top of her head. Her arms slid around my waist and held on. I felt the slight tremor in her shoulders, the way her fingers gathered a fistful of my jacket.
“I’ll be okay,” I said into her hair.
“Promise?”
