The chatter rose again, and Kate cheerily helped serve, but when everyone had a full plate and had dispersed to places to eat, she realized she wasn’t hungry.
With no one noticing, she slipped out to the back deck for air and the chance to take in the yard she hadn’t examined yet.
It was, indeed, a wreck, but oddly beautiful. She walked to the railing to survey a world stripped by the storm—branches lay everywhere, scattered and broken. The oaks had been pulled half-bare, their leaves torn off, green and plastered now in chartreuse patches against the side of the house, the fence, the firepit area.
One maple had come up at the roots entirely and lay along the ground with its ragged, torn underbelly showing, like something not meant for human eyes.
The light came in low from the east under the edge of the cloud, moving across the soaked and battered yard. The sun found every wet surface, turning silver pools to hammered metal, the plastered leaves lit one by one like small green lamps, the torn roots of the fallen maple gone gold.
The whole ruined backyard held the light up and somehow became lovely. Not in spite of the wreckage, but because of it.
Kate knew exactly what she was looking at. She could have written it on a board and taught it to a lecture hall full of freshmen. The angle of light, the scatter of clean, rain-washed air, the simple physics of water bending rays. She knew exactly how this picture was painted.
She just didn’t knowwhodid the work.
Was it the same creator of the cells she saw under a microscope? The one who somehow made sure that stained glass cathedral windows perfectly matched the shape and symmetry of the top cross-section of human DNA? Oh, that article she’d read about it in her research had kind of wrecked her.
She thought about the wall her studies had run into, and how the road stopped short of what Eli wanted from her. How he loved her and believed a thing she could not believe, and how neither of them knew the end of their story.
And Kate Wylie, who had never considered this before, who had no form for it and no faith behind it and would have been embarrassed to be caught doing it, looked at the light on the shattered beauty of the morning and opened her mouth, taking in a breath.
“Okay,” she said into the air. “If you’re there, if you’re real, if you’re any of what they say you are—then I need you to do the thing I can’t do for myself. I’ve looked as hard and as honestly as I know how, and I’ve hit the end of what I can find on my own.”
She drew another breath and let it out with a shudder.
“So prove it,” she said to the light. “Prove to me you’re real. That’s the whole thing. That’s my, uh, prayer. I don’t know how to make it fancier. Prove it, and I’ll go wherever that leads. But I can’t take the last step in the dark. You’ll have to turn on a light and make it obvious.”
That bird—probably the one they heard this morning, a hearty little sparrow—flitted around some stripped oaks. Thewater lay silver in the low places. The light kept moving across the wreck of the world, and Kate stood in it and waited, the way a scientist waited for an experiment to reveal a result…and got nothing back.
No proof. No answer. No nothing.
Well, she’d asked and, honestly, that wasn’t easy.
The sliding door opened behind her.
“There you are.” Eli came out, two mugs in his hands, and gave her one without asking. “What are you doing out here?”
If she told him…no. It would give him hope he shouldn’t have.
“Breathing,” she said instead.
“Fair.” He stood beside her and looked out at the messy yard, and for a moment neither of them said anything. “Bridges should be open by noon,” he said after a few beats. “They’re clearing Gulf Shore Drive now. We can head down in a few hours after Peter’s office maps out a route of side roads that don’t have downed trees. Then we’ll see what we’re dealing with. I won’t rest till I’ve put eyes on that house.”
“Then we’ll go put eyes on it.”
He looked at her—grateful, worn, hopeful in the particular way that still, after everything, made her chest ache. “Thank you,” he whispered.
She stared at him, thinking, for a moment, that he’d heard her pray. “For…what?” she asked haltingly.
“For staying through this storm,” he said. “For all you’ve done and all you are and all you put up with from me this week.” He leaned down and gave her a light kiss. “I love you so much, Kate.”
She leaned into him and said the only thing she could—the truth. “I love you, too, Eli.”
The trip home from Rock Hill should have taken forty minutes.
It took two hours and seventeen minutes, and Tessa spent every one of them with her hands wrapped around a coffee she had stopped drinking somewhere on the wrong side of Niceville.
As she fixed her gaze on a world that was steadily, mile by mile, getting worse, she tried to keep up with songs, baby finger books, and distractions when Olive wasn’t asleep.
