“Hey.” Dusty’s hand found hers. “Whatever we find, we’ll fix it. We knew this could happen when we bought the place. We have insurance. Flood, wind, whatever.”
She nodded and swallowed. “I know.”
“So we go look. Don’t rush. Don’t climb, step on, or touch anything I haven’t inspected. You hold tight to Olive and make sure she knows that the storm ruined things, but we will fix it and it doesn’t affect her.”
“Okay.” She hoped the syllables could communicate her gratitude for his strength because she didn’t have any right then.
“You ready?”
Not really, but she smiled. “Yep. Let’s go in.”
The stench hit her before they even opened the front door.
It was the smell of low tide on a hot day, plus the particular thick wet-drywall odor she remembered from flooded staterooms when she worked in the cruise business.
With Olive on her hip and Wingo squashed between them, Tessa hung back as Dusty went first, with the powerful flashlight he had been wise enough to keep in the glovebox. There wouldn’tbe electricity, so they were conserving phone batteries, and the house was going to be dim.
He opened the side door into what had been the laundry room, the one they joked that she had to share when she took the upstairs unit of this house and won the rooftop access. The one he promised to update right after the stairs.
Guess Norman did the updating.
The floor was a slick of fine brown silt. The dryer had floated. It now sat at an awkward angle three feet from where it belonged, leaning into the half-open door of the laundry room. The washer was where they had left it, but it was wearing the line, too, and a piece of something that looked like seaweed was stuck to its side.
“Oh,” Tessa said. “Oh.”
“Deep breath, Tess.”
She nodded and followed him through, taking every step carefully.
The downstairs was…indescribable. Everything was wet, every single wall, sofa, bookshelf, and lower cabinet had the line. Everything that could move had shifted and floated on water that had no right to be in her house, destroying all it touched.
The couch sat in a dent in the floor like a barge run aground. The flat-screen above the not-yet-installed mantel had survived, perched safely above the line, looking ridiculous on drywall that, below the line, buckled visibly.
And where there should have been a staircase up into Tessa’s old upstairs apartment, were the remnants of a renovation in progress.
The interior stairwell stood as it had for a few weeks—gaping and unfinished.
It was still all those things, just wet to the studs, filthy, rotting, and covered in muck and sand and a few dead things she didn’t want to think about.
“It’s uninhabitable down here,” she said, whispering the obvious. “Maybe we could move upstairs. It’s a full apartment, so?—”
“No,” Dusty replied instantly. “Two and a half feet of saltwater soaked into every structural wall. We have no idea how sound the upstairs really is, even if it’s dry.”
“Can we go outside and upstairs to look? To dash in and get what we might need?”
He nodded, still processing the shock and gravity and potential danger. “The outside stairs are independent of that framing,” he finally said. “They’re anchored to the exterior. I want to walk around the perimeter first and look at the building from the outside. If everything looks right, we’ll go up the outside once I test the stairs. Why don’t you step out and get clean air?”
“Of course. Olive shouldn’t breathe this.” She followed him out the way they’d come in and only then realized that the child in her arms hadn’t spoken the whole time. Not a word.
Back in the sunshine, she looked at Olive and made an exaggerated face. “Stinky and messy, huh?”
Olive’s eyes were wide and her face was pale. “Dirty. Everything dirty.”
“And we’re going to make it clean.” She had no idea how or when or what they’d do in the meantime, but she was confident in the promise. “So clean and pretty. All new floors—we can get that nice oak I’ve been lusting after. We’ll paint. And new furniture. Olive, we must see this as a shopping opportunity.”
“Mm-kay.”
Her sweet agreement ripped at Tessa’s heart. “You’ll have your pretty home again,” Tessa said, as much to herself as Olive. “In fact, it’ll be prettier. It’ll just take time.” And money, patience, insurance, decisions, and so many months.
