Chapter 2

The morning after the hurricane passed, the whole complex was without water and without power.

The rain that had flooded in overnight stood in a layer across the living room. Worse, after the fright and the cold of the night before, Owen's little face had gone red and his breathing had turned fast and shallow.

I put my hand on his forehead. He was frighteningly hot.

The ear thermometer read 100.8.

A fever in a newborn is not something you wait out. I went straight to panic.

Dragging my swollen, inflamed leg through the standing water, sweating, I tore through every drawer and cabinet looking for the cooling patches.

While I searched, I used what was left of my phone battery to call Caleb.

"The number you have dialed is not available."

The recorded voice bounced around the empty apartment. I wouldn't accept it. I called again. And again.

All morning. Twenty calls. Every one of them dead air.

Outside there were downed trees everywhere and floodwater up past my chest. No car, and a leg I couldn't stand on. There was no way to carry a feverish baby to the hospital by myself.

All I had was half a bottle of drinking water. I wet a washcloth with it and wiped his forehead, his underarms, his palms, over and over.

Sweat soaked through my nightshirt. The movement split the wound in my calf open again and it started to bleed.

I counted the minutes one at a time while the despair spread through me a little further.

It was almost noon when the front door finally opened and Caleb walked in, soaked to the skin and worn out.

"This weather is going to kill somebody. There's water over every road out there."

He complained while he changed his shoes. He hadn't brought a single thing—no water, no batteries, no food, no supplies.

But he was carefully cradling an expensive insulated food carrier against his chest.

Then he saw the wreckage of the living room, and the blood soaking through the gauze on my leg, and he stopped dead.

He crossed the room fast, and something like alarm finally reached his eyes. "Lena, what happened to your leg? How did the place end up like this?"

I stayed on the edge of the bed without looking at him and kept wiping Owen's face.

"Last night you said the wind was too strong to come home. So where were you all morning? Why was your phone off?"

Caleb's eyes slid away. He shifted the carrier behind his back without thinking, and his voice came out guilty and coaxing.

"The wind died down a little this morning, and Brielle said she'd been too scared to eat all night. She's out there alone with a kid, and I felt bad, so I went across town to that place she loves and got her a bowl of their seafood chowder.

"That side of town still had power, and the line was out the door. My phone was already low and it shut itself off. Lena, I swear I didn't do it on purpose."

I stopped wiping. I looked at the carrier. And then I laughed.

A hurricane. The entire city shut down. Water up to your waist on the main roads.

And my husband had crossed half of Rivermarch and stood in line for his brother's widow's bowl of chowder, and hadn't cared enough to notice his phone was dead.

Meanwhile his wife, eight weeks out from delivering his child, sat in a dark apartment with no running water and a bleeding leg, watching over his feverish son and making twenty calls that went nowhere.

"Babe, don't be like that. I'm here now, aren't I?" Caleb reached to put his arms around me.

I turned away from him and pointed calmly at the door.

"The chowder's getting cold. Go deliver it."

Caleb went rigid. Finally he got out, "Do you have to be so damn petty about this? She's my brother's widow."

I didn't bother answering. I turned back and took Owen's temperature again.

Somewhere inside me, I drew a line through the first chance.