I hold on to John, exhaustion taking over, my eyelids fluttering once more.

* * *

—

When I wake, it’s to another loud boom, a crash of metal, a terrible ripping sound, a sharp crack.

The baby cries.

Beside me on the bed, John’s body quakes, his arms wrapped around me.

“What’s happening?” I blink, trying to adjust to my surroundings. “How long was I asleep?”

“Not long. An hour at most,” John replies, his voice grim. “The sea is rising. Quickly.”

“Is it close to the house?”

“It is.”

The bed is the highest point in the cottage, and there’s no building close by that’s higher in elevation. For the sea to overtake the cottage—

There’s another ripping sound, like the top of a metal can being pulled off in one powerful motion, except much, much louder.

I glance up at the ceiling. “Is that—”

“We lost part of the roof,” he confirms.

In the corner of the cottage, near the front door, rain begins falling through an open gap where the wind ripped the roof off. The floorboards are wet, and it takes a moment for me to realize that it’s not the rain that caused it to accumulate—the water is coming into the cabin from the ground.

The sea is here. We have nowhere to go.

I’m so tired from giving birth that I feel as though I am in one of my dreams, as though none of this can be real. It’s the dream with the boat again, and I’m rocking back and forth, swaying from side to side.

Lucy cries once more, the noise piercing the haze, and I pull the neck of the nightgown Alice lent me aside, letting the baby nurse. It’s taken a few tries for us to get the hang of it, but now her mouth latches on hungrily.

I stare down at the bundle in my arms, another wave of tiredness filling me. Maybe the exhaustion is a blessing, a way to numb the reality of the situation before us.

But we’re still swaying. It’s almost like the cottage is moving, carrying on like a boat on the sea, the bed rocking, sliding.

I try to move, but my body is so weak and I sag against the bed. Water splashes my leg, wetting the hem of my nightgown. The sea is rising, nearing the bed, moving on a steady current.

“Is the house—” I can’t finish the thought, can’t accept what I’m seeing as true.

“It’s floating,” John answers, his voice grim.

I swallow. “Floating?”

“The storm must have carried the house away. Ripped it off its stilts.”

“We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

He doesn’t answer me.

Is this it? All the years I spent hoping for a child, the months with the baby inside me, those first kicks, the tiny flutters that became all-consuming, my body changing, the child inside of me becoming a part of me until we were inseparable. The pain of a few hours ago, the dull ache in my back sharpening to something more unbearable, the sensation and emotion stealing my breath. All of the hopes and dreams for this baby, the stories I conjured up in my mind, the adventures we’d have, the simplicity of daily domesticity no longer me alone, but with a bright-haired child beside me, filling the spaces of our days with cheerful words and laughter. That first sight of my daughter’s eyes meeting mine, her little face scrunched up, her weight settled in the crook of my arms as though she belonged there.

We can’t die.

I hold on to Lucy as tightly as I can, John’s arm wrapped around both of us as the cottage floats along the sea, the storm battering the structure.

How will we survive this night?

Twenty-Three

Mirta

My limbs are frozen, an ache in my chest, my breaths coming in ragged spurts. The eye of the hurricane passed us, and the wind is back again, the water hammering the house, and as I feared, it is worse than before. It’s as though the world is ending, the fabric of it being ripped apart at the seams. And, of course, there is the dead body lying a few feet away from me.

We covered the intruder’s body with one of the bedsheets, wrapping it around his bulk. We briefly contemplated dumping the body outside, allowing the storm to carry it away, but the weather was too dangerous, too unpredictable to risk it. A red stain grows over the white fabric, spreading larger and larger, until I can’t look away from it, the stain on me as well as the body.

What have I done?

“Mirta.” Anthony shakes me—once—twice. “Mirta.”

My gaze jerks away from the dead man and up to my husband. Every action is a tremendous effort, my legs heavy as though they are trudging through the sand, my arms weighed down by the sea.

“You’re in shock,” Anthony murmurs, rubbing my bare arms.

There’s a splatter of red on the sleeve of my dress from where the man’s blood—

I shudder.

“You’re safe,” Anthony croons in my ear. “Everything is going to be fine.”

I brush him off, a spark of anger breaking through all that cold.

“I killed a man. How will everything be fine?”

“He would have killed you if you didn’t kill him first.”

“I killed him,” I repeat, scarcely able to believe it.

“You did what you had to do.” He takes my hand. “You’ll get no judgment here.”

No, I wouldn’t, would I? What sort of world am I entering into? And despite what my mother implored me, all of her earnestly imparted marital advice, I cannot resist the urge to speak my mind. What’s the point in pretending anymore if we’re only going to die anyway?

“He came after us because of your job. Because of your enemies. As what, retaliation for the times you pointed a gun at a man and his family?”

“I have never targeted anyone’s family. You can choose to believe whatever you’d like about me, but there is a measure of honor among the men of my acquaintance, some lines you don’t cross. Frank Morgan has no honor. To send a man like that to the home where I am spending my honeymoon, to have a man like that confront my wife—”

“Why didn’t you warn me? You told me you had a bad business meeting, but I had no idea what that meant, that I should be on guard for someone trying to kill me. If I’d known, I would have told you when I first noticed him hanging around the house. I assumed he was one of the men who worked for you, and I didn’t want to cause problems. I wanted them to like me.”

“You’re right. This is entirely my fault. I met with some of Frank’s local representatives down here to orchestrate a truce between us. It didn’t go as well as I’d hoped, but I didn’t anticipate him moving against me like this.”