I don’t say anything about what still scares me.
Not yet.
Chapter 18
Dane Gallagher
The weather turnsin the early afternoon the way it always does out here—fast and without warning. One moment it’s holding, the next something shifts and the island just… changes.
I’m at the northern point when I see it. The water isn’t just rough anymore—it’s off. The swells cut at the wrong angles, out of sync with the wind. The surface has a tension to it I don’t trust. Even the horizon looks wrong—flat, dimmed, like the light’s been pulled out of it.
I head back to Charlotte.
She’s crouched near the fire, adjusting the wood to keep it burning evenly. I watch her for a second before she notices me.
The changes in her are subtle, but I know her too well not to see them. The way she shifts her weight. The slight favoring of one side when she stands. The tiny pauses that happen mid-task now, like her body checks itself before continuing.
She’s further along than we thought. I stopped trying to pin down how far. The number doesn’t change anything that matters.
She looks up when she hears me, and I catch the quick shift in her expression before she smooths it away.
“We need to move to the yacht.”
She glances past me toward the sky. “It’s going to be bad, isn’t it?”
“Don’t know yet. But I don’t like the way it’s building.”
Her attention stays on the horizon another second. “You think it’ll be worse than the storm in our second year?”
“Maybe.”
Probably.
She nods once, already adjusting to the plan. “Do you think a few days’ worth of food will be enough?”
Charlotte’s eating for two now. Whatever this storm turns into, running low isn’t an option anymore.
“Four days,” I say. “Just in case.”
We move quickly without rushing. She gathers what’ll keep longest—fruit, dried fish, anything that won’t spoil fast—while I fill water containers and secure what we’re leaving behind as best I can.
We’ve done this enough times that it barely requires thought anymore.
By the time we leave, the wind’s changed completely. Not just stronger now. Sharper. More aggressive. The storm’s building fast.
We cross the beach without speaking. The tide’s already pushing harder along the shoreline than it should be this early, water dragging roughly against the sand around our feet.
When the sand shifts beneath Charlotte, I steady her automatically with one hand at her back.
I don’t let go again until we reach the yacht.
“The shelter won’t hold if this gets much worse,” she says as I help her aboard.
“I know.”
I climb up after her and pause for a second, looking back toward shore.
The shelter looks smaller from here somehow. Less permanent. Everything we spent years building and reinforcing suddenly reduced to something fragile against the trees and darkening sky.
