At least that’s how it felt, driving through the flooded streets to her grandmother’s house. Or perhaps the storm was inside Gracie, swamping her hopes and dreams for her daughter, dredging the past from the valleys of her mind, and floating it to the surface. In the backseat, squished in with the dogs, Analise huddled against the door, and Brendan, looking confused and somehow innocent, sat directly behind Gracie. She wondered at Analise’s distance from Brendan. Had the dogs forced her away, or was there trouble in paradise? She met Brendan’s eyes in the rearview mirror, but they revealed nothing of what was going on in his mind. She wanted to hate him, to throw him out of the car, to call him names. But like the storm, her anger simply roiled and ebbed in torrents, bogging her down with indecision and frustration. By the time she reached the house, her nerves were stretched beyond endurance. They raced through the onslaught of wind and rain to the shelter of the porch. There, they found Reilly sitting quietly, a notebook opened to a blank page on the bench beside him.
