CHAPTER 1
Corinne Scully lay on the beach, gazed out at the vivid blue water of the Gulf of Mexico, and tried to imagine the crashing waves the hurricane might bring. They were calling the storm Juliet, which had launched a thousand bad Shakespeare-related headlines, but there was nothing romantic about the news coverage. The storm had already blasted a path of destruction through the Caribbean, and now it had begun its journey through the Gulf. The only remaining question was where it would make landfall.
She heard the familiar hiss-pop of a beer bottle being opened and glanced up as her husband, Rick, handed her a Corona and began fishing inside their cooler for the small plastic container in which they’d placed a sliced-up lime.
“I’m okay, thanks,” Corinne said, shielding her eyes a bit so she could see his face.
His brow furrowed. “You sure? I thought you wanted another.”
“Maybe in a little while. I’m feeling a little queasy.”
“The sun,” Rick replied. “You should hydrate.”
“With beer?”
Rick smiled. “You don’t want that?”
“Water would be better. You’re right about hydration.”
He retrieved the beer and traded it for a plastic bottle of water. If Rick had taken offense at her rejection of the Corona, he gave no sign, and Corinne took notice. There had been growing tension between them over the past couple of years and she had been dubious about this vacation as a result, particularly since they were sharing the beach house with friends. Jenn and Matti Hautala and their son, Jesse, were more like family. The couples were together so often their kids had grown up squabbling like siblings.
Before marriage, it had never occurred to Corinne how difficult it would be to find another couple whose company both she and Rick would treasure, but Jenn and Matti were that couple. Which meant the four of them knew one another’s secrets, and that Jenn had begun to sense the turmoil brewing in the Scullys’ marriage before Corinne herself had consciously become aware of it.
On his beach towel, Matti reached out a hand without even opening his eyes. “My psychic gift tells me there is an unwanted beer floating in the ether. Come to me, lost soul, and we shall be one.”
Corinne laughed. Rick nodded in satisfaction and slapped the dripping bottle of Corona into Matti’s hand. With a grunt, Matti sat up and stared at the bottle as if it had magically manifested in his grasp, then looked up to the sky and mouthed “thank you” toward the heavens before tipping the bottle to his lips. When he lay back down, the bottle nestled into the sand by his head, Jenn reached over from her towel and laid a dark arm across his pink-tinged back in the quiet, contented way they always seemed to manage so easily.
We used to be like that, Corinne thought. Or at least she believed they had. But she and Rick both worked so much that they were often apart, and the less time they spent together, the harder it was for her to remember that she loved her husband, and the easier it was to see the traits she found irritating about him. She could tell that Rick felt the same, that their frequent sparring and the many nights they went to bed with a chilly space between them had taken a toll.
So they had returned to paradise.
The Scullys had been to Captiva, Florida, many times. It always seemed to clear their heads and give them time to breathe and take stock of their lives. Over the years there had often been talk of the Hautalas joining them, and now it had finally happened.
Captiva Island was connected by a small bridge to Sanibel, which was itself connected to the mainland by a miles-long causeway, but out here at the end of the tiny island they might as well have been a thousand miles from their working lives, what Corinne thought of as their office selves. Normally, that distance from the so-called real world was enough to let them exhale, and to ease any tension between them. But this trip felt different to Corinne. It seemed as if Rick found it impossible to relax. If anything, thanks to Hurricane Juliet, Rick had been getting more wound up by the hour.
He opened a new beer for himself and sat on the edge of his beach towel, watching her.
Corinne squinted at him. “You want to go for a swim? I’m sure Kelsey would love it.”
Kelsey, their nine-year-old, was still Daddy’s buddy. Emma, who had turned fourteen in April, had grown too serious to let her father toss her around in the waves. The girls had set up their own beach camp a little ways down the sand with the Hautalas’ son, Jesse. The kids wanted their own space, their own vacation, and although it made Corinne sad, she couldn’t blame them.
Rick did not respond. He sipped his beer.
“Babe?”
He took another sip. “You really think it’s safe to stay?”
She knew he hated when she rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t help it. “We’ve been through this,” she said.
“I still think—”
“We know what you think,” Corinne said, her voice low, glancing over at Jenn and Matti, who were studiously ignoring the conversation. “But the odds of Juliet hitting us are slim, and you know it.”
“Slim, and growing. And if they’re so slim, why evacuate?”
She took a deep breath. He wasn’t wrong, but she was sick of talking about it and knew the Hautalas were equally tired of the topic. The storm had been headed for East Texas, and then for the Louisiana coast. Its track kept wobbling, and so every national meteorologist had started to cover their ass by posting a variety of possible paths for Hurricane Juliet, including several models that showed it striking Lee County, Florida, passing over the islands. It had gone from a Category 4 down to a 1, then back up to a 2, its strength just as much a variable as its landfall location. The governor of Florida had ordered the islands and the coastal area on this stretch of the Gulf shoreline to begin voluntary evacuation, but Corinne, Jenn, and Matti all agreed it was too soon to panic.
“We paid a lot of money for this house,” she reminded Rick for at least the tenth time. “Let’s give it another day, see what the forecast says. If they make the evacuation mandatory, we’ll go.”
Rick took a long draught of beer. At forty-one, his hair remained dark and his handsome features sharp, but he had worry lines around his eyes and dark circles beneath them. He looked tired, and they had already been in paradise for two nights.
He turned those tired eyes on her. “And if we’re putting the kids in danger?”
Anger rippled through her. She pressed her lips together, fighting the urge to tell him off. How dare he accuse her of risking her daughters’ safety? But snapping at him would only make things worse, so instead she stood and turned toward the Hautalas.
“Who wants to go for a swim?”
Copyright © 2019 by Daring Greatly Corporation
