chapter nineteen

meghan

“Meghan.”

I jolted awake, finding Chase kneeling on the bed beside me, his hand resting on my shoulder. The room was darker than it should have been. I shot up straight, wiping the dot of drool from the corner of my mouth. Good God, how embarrassing. “What time is it?”

“It’s almost five. We slept for an hour, and your phone keeps ringing.” I scrambled for it beneath my pillow, my phone’s usual spot, but Chase handed it to me. “It was in the living room.”

I had two missed calls from Graham and a text from Xander, who wondered where I was. My phone rang again before I could answer either of them, and it was Xander this time.

“Xan, I’m sorry—I came back to my apartment to rest. What’s going on?”

“Our lovely editor is insisting you and I consolidate our info and collaborate on this tornado story for the front page. When the hell will you be back?”

Still half-asleep, I could barely process his words. “But who gets credit?”

“We’ll share the byline. Not like we haven’t done that before.”

“No, I mean, in the competition,” I said, picking my shoes up from the floor. Chase was sitting at the foot of the bed with Wanda in his lap, staring at his own phone. “Who gets the points?”

Xander let out an exasperated sigh. “He said breaking news doesn’t count. Will you just get here so we can write this thing? And send me what you’ve got while you’re on your way.” And with that, he hung up.

“Ugh,” I groaned.

Chase looked up from his own phone, swiping Wanda’s tail away from his face. “What’s wrong?”

“Graham says breaking news doesn’t count in the competition with Xander. So what’s the point?”

Chase stared at me with a couple of slow blinks. “Informing the public…?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered, pulling my knee up to my chest to fasten the strap of one of my sandals. My left hand felt tingly and weak from sleeping on it, making me struggle with the second shoe. “Shit,” I whispered.

Chase nudged Wanda off his lap and slid off the bed onto the floor to kneel in front of my feet. He rolled his eyes, grinning at the way I tried to pull my foot away. Did he think I was a toddler? “Just let me help you, dammit,” he insisted, with one hand on the back of my ankle, the other on the bottom of my shoe, to bring my foot to his thigh. As he took the strap in his hand, he stared up into my eyes, his fingers tickling the back of my ankle when he moved them away. The sensation sent a tingly feeling all the way up my leg as he lowered his eyes to concentrate on the buckle.

Fuck, I really didn’t mind the sight of him kneeling at my feet.

He let out a quiet grunt, adjusting the placement of my foot on his lap. It shouldn’t have been so difficult to simply buckle a shoe, but maybe he was taking his time on purpose. My mind went to a dirty place, imagining him pushing me back on the bed and climbing atop me like he had so many times before. The memory of the weight of his body pressing down on mine made my heart race. Could he hear how fast I was breathing?

“You okay?”

Shit, he could hear it. I yanked my foot away the second he tucked the strap behind the little black loop. “Yes. Let’s go.” I couldn’t look him in the eye as I gathered my things, almost forgetting my phone on the bed. When I reached for it, Chase stood up and grabbed me by the wrist. I held my breath, half afraid he was about to kiss me, and half afraid of how badly I wanted to let him.

But he said, “Please don’t take offense when I say this, but you should probably look in a mirror before we go.” His eyes lingered on my hair, which had been secured in a perfect bun that morning. That felt like an eternity ago, and I imagined I probably looked exactly how someone who’d been through a tornado would look.

I sighed, letting out a nervous laugh to cover my sudden, inexplicable nervousness. “Right. Good call.” I pulled my wrist from his grip, brushing past him toward the mirror above my dresser. My hair had come unraveled, dark strands falling around my face in a wild, tangled mess. I tried to adjust it with my fingers, tucking pieces back in here and there, ultimately deciding to let my hair down completely. From the corner of my eye, I saw Chase standing behind me, watching with that familiar, infuriatingly patient expression on his face. He wasn’t rushing me, but the intensity of his gaze made me feel even more flustered.

I wasn’t one to show up at work with a sloppy hairdo, but then again, a tornado wasn’t a bad excuse, was it? I reached for a claw clip, taking two seconds to gather all my hair at the back of my head. Then I grabbed a make-up wipe, quickly removing the smudges from beneath my eyes as I made my way to the bedroom door. I paused, turning to face Chase. “Do I look decent?”

He wasn’t smiling, but the expression on his face was warm, nonetheless. “Decent?” He shook his head. “Meghan, the way you look after surviving a tornado is what most people strive for on their best day.”

I fought the compulsion to giggle like—well, like a schoolgirl—and pretended to be annoyed instead. “Whatever. Don’t try to flatter me,” I muttered, squeezing past him on my way through the bedroom door. He could see right through the facade, though, grinning as he followed me out.

What a long, confusing day this had been.

**

In the days that followed, our work shifted to round-the-clock tornado relief coverage, forcing us to push most of our other assignments aside so we could give it our full attention. Most of the events on our schedule were canceled, anyway, as the entire town focused on the storm’s aftermath. Clean-up efforts were underway, and local businesses had stepped up, offering supplies and meals to those affected.

The National Weather Service classified the tornado as an EF-3. Thankfully, there were no deaths, and only a few injuries, including the school custodian. In my phone interview with Sarah two days after the tornado, she let me know Russell had suffered a collapsed lung and a lot of broken bones, but he was already taken off the ventilator and breathing on his own. “He’s going to make a full recovery,” she said.

My mind wandered to the day I had to make the decision to take my mom off her ventilator, knowing she would never breathe on her own again. The memory of the sound of the machine in her hospital room made me lose my train of thought for a moment.

Memories like that hit me like a freight train sometimes. It didn’t matter where I was or what I was doing. Grief didn’t wait. It just barreled on through, dragging me back to that hospital room, where I watched helplessly as my mom succumbed to pneumonia after the cancer had already ravaged her body. I had to shake my head, like I could physically push the memory away. Not now , I told myself.

“I’m sorry,” I said, adjusting the phone against my ear. I clenched my eyes shut, trying to picture Sarah’s face instead of my mother’s. “There’s so much going on here, it’s hard to stay focused. But I wanted to ask about your plan for moving forward. Um, let’s see…” I flipped through my notes, trying to get myself back on track. “Have you been given a timeline for when students can return, and what they will do in the meantime? E-learning, I assume?”

There was a heavy sigh on Sarah’s end. “Unfortunately, I received some bad news this morning. Much of the school’s roof suffered damage, not just the gymnasium. The structure isn’t safe. It might be weeks before we’re back at Grissom. We are moving to e-learning for the time-being, but I’m working with Superintendent Delgado to look at other options.”

I tapped my pen on my notebook. “Like alternative buildings?”

“Yes, exactly,” Sarah said. “Because here’s the thing—for some of these children, their only complete meal of the day is our school lunch. I’ve also been in conversation with many parents who don’t know what they’re going to do for childcare. And the kids who view the school as their only safe place have no safe place now. That’s why I’m going to push for in-person schooling, one way or another.”

I jotted down Sarah’s words, myhand moving as fast as my thoughts. I’d sort of developed my own language when it came to taking notes during phone interviews; a combination of abbreviations and shorthand that would make the pages of this notebook indecipherable to anyone else.

It reminded me a little of the strange, rune-like symbols I’d discovered doodled inside Fannie’s journal. There were six of them across the top of one of the pages, with a few similar markings spread throughout the book. I’d meant to research the meaning behind those symbols the day the tornado hit, but—well, things had gotten a little hectic since then.

My pen hovered over the last word as I considered Sarah’s concerns, finally processing what she’d just said. Those kids needed a place for in-person instruction. What better than an old school?

Between our newspaper staff, the TV news crew, and the radio guys up on the third floor, we took up less than half the building, even counting the offices and storage. As far as I knew, the cafeteria was still functional, and so were the bathrooms. We couldn’t fit the entire Grissom student body in this building, but we could probably accommodate a good number of them.

“Sarah, has anyone spoken to Silas Brown?”

“He’s… the head of your news network, isn’t he? I don’t think so.”

“Well,” I said, sitting up a little straighter. “I’m not sure if you’re aware, but we moved our offices into the old Clark Elementary building not long ago, and there’s still a lot of unused space. That might be exactly what you’re looking for.”

Sarah had a lot of questions for me. Was the building accessible? Did all the rooms have working air conditioners. Were the words“FUCK ENZO” ever removed from the side of the gymnasium? All the important things. I was able to give her some answers before passing along Silas’s contact info.

The second I hung up, I was startled by Xander’s brooding presence over the side of the cubicle. His hands gripped the top of the wall, and he was looking at me like I was a bug he wanted to squash. “Are you out of your damn mind?”

“I’m sorry?” I spun in my chair to face him.

“You want to bring a bunch of noisy-ass kids into this building? Do you have any idea what that’ll mean for us? Extra security, no more coming and going as we please, and sharing a bathroom with a bunch of toddlers who’ll piss on the floor?”

“Toddlers don’t go to elementary school,” I said, holding back a laugh.

He ignored me, nodding toward my phone on the desk. “Call Sarah back right now and tell her you spoke to Silas yourself. Tell her it’s not going to work.”

I set my pen down and folded my arms. “You should’ve heard how stressed Sarah sounded. This is going to help her out, and isn’t she your friend’s wife? What would Owen think of this reaction?”

That got him to close his mouth, at least momentarily. “There are other buildings,” he mumbled.

Another realization struck me. I leaned back in my chair, a slow smile stretching across my face. “I wonder,” I said, touching my chin with my pointer finger, “if your beloved librarian would move into this building. You’d probably get to see her every weekday, wouldn’t you?”

Xander’s face softened, and his eyes dropped to the floor. He could deny his affection for Abigail all day, but his love for her was written all over his face. After a moment, his jaw clenched again, and he disappeared from my view. I heard the squeak of his desk chair as he sank into it, having changed his mind.

“That’s what I thought,” I hollered over the cubicle wall. Xander was probably just bitter about our competition being put on hold while we covered tornado-related news. Graham told us we could return to our regularly scheduled assignments in a week.

I’d also seen less of Chase than normal over the past couple of days. Our reporting required us to be in different places at odd times, often with little notice.

Sitting alone in my quiet cubicle, staring at the blank document before me, I found myself missing Chase. Actually, truly missing him. A hollow ache settled in my stomach, and it wasn’t from hunger or anxiety, the usual culprits. It wasn’t grief, either—no tears came when I stared at the picture of my parents on my desk.

That ache deep within my body? It was longing .