Page 81 of Chasing the Other Woman

Brooks takes the turn when I point. The truck fishtails hard enough that my shoulder slams into the door. He catches it, cursing under his breath, and gravel spits out behind us. For a few seconds, the world gets smaller. The cab. The radar. Brooks’s hands on the wheel. The brown leather bracelet against his wrist. The rain. My own breathing, too fast and too loud.

I check the velocity, then the reflectivity, and then our position. The storm isn't behaving. It's erratic. The circulation tightens, wobbles, shifts, then wraps itself in rain like it knows exactly how badly I need to see it.

“Talk to me,” Brooks says.

“Inflow's getting stronger. Motion’s messy. It’s trying to turn right again.”

“Toward us?”

I don’t answer fast enough.

“Sam.”

“Maybe.”

He nods once, and that scares me more than if he’d argued. “Options?”

I drag my fingers over the map. “North road’s half a mile ahead.”

“Good.”

“No. Not good. Low-water crossing.”

“West?”

“Gone.”

“South?”

“We’d drive right into it.”

He absorbs that without flinching. “Then we keep east.”

“We try.”

The word hangs between us. Try.

The truck jolts over a rut. Rain hammers the roof with the force of thrown rocks. Something larger skids across the road ahead of us, pale and jagged, and Brooks swerves just enough to miss it without taking us into the ditch.

“Power line?” he asks.

“Fence panel, I think.”

The radar updates. My stomach drops.

“Brooks.”

He hears it. “What?”

“We’re not outrunning this in the truck.”

His hands tighten on the wheel. For one awful heartbeat, I wait for him to become the man who locked me out of the field. The man who heard danger and tried to shrink my world to keep me safe.

Instead, he says, “Tell me what we’re doing.”

I look out through the windshield, searching between pulses of rain. There. A farmhouse, half hidden by trees bent nearly sideways. The roof has already lost pieces. A small concrete structure sits low to the ground beyond it, with a metal door angled away from the wind. Storm shelter.

“There,” I say. “Right side. Past the mailbox.”