✯ North Star ✯

2 - After The Storm

Hurricane Agatha is already on her way, and the crew at the house is moving fast — shutters going up, lawn furniture dragged inside, everybody doing the grim, efficient work of people who've done this before and know better than to underestimate it.

I want to go help John B. The Château is old and stubborn and held together by optimism as much as anything structural, and the idea of him out there securing lines by himself while I'm stuck on Figure Eight property sits in my chest like something I can't swallow. I keep thinking about the shack — the way the wind got under the roof sometimes even in good weather, the way the marsh rose in a bad storm — and the thinking doesn't help anything, so I try to stop doing it and keep not managing to.

But Dad said we weren't leaving. No argument, no negotiation — just that particular tone of his that meant the conversation was already over. When Ward Cameron got serious, you felt it in the room. You stayed put.

So I stayed.

And tried not to think about the Château.

---

The morning after was exactly the kind of mess a hurricane left behind — debris everywhere, the yard rearranged by wind and water, everything slightly wrong in the way of a room someone had moved through in the dark. There was a specific exhaustion to the aftermath of storms, the way the world looked tired even when the sun came back.

"Be careful with that," Dad says, tracking the workers as they maneuver a statue across the lawn. "Rose is gonna kill me."

"Yes, sir, Mr. Cameron."

He watches them go and mutters something under his breath about not wanting to know what it cost, and I watch him do it and feel the particular distance I'd been feeling more and more lately — like he was standing on one side of something and I was on the other and neither of us had acknowledged when the gap had opened.

"Dad, the Wi-Fi's not working." Wheezie appears at my elbow, phone in hand, expression somewhere between devastated and personally offended. "I can't post anything."

"Wheezie, there was a hurricane, sweetheart."

From somewhere across the yard comes Sarah's voice — not words exactly, more of a battle cry — and I look over to find her waving a tennis racket at a cluster of birds with the focused energy of someone who has decided this is her war and she intends to win it. Something in me loosens just slightly at the sight of it. Sarah was good for that.

"What is your sister doing?" Dad asks me.

"Saving mice," I say. "And having a good time."

"Sarah!" Dad starts toward her, some woman trailing behind him with the look of someone important and unhappy about it.

Perfect.

I grab my bag and go, and I don't look back, because looking back is how you got asked questions you didn't want to answer.