“I said, I don’t want you anymore.”
“Doris, I’m offering you a way out and you’re spitting on it?”
He sucked in a breath, looked around, and his eyes landed on the embroidery design archive at the corner of the table. He snatched it up.
Those pages held the craft my mother had passed down to me. It had taken me three years to compile them.
“You don’t want me? What can you even do without me? You think that Gilbert man is really going to come for you?”
“Fine. Then you can forget about keeping this junk too.”
He hurled the whole archive into the fire basin in the corner. The flames licked up instantly, belching black smoke.
I lunged to save it. He shoved me back, and I watched three years of my life turn to ash.
“Ungrateful little wretch.”
He slammed the door behind him hard enough to rattle the frame.
“Apologize to Amy first thing tomorrow, and I’ll think about whether I still want to marry a freak like you.”
His footsteps faded down the path.
I knelt in front of the fire basin and clawed at the charred paper with my bare hands.
Blisters rose across my fingertips. It was already too late.
Most of the archive had burned to ash. Only a few scorched corner pages were left, still smoldering.
That was when the door opened again. Amy Fox poked her head in.
She glanced at me, crouched by the fire basin, and used a teapot to douse the last of the embers.
I looked up at her.
She bent down, picked up those few surviving pages, leafed through them, and carefully tucked them into the front of her clothes.
When her eyes met mine, she smiled.
“Doris, don’t hold it against Louis. His temper runs a little hot, but he’s already been good to you.”
“These things are burned anyway. There’s no point keeping them. Let me take care of getting rid of them for you.”
Then she turned and left with a light, springing step.
She didn’t know yet what those surviving pages would bring her.
The storm came at midnight, without warning.
By the time the thunder jolted me awake, the water inside the house was already up over my ankles.
The village loudspeakers had started blaring the alarm: “Flash flood. Everyone get to high ground.”
I rolled out of bed, bare feet splashing into the rising mud, grabbed my bag, and ran.
The whole village was in chaos.
Adults shouting, children crying, chickens and dogs all tangled into one wall of noise.
The water rose too fast. It was already over my knees.
As I passed the ancestral hall, I heard someone inside screaming.
It was Amy.
I had no idea what she’d run out here for in the middle of the night, but she was trapped inside the ancestral hall.
I cursed under my breath, then turned back to save her anyway.
When I pushed the door open, the water was already up to her thighs.
She was crouched on the altar table, soaked through, screaming until her voice cracked.
“Doris, hurry, save me, I can’t swim!”
The water had climbed to my calves. The earthen walls of the hall were giving off a horrible groaning creak.
I rushed in and grabbed her. “Move, this place is coming down.”
The words were barely out when a crash split the air overhead.
The roof beam had snapped.
In the instant it fell, instinct made me shove Amy clear.
The whole beam came down across my right leg.
The sound of bone breaking was sharper in my skull than the storm.
The pain whited out my vision. I opened my mouth and no sound came.
The water beneath me turned red, fast.
Amy stood a few steps away, a thin scrape of skin torn off her arm by the splinters.
She started sobbing: “Help, Louis, help me!”
It didn’t take long for Louis Carpenter to break in through the window with his men.
He stood in the water, his headlamp swinging from me, then to Amy, then back again.
The moment Amy saw her rescuer, she clutched her arm and shrieked.
“Louis, my arm, I’m bleeding, it hurts so much, it hurts.”
