Sins of the Storm by Jenna Mills

hit, she’d go under.”
    His dad had predicted the same thing. But human nature was funny that way. Folks tended to wallow in horrible possibilities, but never really thought anything bad would happen. Not to them.
    “I remember watching the cable news shows and seeing the satellite imagery, the track straight for New Orleans. And I remember…”
    Her voice trailed off, and through the silence, another voice sounded. Susan’s. She’d called him, terrified. She’d told him she was evacuating, that she wanted out, to go far. That she didn’t want to be there anymore….
    He should have let her go then. He should have realized how miserable she’d become, that being the wife of an airman was not the glamorous life she’d craved. That after the adrenaline rush faded, reality began. And that just because Jack could put on a flight suit and fly combat, that didn’t mean there weren’t skeletons in his closet. That there wasn’t murder…secrets.
    He’d been wrong to bring her to Louisiana. Wrong to think she’d be happy there.
    “What?” he asked, dragging his mind away from Susan, and back to Camille. Without thought, his hand found his thigh.
    “My friends didn’t understand why I was uneasy. Folks in California didn’t really understand how devastating the big one could be.”
    California. It was the first time she’d mentioned a place.
    “No small irony there,” he muttered.
    Her smile was brief, fleeting. “No,” she said. “Everyone loves to talk about the big one, that part of California will fall into the Pacific, but no one actually thinks it will happen.”
    Her words, so close to his thoughts moments before, had him drawing her closer.
    For the first time, she didn’t resist. “But I knew,” she said. “I knew what would happen and when it did…”
    “When it did, what, ’tite chat? ” He wanted to hear her say the words. Needed her to.
    “I was half a country away, but… I felt it, ” she whispered. “I felt it all… everything. ”
    He didn’t want to believe her. He didn’t want to think of her that way, thousands of miles away and hurting, worrying….
    “I kept thinking about Bayou d’Espere,” she whispered. “The trees and the beautiful houses, and I was terrified that I’d look up and find some reporter in one of those dumb boats making his way down Main Street, and that everything would be gone.”
    “Then why didn’t you come back?” The question was low and hoarse. “Why didn’t you try to help?”
    “I couldn’t.”
    She kept saying that. That she couldn’t come back. That it wasn’t that simple, that easy. “Why not?” Somehow he kept the accusation from his voice. “People were desperate for volunteers—”
    She twisted and damn near slayed him with the glow in her eyes. “I bought a plane ticket. I had my bag packed—”
    He gave her a second to finish. When she didn’t, he lifted a hand to slide the hair from her face. Nice, he told himself. And. Slow.
    But all those hard edges kept grinding away. “But what?”
    “I kept calling Mama’s house, Gabe’s office, anywhere I could think of to get information.”
    But the lines had been down. He’d been trying, too.
    “Then I ran across a news story about the courthouse, all the cases pending trial…and he was there.” She moistened her lips before continuing. “Gabe was. He was quoted,” she said.
    Jack remembered the story—he’d seen it himself. It had run on one of the cable news networks. The air had damn near burst out of Jack’s chest when he’d seen Gabe’s tired, shadowed face on the television.
    “He talked about how he’d gotten his family to safety,” she said, “but then he’d gone back to the courthouse with the D.A. and a few of the other A.D.A.’s, to keep things safe.”
    Jack let out a rough breath. “So you decided you weren’t needed after all.”
    The stillness was immediate, in her body, her eyes. “It wasn’t a question of being needed.”
    “Then