She threw her heels straight at his chest, not at the door, not at the porch railing, at him. Marcus Reed barely caught them before they hit his face. He stood there in the dark, soaked through his shirt, staring at the woman on his porch, barefoot, bleeding. Evening dress plastered to her skin, and the first thing out of his mouth wasn't, "Are you okay?" It was, "Clare, what are you doing here?"
She looked past him into the house. Looked back at the road disappearing under 3 ft of black flood water and said, "I'm staying the night." Marcus said, "I've got a sofa." Clare said, "Not sleeping on it."
And that was the moment. Everything Marcus Reed thought he understood about his life started coming apart. The flood warning had been on the radio since 4:00 that afternoon. But Marcus Reed didn't pay it much attention. He'd lived on that ridge above the Tennessee River for 11 years.
The river rose, the river dropped. He'd watched it swallow the road below his house twice before and come back up with nothing more than mud on his tires and a few boards loose on the dock. He wasn't the kind of man who ran from water. He was in the garage at 11 finishing a wiring job on a pontoon motor that a weekend fisherman needed back by Saturday. When the pounding started, not a knock, pounding, both fists, fast and hard, like someone who didn't know if the door was real or if they were dreaming it.
Marcus set down his wrench. He stood up slowly, not because he was afraid, but because his back had been tight since Tuesday, and the cold from the concrete floor had worked into it. He walked to the front of the house, wiped his hands on a shop rag, and pulled the door open. The woman standing on his porch was not someone he expected to see. Not in the rain.
Not at this hour. Not ever again, if he was being honest. Clare Bennett, 29 years old. Maybe 30 by now. Last time he'd seen her, she was the younger sister standing quietly at the back of a room full of people who didn't notice her.
That was the pattern with the Bennett. Clare was never the one anyone was looking at. She was barefoot. Her right ankle had a long cut across it, already dark with dried blood and fresh rain, and she was holding a pair of heels in her left hand. Expensive ones, the kind with a red sole, gripping them by the straps like she might throw them at something.
Her silver evening dress was soaked through and stuck to her like a second skin. And her hair, which he remembered as always being carefully done, was down across her face in wet pieces she hadn't bothered to push back. She was shaking. Not crying, not yet. Just standing there and shaking.
With that look in her eyes that Marcus had seen exactly once before in his life on a man he'd pulled off a capsized skiff in the middle of the river. The look of someone who' just made it to something solid after a long time in the water. Clare. His voice came out flatter than he intended. What happened to you?
I walked, she said. From where? The Caldwell estate. The party. She said it like the words tasted bad.