Her lower lip began to tremble. “I only left him for a few seconds, but then everything started shaking and shit was falling everywhere. The quake knocked me to the ground and I smacked my head on the curb.” She touched a bloody hand to a matted parting in her hair that Ana hadn’t noticed before. “By the time the shaking was over the entrance was like that and I couldn’t get back in again. Then I saw the water coming and I ran. I-I ran across the street to the dentist on the second floor. I stayed there until the water was only knee deep and then I started trying to clear the entranceway. The dentist and his assistant helped me for a while, but then they left to go home to their families.”
Chest heaving, Kyla fisted handfuls of her blond hair either side of her ears and pulled them tight. “Cody’s my f-family, he’s all I’ve got, and I heard him—I’m sure I heard him crying. Oh God. I should’ve stayed with him. I should’ve—I should’ve…” Kyla folded over with a howl, her bruised and battered arms wrapped around her middle.
The young woman’s grief smacked Ana like a physical slap. Ashamed of her selfishness, Ana slipped off her backpack and drew out her spare T-shirt. She rubbed Kyla’s shoulders and drew her upright. She knew what it was to be a young mother with only yourself to blame when your life shattered around you.
“Kyla, honey, it’s not your fault. You’re doing everything you can to help your little boy. We’ll help, too. Here, put this on.” Ana guided her over to the backpacks and slipped the T-shirt over Kyla’s head. The woman’s teeth were chattering in the cool morning air, but at least it was another layer. “You sit here and rest a little. That’s Daniel, and I’m Ana. We’ll keep digging.”
She joined Daniel in the doorway, hauled a chunk of concrete off the pile, and tossed it behind her.
“Any more sounds from inside?” she whispered.
Daniel met her gaze. After a moment’s hesitation he shook his head—a slight movement in case Kyla was watching.
She lowered her gaze and selected another small slab. “There’s still hope, though.”
“There’s always hope.”
Kyla had made good headway forging a path inward. A few passersby stopped and helped, but it was hard, brutal work. After an hour of repetitive pick up, twist, throw the debris away, Daniel spotted the timber framing of the café entrance.
“I see it.” He pitched his voice low so it only carried to Ana.
Kyla had joined the effort several times, but exhaustion finally won and she lay curled on the ground, asleep by their backpacks.
“Cody? Baby, can you hear us?” Ana called quietly, brushing away a moth that buzzed her ear before it winged through the small gap between doorframe and rubble. If only they could get inside so easily.
The weak whimpering response galvanized them both to frantic action.
The aftershock hit with sudden fury.
Not as powerful as previous ones, it was still strong enough to shift the rubble under their feet. Another lump of concrete broke under the strain of supporting the mass above and it slid with a dry screech toward the spot where Daniel struggled to stay upright, his focus on Cody blinding him to the danger.
Years of snatching unsafe items out of the grasp of her two offspring had honed Ana’s reflexes. She snagged the back of Daniel’s jeans, using her body weight to pull them both backward. The concrete smashed onto the pile and sent an avalanche of debris cascading toward them. Daniel, regaining his balance, grabbed Ana and swung her out of the way.
As soon as the shaking subsided, Kyla darted around them and clambered to the tremor-enlarged opening.
Daniel brushed a strand of hair away from Ana’s face. “You saved my life.”
“No big deal.” She stepped away from him with a wary smile. “Just returning the favor.”
“Cody—oh my God.” Kyla’s sobs echoed through the stillness.
Daniel and Ana scrambled over the loose rocks, peering through the clouds of dust to where Kyla crouched under a huge steel beam. Beneath the protective slant of the beam, faint whimpering drifted out of a grit-covered stroller.
Slabs of concrete lay at odd angles around the rest of the small café and the smell—brine and garbage, dank mud and a rotting earthy meaty stench beneath it all that caused Ana’s stomach to churn. A thick layer of silt and sticky mud coated the once polished tile floor, evidence of the tsunami’s presence. Cody had been fortunate, out of the reach of the water and protected by the beam from falling debris. Fortunate, too, that the boy still held a bottle of formula in his hands—although it was empty now. Others, though, were not so fortunate. Ana averted her gaze from the still body of the elderly woman Kyla had described, pinched her nose shut, and called out. Her hopes of finding other survivors weren’t great considering the amount of noise the three of them had made shifting fallen masonry.
Daniel also shouted and, braver than her, touched a couple of human limbs exposed under the debris. Nobody answered and Daniel grimly shook his head at her after checking yet another victim. They edged around an upturned table to where Kyla crouched beside the stroller.
She unhooked the safety straps and lifted the boy out, her whole body quivering with emotion and fatigue. She backed out of the beam’s shadow and turned to Daniel. “Please, can you carry him? I don’t know if I’m strong enough.”
Daniel stepped forward and accepted the boy, who stared at him in silence. The gentleness with which he stroked the grimy blond curls on the child’s head caused Ana’s heart to suddenly skid sideways.
“Come on, mate,” he said. “Let’s get you out of here.”
Ana wrapped a supportive arm around Kyla’s waist and followed Daniel, who led them all into the light.
Hours of daylight had slipped by while Daniel and Ana helped Kyla recover Cody and then escorted them both to the nearest group of medics. They directed rescue workers to the café, with Daniel providing a head count of those he’d found unresponsive. After leaving Cody and Kyla at the makeshift field hospital, they accompanied another group of civil defense workers back to Ana’s building, where Maggie waved at them from the third-floor window. Having gained promises of equipment arriving soon to rescue Ana’s coworkers, they finally set off out of the business district.
The next thirty minutes were wasted in a heated argument when Ana insisted they keep hiking toward home.
“We’re both exhausted,” Daniel said finally. “There’s rain coming”—he jerked his chin up at an approaching bank of thunderously black clouds—“and it’ll be getting dark in an hour. The Wellington motorway—assuming there still is a motorway—is not something we want to tackle at night with the risk of landslides from the hills above.”
Ana swore, her gaze skimming over the dense green hills of bush that formed a spine between the two cities. Landslides probably were a given, but they’d made so little progress today—
Continuous tinny beeps from both backpacks caused them to stop, stare at each other, and then scramble to shrug the bags off.
Chapter 13
Saturday, July 24. 4:04 p.m. Lower Hutt, greater Wellington area, New Zealand.
* * *
Ana’s hand disappeared into the guts of her backpack and came up triumphant, her hand shaking as she jabbed at the screen. “Ten new text messages.” Her voice wobbled as she dragged her index finger down the screen. “Two are from Theo’s phone, and one from Nadia.”
Daniel’s heart clenched.
Nadia. He watched Ana open her messages without making a move to retrieve his own phone. “Read them out.”
Ana sucked in a deep, shuddering breath. “Nadia says: Alyssa and I are fine. You and Dan okay? House not too bad but my phone battery nearly dead.” Tears squeezed out from the corners of her eyes.
She tapped the screen again. “Theo says: I’m good. You okay?” Ana forced out a strangled laugh. “Not much of a talker, my son. His second message says: Going to Granddad’s house. Meet me there. Thank God, they’re alive. They’re alive.” Her voice fractured into a sob and sh
e sank to the ground beside her backpack.
In that timeless and ineffectual way men had done for thousands of years, Daniel rubbed her shoulders while Ana cried. When the tears finally tapered off, he helped her back to her feet.
“We need to find shelter,” he said.
Some of the fight had drained out of her now that she knew her kids were okay, and she nodded. “There’s an old family friend that lives about a twenty-minute walk away. Let’s try there.”
“Mrs. Wilcox used to live next door to us for years when I was growing up,” Ana said as they walked up a concrete path split into a labyrinth of fissures.
The single-story villa seemed to have been spared any major damage—aside from a few cracks in the lower concrete foundation, the house was remarkably untouched. Mrs. Wilcox was fortunate in her choice of real estate, picking a property in a hilly suburb out of the path of the tsunami.
“She and my mum were good friends, and she still rings Dad a few times a year to see how he’s getting on.” She pressed the doorbell.
Soon after the chimes died away, footsteps tentatively approached on the other side of the door.
“Mrs. Wilcox? It’s Ana. John’s daughter,” Ana called out.
“Ana? Is it really you?” The voice quavered and rose to an expectant pitch.
Locks clicked and the door swung inward. Mrs. Wilcox peeped around the edge, looking like a tuft of dandelion fluff that would blow away at the slightest gust of wind.
“Ana, it is you.” She flung the door wide open and held out her arms—with one of her gnarled hands grasping the neck of a plastic spray bottle.
Ana hugged the elderly woman and kissed her cheek. When Ana stepped back, Mrs. Wilcox turned a speculative stare on him and nudged Ana in the ribs with a bony elbow. “Who’s this handsome young man?”
“This is Daniel Calder, Mrs. Wilcox. He’s my nanny’s brother. He was meant to be visiting her this weekend.”
Mrs. Wilcox’s lips pursed and any suggestion of teasing in her previous tone disappeared at the mention of Ana’s children. “That’s where you’ll be headed, then, back to your wee kiddies?”
“Yes.”
“And John?”
“Theo’s with him at his place, and after I check on Alyssa I’ll go and bring them both back.”
“You’ll stay here tonight. Get a good night’s rest and some supplies in the morning.” It was an order, not a question.
“Thank you, Mrs. Wilcox. We’d appreciate your hospitality.” Daniel kept his tone smooth and polite.
Mrs. Wilcox reminded him of a scary old woman he and his brothers had labelled a witch when they’d spent childhood summers roaming the rural neighborhood around their farm. Mrs. Simmons caught the brothers stealing plums from her garden once, and since the raid was Daniel’s idea, he copped the punishment of weeding her garden for the next month. He came to love that old woman during those four weeks after discovering the witch’s bark was worse than her bite—not to mention she made a mean batch of scones to go with her plum jam.
Mrs. Wilcox looked to be as shrewd as his childhood nemesis. “You’ll protect her.” She tossed him the bottle and he caught it one-handed.
“Window cleaner,” she told him. “Not as good as pepper spray—beggars can’t be choosy. But squirt that in some bugger’s eyes and they’ll know all about it. Take that with you—I’ve got plenty more where that came from in case anyone tries to take advantage of a poor old lady living alone.”
Daniel allowed himself the luxury of a cheeky grin as she ushered them inside the house. “I don’t think I’d like to try and take advantage of you, ma’am. I’ll be on my best behavior.”
“See as you are.” She patted his arm. “Now, into the kitchen. I’ve got some soup heating up on a little gas ring.”
After a small but comforting meal of canned soup and bread rolls, Mrs. Wilcox asked Ana to make up the beds in her two spare rooms. Old lady hips pained her something terrible, she said, and she needed to sit in her armchair a spell. Ana, of course, was happy to help and disappeared down the hallway with sheets and blankets, a flashlight tucked under her arm.
Mrs. Wilcox led him into her cozy living room and sat in her armchair. As soon as Ana was out of hearing distance, she verbally pounced. But he’d expected it.
“You got that look about you, like my husband, Phil,” she said. “You’re a soldier, aren’t you?”
Daniel shook his head. “Not anymore.”
She picked up a set of lethal-looking metal knitting needles. A half-completed yellow bootie dangled from one. “Pah. Once a soldier, always a soldier, that’s what my Phil said. It’s in the blood.”
Daniel stretched his legs out along her two-seater sofa. They sat in silence for a few minutes, her needles clicking a soothing metronome beat.
Mrs. Wilcox stabbed one needle through a loop of yarn with vicious accuracy. “I meant what I said, you know. Look after Ana. She’s been through a lot in her life, and those kiddies mean everything to her.”
“I intend to see her home safely. It must’ve been difficult losing her husband, being alone these last few years…”
Subtle, Calder, real subtle. Prying into Ana’s history to see if she was currently involved with anyone.
The woman’s eyes gleamed in the warm light cast by the battery-powered lanterns. “Ah. Like that, is it? Well, you are a handsome devil, like my Phil was—and don’t think Ana’s missed it either. I’m old, but I’m not blind. I’ve noticed the way you two look at each other.”
Daniel raised his palms and grinned sheepishly.
Her needles clacked briskly. “I’ve known Ana her whole life and I love her like she’s one of my own. I’ll tell you this for free.” She paused, peering over the crossed X of her knitting. “Ana doesn’t easily get involved with men; she doesn’t trust them. There are a few reasons for that, one being Theo’s dad, one being her late husband, and one being her father, but it isn’t my business to tell you any details about it.”
Something rammed him in the heart region like he’d been struck with a wooden fencing post. Ana doesn’t trust men. He knew Ana was a widow and figured she’d have deep-seated issues of grief. But there was obviously some stuff there that went deeper than the hurt of losing her husband. Stuff he’d be well advised not to probe.
Do you need a neon sign, Calder? Of all the women you could fixate on, this one could make you feel even more of a failure and rip your heart out to boot.
But Ana still drew him in, and male curiosity needled him to scale the wall of mystery and reserve she hid behind. “Would she tell me?”
Mrs. Wilcox’s bony shoulders twitched in a shrug. “That I don’t know and it’s up to the two of you to figure out. But your potential for romance is not the reason I sent Ana off to the bedrooms.”
She lowered the needles and leaned forward, her eyes large and serious behind a pair of bifocals. “I popped around to see her dad a few weeks back. Something was up with him, I could tell. John wouldn’t tell me at first, but I dragged it out of him eventually. He was worried someone was watching him—and Ana, too—because he thought he saw the same car parked in Ana’s street a couple of times. He tried to make light of it and he wouldn’t confide in me much more.” She let out a deep sigh. “We’ve kept in touch, John and I, but I was always closer to Lily. I think he thinks I took sides after it all came out about…well, there goes my mouth running away with me again.”
She fiddled with the yarn twisted around her fingers. “It’s not like him to jump at shadows or make mountains out of molehills. If he says someone was watching him, then someone most likely was. If he was worried enough about Ana to mention it to me…” She started to knit again, her fingers flying. “Just keep her safe, Daniel.”
“I can do that,” he said.
But his agreement, the responsibility of it, settled across his tense shoulders in a leaden weight. Failure was not an option.
Chapter 14
Saturday, July 24. 7:21 p.m. L
ower Hutt, greater Wellington area, New Zealand.
* * *
Ana made the beds with ruthless efficiency, as if the sheets themselves conspired to raise her temperature higher by not fitting smoothly over the single mattresses. Sally Wilcox was a dreadful gossip. Ana considered her an honorary grandmother, but the fact remained—Mrs. Wilcox had sunk many ships with her loose lips.
It irked how easily Ana had been manipulated into leaving Daniel alone, but inbred politeness prevented her from protesting. The elderly woman was a pro at manipulation warfare. Small as a sparrow, lethal as a hawk.
Ana tucked the last corner of blanket in place while faint snippets of muted conversation drifted down the hallway. She shook out a pillowcase and shoved a pillow inside, practically punching the stuffing around to make it fit.
What part of her life was Sally nattering on about? Hell. There was no shortage of scandalous labels attributed to her in the past to examine—devastated daughter, knocked-up young mother, and lastly, the grieving widow. She’d enough emotional baggage to overload an airport carousel. No doubt one glimpse of it would send Daniel, like any sane man, running in the opposite direction.
Ana huffed out a sigh, threw the pillow on the bed, and started battling with the next. Why did the thought of Daniel disappearing over the horizon bother her? Logically, it shouldn’t. The desire to know Daniel better, and more importantly, this attraction to him, was completely illogical. It transformed the solid bedrock she’d built for herself since Neil died into a murky quicksand.
Because she was beginning to like him, she really was.
His piercing eyes that saw too much, the dimples, and the tightly packaged body that filled out his shirt and jeans. And aside from the physical attraction, he made her laugh, was family-oriented, cared about people, and she could easily make the list a whole lot longer. Daniel would be the perfect boyfriend or even husband material for some lucky woman.
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