Page 62 of Weathering The Storm

Heisstrong. He’s mystrength, too.

There’s an empty spot beside Seth when I crawl into the cargo area. My knees find it first, and the rest of me collapses into a heap beside his sleeping body, bundled in multiple layers of crinkly metallic emergency blankets.

He’s going to be okay. He’s strong.

It’s the truth. It has to be.

Chapter 17

Nick

It’s been twenty-four hours since we arrived at the small regional hospital. Seth’s been in and out of consciousness for all of it, receiving heated fluids through an IV and lying in bed, nested beneath a pile of warm compresses.

He’s stable now, if exhausted. I know the feeling. The staff have been kind enough to offer me one of the empty beds, but mostly, I rest in the chair in Seth’s room. Watching him murmur and move in his sleep until eventually the steady sound of his breathing makes me doze off.

It never lasts long before I feel it all again.

The cold plunge of phantom water. The terror clawing at my chest as Seth is ripped away from me by thirty-foot seas.

I’m still gasping from the latest jolt when I decide to give up on sleep for the time being.

I stand up, take a walk down the hall for a cup of water, and drink the whole thing before I make it back to the room. It’s snowing outside. The peaceful kind. White and fluffy, casting a glittery sheen over everything it touches. Mocking the jagged ice that tried to kill us yesterday.

By the window, on top of the end table, there’s a landline. One I’ve been forced to look at every time I set something down. One I’ve been avoiding.

But there’s only so long I can delay the inevitable. Only so many times I can relive the day before and let my mind lie to itself that it was all a terrible nightmare.

I pick up the receiver, thumbing the smooth plastic as I hesitate to type the number I know by heart.

Telling my father makes all of this feel more real than the crick in my neck from sleeping upright in Seth’s hospital room. But he should know. There’s only one other person on this planet who cares about theSuojalike I did.

I press the ten digits and hit the call button.

He picks up on the first ring.

“Have you heard anything?” comes my father’s weathered voice, with a little extra grit from the static of the phone’s speaker. “Is he back?”

“Is he okay?” I hear my mother in the background.

They know.

A deep breath whooshes out of me. “Dad?”

“Nicolas.Fuck.Thank God. You’re alright?”

Am I? I don’t know. I feel drained. Raw. Cracked open and waterlogged.

“Yeah.” My chest prickles at the soft sound of my mother crying in the background. “I’m okay. You… uh. You heard?”

“The storm’s been all over the news. Eight vessels disabled, three wrecked. They released the names of the boats that sank last night, but not all the details.” Dad pauses. “One of them lost their entire crew. Three more people are still in critical condition.”

The news coils up in the pit of my stomach like an anchor chain. New links of guilt attaching to old.

An entire crew lost.

I know that what happened to us could have been so much worse. Of course I know that. We’re lucky to be alive.

But it’s different being faced with the reality that there were men who never made it through to the other side of that storm. Who won’t come home to their families. Men my fatherprobably knows after over three decades in the business. Men I’ve probably shook hands with before.