Page 40 of Where You're Planted

“We’re working together,” he pointed out. “What more do you want?”

“I don’t know. A truce? A genuine effort to make the most of the situation?”

He could have pointed out that he didn’t need tohelpher to get her out of his space when the library board was most likely going to abandon their experiment in a few months anyway. But she was looking at him with sincerity, her eyes open and warm, and even if their jobs—andthey—were at odds, they were surprisingly in line with their values. He felt her passion for her job, determined but suffocating under the boot of bureaucracy and shitty circumstances. It was exactly howhefelt.

He reached across the table. “A truce. All right.” She tookhis hand, and he held it an extra beat, adding, “I have a question, though.”

“What?”

“That day during the storm. You didn’t want to get on my boat.”

“Is that a question?”

“Why? Because I disapproved of the birds before?”

“Disapproved?” She made a buzzer sound. “We’ll acceptscolded. We’ll acceptchastised. But notdisapproved.”

He raised his hands. “It was a tense situation.”

“And your attitude definitely made itlesstense,” she said sarcastically.

“All right. Fine. I’m sorry. But that’s why? I was mean to you, so you didn’t want to get on my boat?”

She groaned into her hands. When she pulled her palms away from her face, she shook her head helplessly. “I was…”

“What?”

“It was embarrassing! I wasn’t proud, okay?” she blurted, a blush burning across her cheeks. “I screwed up. Again. And this time, it was, like,reallydangerous. If anything had happened to Briar—” She cut off that thought with a hard shake of her head. “You were right about the birds, that I shouldn’t have taken that risk, just like I should have known better,donebetter to protect Briar—”

Jack leaned across the table, grabbing her hands before he could think better of it. Her amber eyes snapped to his, wild and wary. “Are you serious?” He leaned even closer, forcing her to hold his gaze, to really hear him. “You think it’s your fault that an unprecedented, catastrophic hurricane caught you unprepared? You think you could have made some simple other choice thatthousandsof other people also didn’t make?”

“We could have left town before—”

“Yeah, people did that during Rita, and it was a complete disaster. Cars ran out of gas on the freeway.”

She shrugged. “I could have packed a go bag before there was water inside my house. I forgotunderwear, Jack.”

He felt his own cheeks burn at that.

But she was on a roll, oblivious to the montage suddenly screaming through his mind—her wet shirt that day, her bare thigh. “Or I could have kept our important documents all in a designated place in one of those safe boxes like a responsible adult instead of having to run around finding them. Or, God, I could have realized my house was in a freaking floodplain and purchased flood insurance.”

Jack swallowed. That meant she’d probably had to foot the bill for her repairs herself. He stopped her. “And all the other people who wound up in the same situation as you,” he said. “Do you think they screwed up? Made the wrong choices? Should they have been ashamed?”

She narrowed her eyes at him but finally said, “No.”

“No. Because it was a natural disaster. I mean, unless you think you’re smarter than everyone else who made the same choices as you?”

“Of course I don’t think that.”

“Then knock it off with thinking you somehow had more control over the situation than anyone else. It was a thousand-year flood. As in, that’s how infrequently a disaster like that happens.No oneknew it was gonna be that bad.”

“It’s just—I don’t want to be a…” Her eyelashes lowered and then she twisted to look again for Briar, who was running hand in hand with another girl her age.

“A what?”

She drew in a shaky breath but kept her face turned away. “A victim.”

He waited until she finally peeked back at him. “You’re really gonna make me say this?”