“Granny!” I yelled, hugging her. She squeezed me back, but it was only for a minute. She’s never been big on affection; before my father died, he once told me that growing up, my grandmother and her sisters hadn’t been hugged or kissed much, and it had been hard for her to show any kind of love to my father when he was small. Now she just squeezed me briefly and said, “Makayla. You came.”

I checked to make sure that everything was as upswing as it could be, that she’d had enough food and water, that she wasn’t scared or shocked.

“Damn it, what do you think happened here?” she asked. “I was just in the dark, was all.” She swatted me away as I touched her face, her arms, making sure she was whole.

After I was sure she was fine, I went into her kitchen and I grabbed her biggest butcher knife and a candle, and I made my way back down the stairs. I looked around outside for Peter’s boat. I could still taste him in my mouth. My heart was pounding, my blood slamming through my veins. I was going to fucking kill him. But he must have known, because he was gone. I stared out over the floodwaters that blended into the ocean. He was gone, and maybe he was gone to do the same thing again. Maybe there was someone in his boat right now, and he was whistling and getting ready to pull down some dark alley. Maybe he felt like this sort of thing was owed to him, and now, with no one around to stop him, he was just going to get what he deserved. The balloon over my head felt tight like it was being squeezed and getting ready to pop. I had to sit down and breathe until the squeezing stopped.

I went back to my grandmother’s apartment and let her talk to me until the shaking stopped.

“Why are you shaking, girl?” she asked me, half concerned and half annoyed.

“It’s just the cold, Granny. The cold and all the bad things out there. I’ll be fine.”

I couldn’t let her know. I could never tell anybody, because then they would look at me and see how broken I was. I could not be broken. I had to make it through this.

It took hours before the shaking stopped. After it did, I got some slurree for my grandmother and me and we drank it. It was the government-issued kind, the kind that would do the bare minimum to keep us alive, and even then, not for long. Then I went down to the fire escape and tried to flag down a boat. I didn’t get one that day, and when night started making the sky pastel, I went back inside. I slept on my grandmother’s couch and went back to finding a boat early in the morning. I was able to flag one down around noon. There were more of them out here near the coast than there were inland where I’d been. I made sure, this time, that there were more people in it, that I found one piloted by people in uniforms. Not that I was sure any of it would help. In this new terrain, anyone could be the enemy.