She hadn’t counted on a lack of transportation. Now she busied herself with packing while all around her the usual storm preparations went on without her: securing the lawn furniture, boarding up windows. Janine went shopping for water and nonperishables while Eric and Tom argued about the best way to nail up plywood, and Davonte desperately tried to get in touch with his manager.

Many of the students hadn’t wanted to leave; that was the surprising part. When evacuation was first suggested as a possibility, an idea spread around the Ranch that the students could stay, helping to prepare their school for the storm’s landfall by writing and praying. God would protect them, they surmised. They would weather the storm like Noah in his boat and would be able to finish their second session in a memorable and probably quite inspiring way. They imagined themselves feverishly finishing seven-hundred-page novels, arriving at the closing insights of their memoirs, being struck by bolts—figurative bolts—of inspiration for long sequences of poems.

Regina thought this was a brilliant idea, initially. “It is time to take a STAND,” she said in a second email to students. “The recent negative press should only make our resolve, our faith, more durable.” She changed her mind after getting some strongly worded advice from her insurance company, and Eric broke the news to the students at Friday morning’s breakfast, asking them to pray for the Ranch from home, to keep writing, to check their email for updates. He did not mention the article or Marianne, and no one asked.

She was finding it hard to pack. She’d had to beg for boxes from the Kangaroo, and now she could not remember which supplies, which staplers and pens and notebooks, she’d bought with her own money. Should she even bother? But what would she do without a stapler? Without pens and notebooks and folders? It seemed that everything in the office was indispensable; she’d have to take it all. Then there was the question of books—where were the books she’d lent to the makeshift library? How could she leave without her Rich and Merwin, her Lowell and Levertov?

But when she checked, they’d all been returned, as if by their very association with her they’d lost all usefulness. Marianne got a box, and set about packing them. She didn’t know where she was taking them, or how. She didn’t have an apartment; she didn’t have a car. She had no job, and no prospects for a job. Eric wasn’t speaking to her.

She thought of Sophie, smugly drinking wine at the Manatee—was she leaving? Though Martin Rice had refused to divulge his sources, she was sure now that Sophie was involved. Sophie owed her something—an explanation, a place to stay, a ride to safety.