Sophie shook her head. “I have friends, and maybe I let something slip. It’s a small community, I told you that from the start. And there are reasons for people to be fighting this organization you got yourself mixed up in.”

She went back to painting moonlight on the water, around the egret’s legs. Her gestures turned gentle, almost tender.

“You’ll start over,” Sophie said. “You’re young. And Christians—they’re supposed to be good at forgiveness. Real Christians anyway.”

“I want to leave, Sophie. I want to evacuate.”

“What about your ex? Is he still there?”

Marianne nodded. “Some of the students too. I’m not like you—I’m a serial ship-abandoner. I bail out. I did it to my sister after my mom died, I did it to Eric after he proposed, and now I’m abandoning the Ranch.”

“You have unfinished business there,” Sophie said. The wind was picking up. Sophie stabbed her brush into its glass and took off her smock. Marianne wondered if she’d finish the painting, or if she considered it finished now. “You need to go back, before it gets worse.”

“Maybe I could stay here?”

“People are still in your inn, your school, whatever you want to call it. You opened the doors to them. Think if they need something and you’re not there. What if something happens and you’re gone—how will you feel then?”

It was true. Janine was there, and Davonte, and even Tom—she was responsible for all of them. She’d personally chosen them, invited them, made coming to the Ranch seem like something worthwhile, something to change their lives for the better. She drained the rest of her glass.

Sophie opened her door and peered outside, then came back to her workstation and blew out the candles, picked up the needle in the middle of “Fist City.” “I’ll drive you,” she said. “I think I’m gonna head inland.”

“What about going down with the ship?”

“My guests are gone, the Manatee will be fine. Or it won’t be. But you should gather your folks and make a plan.”

They rode in silence, and when Marianne got out, she didn’t thank Sophie. She felt like a child being returned to the scene of a crime, to apologize, come clean. She gripped her suitcase obediently and carried it through the storm’s stinging raindrops, all the way to her door.

She turned and waved. Sophie drove away, into the pale and greenish dusk. Marianne opened the door to her room. A hurricane was coming; there was that. She hoped it would swallow her up.