“Yes, she’s more like a friend than a boss, and honey, the electricity in the air around here isn’t a tornado.” April giggled. “It’s just sparks jumping back and forth from our house to Jackson’s. I could almost see them when we played Pictionary last night. You ever think that you might have been wrong about the woman with him in Walmart? Maybe she was just a good friend. When are you going to have it out with him?”

“I’m going over there right now,” Nessa answered. “I’ll either feel like a fool because I was jealous, or like an idiot because I didn’t give him a chance to tell me what was going on. At least it will be out in the open.”

Flynn came in the door, kicked off his shoes, stopped to pet Waylon, and headed to the kitchen. “I’m starving, and I smell yeast rolls.”

“Supper is on the stove and in the slow cooker,” Nessa told him. “Help yourself. There’s a lemon chess pie in the refrigerator.”

“I’m sure glad that I’m working every day. If I was just sittin’ on the porch watching the clouds roll in, I’d gain fifty pounds before Christmas,” Flynn said as he dipped up a bowl of soup. “Aren’t you going to eat with us, Nessa?”

“I’ve been too antsy to eat. I’ll see y’all later,” she said.

April gave her a brief nod and went back for a second bowl of soup.

Nessa kept her eyes on the ground to avoid stepping in a hole or stumbling over a rock. She went through a dozen scenarios about how to even ask Jackson about the woman, and none of them worked. When the wind picked up and blew her hair back away from her face, she looked up at the sky and saw the dark clouds in the southwest.

“I guess that’s what caused the warning,” she muttered as she rounded the corner of Jackson’s house.

He was standing on the porch, his hands on the railing, with Tex right beside him. His eyes were on the clouds, and he didn’t even notice her until Tex barked. He whipped around and yelled, “What are you doing out in this weather? We’ve been issued . . .” His voice was blown away in a sudden burst of wind, and his finger shot up to point at a funnel swirling down from the dark clouds that looked like it couldn’t be more than half a mile away. He jumped from the porch to the ground in one leap and grabbed her hand.

“That thing is coming right at us. Run, Nessa!” he screamed.