She let out a breath and watched as they passed by a watermelon-pink house. “I don’t know. I think I might be easier away from home, too. Like everybody knowing what happened to me locked me into being that girl.”

“Did it, though? When I moved there, you didn’t talk to anybody. You just rode. Now I hear you laughing from the barn, and I don’t know if you’re messing with one of the ranch hands or Stacia or Jason. They look at you different, too, at Sunday dinner. Brighter. I think they’re starting to see you the way I see you.”

She peeked over at him. “Oh yeah? And how’s that?”

His eyes flickered away from the road and stroked down over her bare legs. “Well, maybe not all the ways I see you.” He smiled, and a wave of tingles sparkled through her.

The street they were on ended, and LJ dodged through several turns at odd angles before they found another continuous street. The houses were getting taller now, porches stacked two stories high and bordered with cast-iron frames dripping with flowers, like arbors frozen in black-painted metal.

“Katrina wasn’t the only storm, you know. Sure not the only time we’ve almost lost the city. Look at this.” He spun the wheel and rocketed down a block, dodging the increasing flocks of pedestrians, then turned again and slowed down, leaning into the wheel so he could point up through the top of the windshield. “See that building? It used to be all tile on the roof, because some governor from Spain required it after everything burned down a couple times in the 1700s. Then in the next hurricane, those tiles all went flying off, breaking people’s windows and heads and things.”

Andra cringed. “Oh God, I didn’t even think of that. They’re as bad as bullets, aren’t they?”

“Bigger and heavier than bullets.” He pointed to the left side. “See the watermarks on that brick? That place is two hundred years old, and I promise you those marks are older than Katrina. We’ve had floods and fires, yellow fever and locusts. Might as well be a paragraph out of the Bible.” He shook his head. “But we’re still here. Nobody with the spirit of this place in them ever quits. We just turn a funeral into a second line, dancing away from the graveyard. All the time knowing it ain’t our last trip.”

She shook her head, trying to imagine rebuilding a house you expected to flood, just because it was near the place and the people you loved the most. And suddenly it seemed like the most human thing she had ever heard.

LJ whipped the truck into a tiny parking spot along the curb. Once they were stopped, he reached out and touched her hand with the backs of his knuckles, sweeping his thumb over her wrist.