“Do you want us to come down?” asked her father.
“No.” She molded her palm to her forehead. “You don’t want to see it like this. I’ll, um . . .” She turned in a circle, ordering the prickle behind her eyes to cut it out. “Let me clean up a little before you come by. Maybe a few days?”
“Joey, you don’t have to take this on alone,” her father said sternly.
“I know.”
That’s what she said out loud. However, the truth was that she took on everything alone. She didn’t know any other way to feel like a capable adult. Growing up as a diabetic meant a lot of people assuming she was incapable of certain things. Are you okay? Do you need a break? Should you eat that? That constant concern from others had led to Josephine’s being determined to prove she could do anything without issue or assistance. And she could do mostly anything—except for be in the military or fly a plane.
Unfortunately, staring at the mess that was her family’s shop and having no clue if she’d be able to salvage it, she didn’t feel capable of diddly-squat.
“I’ll call you guys back in a while, okay?” she said brightly. “Love you.”
“We love you, too, Joey-Roo.”
That prickle behind her eyes got stronger and she hung up, blowing out a pent-up breath. She’d give herself five minutes to gather some courage, then she’d come up with a plan. Surely the government was allocating funds for disaster victims, right? Although she knew from past experience with hurricanes that it could take years to see that money—
“Hello?”
Josephine froze at the sound of that voice, calling from outside the shop.
She would know that raspy baritone in the middle of a monsoon.
It sounded like Wells Whitaker, but she had to be mistaken. Low blood sugar tended to make her slightly dizzy, her thoughts fuzzing together like cotton. The man who had fallen off the face of the planet three weeks ago was not knocking on the last remaining intact window of the Golden Tee Pro Shop.
“Belle, you in there?”
Belle.
No one called her that but Wells.
No. No way.
No.
She turned around and nudged the door open with her toe, which wasn’t very difficult, since it hung by a single hinge. “Uh . . . hi? Whoever you are?”
A rush of breath. “Josephine.”
None other than Wells Whitaker’s face appeared in the doorway. Also, his body. It was there. All of him was there. He wasn’t dressed for golf, as she was used to seeing him. Instead, he wore a black hoodie, jeans, his signature backward ballcap, dark hair sticking out from every side. His sideburns were overgrown, on course to collide with his unshaven facial hair where it scaled the sides of his sculpted face. His eyes were bloodshot and the smell of alcohol was basically the third occupant in the room.
Yet, despite the fact that he currently looked like human roadkill, he somehow retained his mystique. His Wells-ness. This was the guy who would lead the ragtag group of strangers in a dystopian universe. Everyone would just follow him without question. No one would be able to help it, because he had this way of moving and observing that said, Yeah, okay, civilization is dead, so what?
And he was here.
“What . . . is going on?”
His eyes moved sharply over her body, as if assessing for injury. “You’re okay.” A beat passed, his gaze meeting hers and holding. “Right?”
Physically, she was fine.
Just a little worried about the obvious hallucination taking place.
“Yes. I’m . . .” She blinked several times, trying to get her eyes to stop playing tricks on her. “What are you doing here?”
He rolled a single shoulder. “I just happened to be staying with a friend, not too far away. I remembered you saying something about your family owning . . . a pro shop? While I was out walking around, looking at the damage, I kind of just stumbled on this place by accident.”
Josephine gave all of that a moment to sink in and none of it made the remotest lick of sense. “But . . . really? You came to stay with a friend in the direct path of a hurricane? And . . . this course is two miles from any residential area. You’d have to walk—”
“Josephine, you know a lot about me, right? Probably way too much.”
“A Sagittarius raised in southern Georgia, you were discovered by one of golf’s most legendary masters, Buck Lee, while—”
“Then you also know I hate answering questions.”
That was the understatement of the century. Wells had once spent a full thirty minutes scrolling on his phone during a post-tournament press conference, completely ignoring the rapid-fire questions about a shouting match that had ensued with his caddie on the sixteenth hole. When his time was up, he’d calmly gotten up and swaggered out of the media tent, earning himself the nickname the Media unDarling.