Chapter 1

Marisol's knuckles went white around the rabbit before her brain caught up with her eyes. Rain hammered the picture window in sheets, the floodwater lapping at the porch steps like a patient animal, and across the flooded street — across twenty feet of brown churning water that used to be Sycamore Lane — a small pale face watched her from the upstairs window of the abandoned Whitaker house.

She blinked. The face stayed. A child, small and thin, pressed up against the dirty glass of the second-floor window, barefoot in a damp pink-and-white floral nightgown that clung to her legs. Her hair was long and unbrushed, the color of wet straw. She looked seven, maybe eight. She looked like she had been standing there for hours.

And she was holding a grey stuffed rabbit.

Marisol's own rabbit was in her hands. She'd found it that morning in the mudroom, soaked and heavier than it should have been, the grey fabric dark with floodwater, one ear torn and clumsily stitched back on with pale thread that didn't match. It had been her sister's, once. The one her mother had sewn after the dog got it. The one that had been lost in the move out of this town eighteen years ago, same as everything else.

She lifted it higher, looked from the rabbit in her hands to the rabbit across the street.

"Dean," she said. Her voice came out thin. "Dean, come here."

He was in the kitchen, she could hear him stacking sandbags against the back door, the heavy wet thump of burlap on wood. The power had been out since noon. The smell of candles and damp carpet filled the front room, and the radio on the coffee table hissed static between emergency broadcasts.

"Dean," she said again, sharper.

His boots crossed the linoleum. He came through the kitchen doorway wiping his hands on his jeans, and even before he reached the window something in his posture changed — his shoulders squared, his chin lifted, the way a man does when he's already bracing.

"We've got a problem," Marisol said. "There's a kid in the house across the street."

He was at the window in three strides. She watched his face as his eyes found the child. She knew the exact moment it happened, because the color drained out of him like water out of a tipped glass. His hand came down on the windowsill and stayed there, fingers spread, knuckles going white against the painted wood.

"That's the Whitaker house," he said. Not a question. He said it the way you'd say a name you'd spent years avoiding.