Chapter 1 - THE INCIDENT
The sparkling cider had been sitting on the table since eight o'clock, and it was still sealed.
Two plates. Two glasses. A candle June had lit at seven forty-five and blown out at eleven, because the wax was running and the smell was starting to bother her. She stood beside the dining table with one hand resting under the weight of her own stomach and watched her husband come down the stairs.
Charcoal suit. Freshly shaved. The watch he only wore when he wanted a room to know something about him.
She looked at him for several seconds before she spoke.
You're leaving.
Nolan stopped near the doorway. Not inside the room. In the doorway, which was a thing he did now — standing at the edge of spaces instead of in them.
Daphne is hosting a small gathering in Manhattan. Several insurers and lenders will be there.
June looked at his shoes. Polished. Then at the watch.
Business.
Yes.
She almost smiled.
Three weeks ago she had found the restaurant receipt in his coat pocket. Dinner for two. Champagne. Daphne Keane's name printed beside the reservation number in the same font as everything else, which was the part that had stayed with her — how ordinary it looked. How easily a thing like that fit into a pocket.
She knew about the calls he took outside. She knew Daphne had been with him twice when he told her he was meeting investors alone. She had spent three weeks waiting for him to say it himself, without being cornered into it.
Tonight, he still wasn't going to.
Their daughter moved under her hand. Nolan noticed.
You should rest.
That one landed harder than the rest.
Six years ago — the first New Year's Eve they had spent together — they had been in a freezing operations room at Hudson Crown Terminal with the heat broken and a shipping company three weeks from collapse. They had eaten cold pizza out of a cardboard box and taken turns walking to the window to see if the river had frozen. At four in the morning Nolan had taken her hand across the table and told her that if they ever made it — if there was ever money, and a house, and people who lowered their voices when he walked into a room — he would not become the kind of man who forgot who had stood beside him before any of it.
He had the money now. He had the house. He had four hundred employees.
He was about to walk out the door and spend midnight with someone else.
If I asked you to stay, June said, would you?
Nolan did not answer quickly enough.
That was all she needed.
She lowered her hand from her stomach.
Go ring in the new year with her.
June—
We'll talk tomorrow.
He stared at her. She watched him wait for the tears, or the anger, or one last attempt to hold him in the room. She had done all three of those things in her own head over the past three weeks, in the shower and in the car and at three in the morning while he slept beside her, and she had come out the other side of every one of them.
None of it came.
At 11:52, the front door closed. She listened to the car start, and turn, and go down the driveway, and disappear.
At midnight, fireworks came up over Manhattan in a bright white spray, and the sound reached her a few seconds later, softened by glass. June stood at the window with her palm flat against her stomach and watched a whole city celebrate across the water.
The cider stayed sealed.
At 12:07, the old emergency phone she had not touched in months began to ring.
She found it in the second drawer of the sideboard, under a stack of takeout menus. The screen said HUDSON CROWN — NIGHT DESK.
She answered on the fourth ring.
Warren Pike's voice came through with wind behind it. June. We have a serious problem.
What happened?
For a moment he didn't answer.
Nothing's moving, he said finally. I mean — nothing. The whole yard.
June turned toward the window and looked across the river, and that was when it reached her properly, because she had been looking at Manhattan and not at the water, and the water was where it should have been.
Hudson Crown Terminal should have been visible from her kitchen. On a clear night you could see the crane lights strung along the south pier like a second skyline. She had looked at that skyline from this window for four years. She sometimes counted the cranes without meaning to, the way you counted things you loved.
She could not count anything now.
The terminal was gone. A dead black rectangle where a working harbor should have been.
Warren.
I'm here.
Is everyone accounted for?
Not yet.
June's face changed. The dinner on the table stopped existing. Daphne stopped existing. There was a shape on the other side of the river that should have been lit and wasn't, and there were people inside it.
She walked to the hall closet.
Her old steel-toed safety boots were on the bottom shelf where she had left them eleven months ago, when Nolan had decided — kindly, reasonably, without ever asking her — that she didn't need them anymore. She sat down on the bench and pulled them on. The leather had stiffened. She had to work her heel into each one.
She took her winter operations coat off the hook.
Her daughter shifted beneath her ribs, a slow roll from one side to the other.
June put one hand over her stomach.
We're going to be careful, she said quietly. Then she called Warren back.
What still has power?
Almost nothing. Fire suppression's on partial backup. Refrigerated cargo's running local, but I don't know for how long.
Don't restart anything until I get there.
Warren hesitated. She heard him breathe.
June. Everett removed your access last week.
She stopped with her keys in her hand.
What?
Your badge may not work.
June looked toward the harbor — toward the dark place where her terminal used to be — and stood very still in her own hallway.
Someone had taken her access to Hudson Crown four days before the most serious failure the terminal had suffered in twenty years.
May you like
She did not believe in that kind of timing. She had never believed in that kind of timing.
Call Ellis at the gate, she said. I'm on my way.
