After Tilda quits her job at La Tapa, she’s on Lovango all the time. There’s a tiny cottage perched just above the beach that came with the sale of the island. It’s bare bones but livable, and Tilda spends a couple nights a week there so she doesn’t waste precious time in the mornings commuting from Peter Bay. She stays alone. Dunk prefers to sleep in his own bed, and so does Olive—fine, whatever. Tilda’s feelings toward Dunk have cooled considerably; she’s beginning to suspect that, behind the sexy accent and all the money, there’s just a little man, like the Wizard of Oz. For dinner, Tilda runs the skiff over to the Pizza Pi boat or grabs sushi from the bar at Caneel, and then she sits in the cottage with the air-conditioning cranked and stuffs her face without anyone judging her.
One day, she sees Treasure Island heading out of the harbor in the wrong direction—toward St. Thomas—and realizes the boat is probably going for its yearly maintenance. They don’t run charters in the autumn. Tilda wonders what Cash is doing over the break. She’d love to invite him to work on the resort. That had been the plan. Everyone is keen to have a robust water-sports program and a series of hikes across the island both as workouts and nature walks, and this was supposed to be Cash’s department—but Tilda blew that chance. She hasn’t even told her parents the truth. They know that Cash broke up with Tilda but they don’t know that Tilda and Dunk hooked up on St. Lucia right after their couples massage, which was before she talked to Cash, so, technically, she cheated. And Cash could tell, she knew he could, so the breakup was her fault. Tilda generally discusses everything with her mother, but her behavior was so shameful and so unlike her that she can’t share it with Lauren.
Tilda has just woken up in the Lovango cottage when her phone rings. Granger, calling from Dubai, where her parents are attending a conference this week.
“Inga is going to be a problem,” Granger says.
Tilda must still be asleep because she has no idea who Inga is. Maybe it’s the woman at the Health Department over in St. Thomas? “Why?” Tilda says.
“She’s picking up speed and strength, and right now she’s on a direct course toward St. Thomas, St. John, Tortola, Jost, Virgin Gorda, and, although they didn’t mention it by name, Lovango.”
“Dad,” Tilda says. “What are you talking about?”
“Inga,” Granger says. “The hurricane.”
Like a newborn with indecisive parents, a hurricane first forms without a name, as a collection of thunderstorms—so says Tilda’s favorite weatherman, Dougie Clarence of the CBS Evening News. Tilda is watching Dougie on her phone in bed—the cottage has no TV, and even if it did, there’s no cable—as he explains that Hurricane Inga started a few days earlier, August 27, as a Cape Verde hurricane, forming off the African continent and organizing near the Cape Verde Islands with a big push from the westerly trade winds, a term originating from the beneficial wind direction for early colonial traders. (Dougie always throws interesting factoids into his forecasts, which Tilda loves.) Inga has had a thousand miles of warm tropical waters to nourish her. In the past forty-eight hours, Dougie says, Inga’s maximum winds have increased from forty miles per hour to one hundred and fifteen.
“It will bear down on Barbuda, the sister island to Antigua, in the next twenty-four hours,” Dougie says. “It might disassemble a bit with landfall, but if it doesn’t, it will hit the Virgin Islands with its full strength.”
“Um…okay?” Tilda says.
She calls Dunk, gets his voicemail. She checks the time; he must be meditating. He’ll meditate until eight thirty, then he’ll drink four espressos while he prepares Olive’s daily meals. Then they’ll drive to town and he’ll call Tilda to pick them up in the skiff right around nine thirty. Can she just wait until then?
The chyron on the screen beneath Dougie says HURRICANE INGA ON DIRECT PATH FOR VIRGIN ISLANDS.
She calls Dunk again. Voicemail.
Texts him: Call me! Urgent!
Calls him again, even though she realizes it’s pointless. He’s unreachable while he’s meditating.
She calls him at 8:31 sharp.
“What?” He sounds pissed for some reason, maybe because she called during his sacred time. She doesn’t care.
“There’s a hurricane, category four, Inga, bearing down on Barbuda. And then, maybe, us.”
“I’ve been tracking it all night,” Dunk says.
Good, Tilda thinks. She doesn’t want Dunk to accuse her of manufacturing drama, hurricane as monster under the bed. “Is it something we need to worry about?”
“Hell yes,” Dunk says. “I have blokes coming to shutter this place up and I talked to Topher. He’s coming to scoop up Olive and me tomorrow morning.”
Wait…what? “You and Olive? Scoop you up to go where?”
“Back to Houston first, then probably on to Vegas. You know Topher.”
Tilda does not know Topher; she only knows of Topher. He’s Dunk’s friend and bandmate in Wasps of Good Fortune (he’s the bass player), and he’s even wealthier than Dunk. He has his own plane, a G5.
“So you’re leaving the island?” Tilda says. “You’re just…leaving?”
“There’s a hurricane coming, mate. A ballbuster. Maybe a cat five.”
“What about…this place? Lovango? The construction, the work trailer, my cottage, the de-sal plant, the pool? We can’t just leave it.”
“If I were you,” Dunk says, “I’d have Keith and the crew secure what they can over there and then you and your parents should have the caretaker shutter up Peter Bay and hunker down on the bottom floor.”
“My parents,” Tilda says, “are in Dubai.”
“You must have the caretaker’s number? Call him yourself. Be an adult.”
“I am being an adult,” Tilda says. “I’m not worried about my parents’ house. It’s made of stone.”
“Even so, mate. It needs to be shuttered.”
“I’m worried about here. Lovango. The resort we’re building.” She laughs. “I can’t believe you’re leaving with Topher. For Vegas. Do you not care about the resort?”
“I
