Using his strength, Sean lifts off the huge iron bar he used to keep the main doors to the tunnel closed, and once the doors open, there’s hardly the crowd of rescuers I expected.
I blink to focus, there’s actual sunshine streaming through the opening, and there’s no more than a handful of people standing around, looking equally confused, wondering what the ranger’s shouting about people being trapped in a tunnel that only has its doors closed.
“The twisters moved east,” Brad starts to say, grabbing Sean’s hand and pumping it, thanking him again for rescuing him, making a bigger deal out of it than I think Sean wants to.
“But…” Sean growls, sensing there’s another reason why Brad wanted into the tunnel so badly.
“Well… there’s some bad news…” Brad says mournfully. Sean taking a step closer, losing his patience with the man.
“Beaver Pines is no more, Sean… I’m sorry… According to the radar the twisters went right through there before heading east. I’d be surprised if anything will be left standing… I just thought you should prepare yourself.”
I gasp at the thought. We were just there, what if we’d slept until it was too late? What if we just never heard any of it coming?
I’m suddenly grateful for my traumatic memory, even grateful in a strange way to those horrible girls who tormented me all those years ago.
In a very roundabout way, they might have ended up saving our lives last night.
If I hadn’t run away, Sean wouldn’t have come after me and we might not have survived.
“I know how much you invested in the place is all,” Brad continues, putting his hand on Sean’s shoulder until Sean makes eye contact with him and his hand darts back.
“Camps canceled, permanently, I guess,” Sean says calmly. But with finality
“You have insurance though, right?” Brad asks, and I feel my head tilting to one side.
I’m confused.
“Why would Sean have insurance on the camp he works at?” I ask, thinking it a strange question.
“Because he owns it,” Brad says, looking at me like I have something seriously wrong with me.
My eyes go straight to Sean who shrugs, giving a smile at my ignorance.
“I don’t know, probably. All that stuff’s tied up with lawyers… part of my brother’s doing with all his corporation stuff,” he tells me, not Brad as he puts his arm around me, leading me out of the tunnel.
Brad takes a loud breath in, putting two and two together as he sees Sean doing the natural thing, the right thing. Looking after his woman.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask Sean, looking up at him as we get some distance between us and Brad and the other people milling about.
“Never occurred to me,” Sean says factually. “I think we’ve both been pretty distracted the past few hours, don’t you?”
I nod, chuckling a little, amazed Sean’s so calm at the prospect of losing so much.
“I haven’t lost anything,” he says, reading my mind and taking both my hands in his, making me feel those butterflies again.
“I could lose a hundred Beaver Pines campsites and still be the luckiest guy in the world, because I have you Tessa.”
I feel myself start to tear up, and I know what he’s going to ask me.
I know what he’s going to say.
He opens his mouth and I kiss him before he can speak. I hold him tighter than ever before, pressing my face into his rock hard chest. Saying just one word over and over again as I feel tears of joy streaming from my eyes.
“Yes!”
EPILOGUE
SIX MONTHS LATER
Sean
Brad was right. The twister took out Beaver Pines, almost like a surgical incision, almost every single tree, rock and crest was left intact, even the old radio tower stayed up, but those buildings?
Gone.
Like they were plucked by the big man upstairs himself and just taken away.
The debris from the storm was taken east, but as we discovered, the storm blew itself out eventually and nobody was seriously hurt.
“It’s almost like you wanted to save yourself the effort of starting over, like someone… something just did it for ya!” exclaims the head engineer, a guy from my brother’s company, in charge of all his construction and now our new project.
I only ever email my brother, and I still don’t fully understand how the whole business thing works. But every quarter, there’s a truckload of money in an account with my name on it, so I just count my blessings and get on with living.
I’ve always loved it out here, and although I never needed a big house or a fancy place to live, the tornado certainly did send Tessa and me a pretty powerful message.
Rebuild.
Build that life you both want together.
“Don’t forget the pigpen!” Tess chimes, waddling past with her hand resting on her belly, carrying our first child, deliberately defying my orders to stay down or sit in the mobile home we call home until our own is built.
“Pigpen?” the engineer asks, and I stab my finger to the square marked ‘barn’ that Tess insisted be a part of our new domestic landscape.
“With a hatch on it!” Tess calls out louder, calling over her shoulder as she carries a bucket of feed to go sprinkle inside the chicken enclosure she’s made.
“You asked me what I wanted, what I really wanted?” she told me after we’d outlined our plans to the architects, who passed it all on to the engineers.
“I want family, and you…” She told me, grinning with pleasure, “But I also want that big barn, right back where it was in the first place, pigpen, pig and all.”
“But why?” I asked her. Worried she might be having some kind of post-traumatic episode.
“Because I want to pay homage, to give thanks for the whole experience… Those horrible girls, that barn, even that big ol’ pig.” She added, with a distinct country twang in her voice.
“They scared me half to death,
