Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock—

“What was the second … issue?” he said.

Tallyho, big guy.

Lizzie ran through the whole protocol, which was the result of her and Greta having worked with Gary McAdams for years storm-proofing the grounds in the spring and the fall. The thing was, it didn’t take an EF5 dropping directly in Easterly’s backyard to create a mess. Some of the generic storms were more than capable of doing a lot of damage if they had straightline winds.

It was one of the things she’d had to learn fast when she’d moved down to Charlemont—

As if on cue, she drove into a blistering wall of rain that hit the windshield so hard it sounded like a team of tap dancers rocking out to “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Cranking up her wipers, she took her foot off the accelerator because the Yaris was capable of hydroplaning on the highway with even the slightest amount of water under its tiny tires.

“You got it?” she said. “Because I need to hang up and drive through this.”

“Yes, yes of course … oh, my God,” the man whispered.

“So you see the storm?” Have fun with that, she thought. “Better get moving.”

“Indeed. Quite.”

Lizzie hung up and tossed her phone back into her purse. Then it was a case of hunch over the wheel, hold on tight … and pray that some idiot show-off in an SUV didn’t run her off the road.

Things got even worse, fast.

And jeez, after a day as long as the one she had put in, the last thing she needed were torrential bands of water that cut her visuals down to five feet, along with teeth-rattling thunder and lightning, but the weather seemed determined to parallel what was going on at Easterly—almost as if the drama at the house was affecting even the weather.

Okay, that was hyperbole.

But still.

It took her five hundred years to reach her exit. And then another seven or eight to get to her driveway. Meanwhile, the storm had turned into stormS—with a big capital “S” on the end: Lightning crackled and sizzled, seeming to target her car, and thunder roared, and she got pelted with a round of hail you could have hit out of Fenway Park. White-knuckled, frankly pissed, worried about Lane, and sore all over, when she finally made it to her home, she was a hot mess of—

The finger of God.

That was the only thing she could think of.

One moment, she was just about to pull into her spot by her house. The next? A jagged bolt of lightning licked out of the sky—and nailed her big, beautiful tree right at the top.

Sparks flew like it was the Fourth of July.

And she screamed, “No!” as she hit the brakes.

The Yaris’s tires were iffy on dry pavement. On a wet, muddy dirt road? It was greased-pig time.

And that was how she learned Lane was already at her house.

Because she plowed right into the back of his Porsche.

Lane had been sitting at Lizzie’s kitchen table reading BBC financial reports for about two hours when the storm hit. As the first wave of rain and noise and flashing rumbled through the house, he didn’t bother to look up from her laptop, even as the old-fashioned glass in the windows rattled and the roof beams creaked.

The volumes and volumes of data were overwhelming.

And he was panicked that he only understood a fraction of it all.

Then again, it had been pretty damn naive of him to think he could get a handle on his father’s dealings with any kind of alacrity. Aside from the crushing numbers of files, he just didn’t have the extensive accounting background that was going to be required to sort everything out.

Thank God Edward had been prepared for something like this, setting up those shadow accounts and passcodes and emails. Without all that, it would have been impossible to export the information without triggering some internal alert.

Maybe that would still happen, though.

He didn’t know how much time they had before their father tweaked to the fact that there had been a major leak.

Taking a break, he sat back and rubbed his eyes—and that was when the second wave of storms hit. And whether it was the forced TO thanks to his burning retinas, or the fact that this T-cell really was kicking it up huge, he became very aware that Lizzie’s home was suddenly under siege.

Getting to his feet, he went around and shut all the open windows, downstairs and up. As he jogged from room to room, lightning strobed in crazy bursts, casting fast, hard shadows over Lizzie’s floorboards, her furniture, her piano. With the sky nearly dark as midnight and all the jagged licks nailing the farmland, he felt as though he were in a war zone.

He’d forgotten how rough these eastward-moving spring storms could be, the collisions of hot and cold fronts given free rein over the miles and miles of flat, tilled fields in the midwest.

Back on the first floor, he glanced out at the front porch and cursed. The wicker rockers and side tables were milling around, animated into nervous agitation by the countervailing gusts of wind.

When he went to open the door, the heavy weight blew in at the slightest turn of the knob, and he had to drag things shut behind himself as he stepped out. Grabbing hold of anything he came in contact with, he moved Lizzie’s stuff around the corner of the porch, out of the worst of the gale.

He was coming back around to tackle the final lounge chair when he saw headlights turn in off the main road. It had to be her—and he was glad she was home. He’d meant to call, text … send up smoke signals or a homing pigeon, but his head had been locked in a—