Saturday, July 24. 4:04 p.m. Lower Hutt, greater Wellington area, New Zealand.

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Ana’s hand disappeared into the guts of her backpack and came up triumphant, her hand shaking as she jabbed at the screen. “Ten new text messages.” Her voice wobbled as she dragged her index finger down the screen. “Two are from Theo’s phone, and one from Nadia.”

Daniel’s heart clenched.

Nadia. He watched Ana open her messages without making a move to retrieve his own phone. “Read them out.”

Ana sucked in a deep, shuddering breath. “Nadia says: Alyssa and I are fine. You and Dan okay? House not too bad but my phone battery nearly dead.” Tears squeezed out from the corners of her eyes.

She tapped the screen again. “Theo says: I’m good. You okay?” Ana forced out a strangled laugh. “Not much of a talker, my son. His second message says: Going to Granddad’s house. Meet me there. Thank God, they’re alive. They’re alive.” Her voice fractured into a sob and she sank to the ground beside her backpack.

In that timeless and ineffectual way men had done for thousands of years, Daniel rubbed her shoulders while Ana cried. When the tears finally tapered off, he helped her back to her feet.

“We need to find shelter,” he said.

Some of the fight had drained out of her now that she knew her kids were okay, and she nodded. “There’s an old family friend that lives about a twenty-minute walk away. Let’s try there.”

“Mrs. Wilcox used to live next door to us for years when I was growing up,” Ana said as they walked up a concrete path split into a labyrinth of fissures.

The single-story villa seemed to have been spared any major damage—aside from a few cracks in the lower concrete foundation, the house was remarkably untouched. Mrs. Wilcox was fortunate in her choice of real estate, picking a property in a hilly suburb out of the path of the tsunami.

“She and my mum were good friends, and she still rings Dad a few times a year to see how he’s getting on.” She pressed the doorbell.

Soon after the chimes died away, footsteps tentatively approached on the other side of the door.

“Mrs. Wilcox? It’s Ana. John’s daughter,” Ana called out.

“Ana? Is it really you?” The voice quavered and rose to an expectant pitch.

Locks clicked and the door swung inward. Mrs. Wilcox peeped around the edge, looking like a tuft of dandelion fluff that would blow away at the slightest gust of wind.

“Ana, it is you.” She flung the door wide open and held out her arms—with one of her gnarled hands grasping the neck of a plastic spray bottle.

Ana hugged the elderly woman and kissed her cheek. When Ana stepped back, Mrs. Wilcox turned a speculative stare on him and nudged Ana in the ribs with a bony elbow. “Who’s this handsome young man?”

“This is Daniel Calder, Mrs. Wilcox. He’s my nanny’s brother. He was meant to be visiting her this weekend.”

Mrs. Wilcox’s lips pursed and any suggestion of teasing in her previous tone disappeared at the mention of Ana’s children. “That’s where you’ll be headed, then, back to your wee kiddies?”

“Yes.”

“And John?”

“Theo’s with him at his place, and after I check on Alyssa I’ll go and bring them both back.”

“You’ll stay here tonight. Get a good night’s rest and some supplies in the morning.” It was an order, not a question.

“Thank you, Mrs. Wilcox. We’d appreciate your hospitality.” Daniel kept his tone smooth and polite.

Mrs. Wilcox reminded him of a scary old woman he and his brothers had labelled a witch when they’d spent childhood summers roaming the rural neighborhood around their farm. Mrs. Simmons caught the brothers stealing plums from her garden once, and since the raid was Daniel’s idea, he copped the punishment of weeding her garden for the next month. He came to love that old woman during those four weeks after discovering the witch’s bark was worse than her bite—not to mention she made a mean batch of scones to go with her plum jam.

Mrs. Wilcox looked to be as shrewd as his childhood nemesis. “You’ll protect her.” She tossed him the bottle and he caught it one-handed.

“Window cleaner,” she told him. “Not as good as pepper spray—beggars can’t be choosy. But squirt that in some bugger’s eyes and they’ll know all about it. Take that with you—I’ve got plenty more where that came from in case anyone tries to take advantage of a poor old lady living alone.”

Daniel allowed himself the luxury of a cheeky grin as she ushered them inside the house. “I don’t think I’d like to try and take advantage of you, ma’am. I’ll be on my best behavior.”

“See as you are.” She patted his arm. “Now, into the kitchen. I’ve got some soup heating up on a little gas ring.”

After a small but comforting meal of canned soup and bread rolls, Mrs. Wilcox asked Ana to make up the beds in her two spare rooms. Old lady hips pained her something terrible, she said, and she needed to sit in her armchair a spell. Ana, of course, was happy to help and disappeared down the hallway with sheets and blankets, a flashlight tucked under her arm.

Mrs. Wilcox led him into her cozy living room and sat in her armchair. As soon as Ana was out of hearing distance, she verbally pounced. But he’d expected it.

“You got that look about you, like my husband, Phil,” she said. “You’re a soldier, aren’t you?”

Daniel shook his head. “Not anymore.”

She picked up a set of lethal-looking metal knitting needles. A half-completed yellow bootie dangled from one. “Pah. Once a soldier, always a soldier, that’s what my Phil said. It’s in the blood.”

Daniel stretched his legs out along her two-seater sofa. They sat in silence for a few minutes, her needles clicking a soothing metronome beat.

Mrs. Wilcox stabbed one needle through a loop of yarn with vicious accuracy. “I meant what I said, you know. Look after Ana. She’s been through a lot in her life, and those kiddies mean everything to her.”

“I intend to see her home safely. It must’ve been difficult losing her husband, being alone these last few years…”

Subtle, Calder, real subtle. Prying into Ana’s history to see if she was currently involved with anyone.

The woman’s eyes gleamed in the warm light cast by the battery-powered lanterns. “Ah. Like that, is it? Well, you are a handsome devil, like my Phil was—and don’t think Ana’s missed it either. I’m old, but I’m not blind. I’ve noticed the way you two look at each other.”

Daniel raised his palms and grinned sheepishly.

Her needles clacked briskly. “I’ve known Ana her whole life and I love her like she’s one of my own. I’ll tell you this for free.” She paused, peering over the crossed X of her knitting. “Ana doesn’t easily get involved with men; she doesn’t trust them. There are a few reasons for that, one being Theo’s dad, one being her late husband, and one being her father, but it isn’t my business to tell you any details about it.”

Something rammed him in the heart region like he’d been struck with a wooden fencing post. Ana doesn’t trust men. He knew Ana was a widow and figured she’d have deep-seated issues of grief. But there was obviously some stuff there that went deeper than the hurt of losing her husband. Stuff he’d be well advised not to probe.

Do you need a neon sign, Calder? Of all the women you could fixate on, this one could make you feel even more of a failure and rip your heart out to boot.

But Ana still drew him in, and male curiosity needled him to scale the wall of mystery and reserve she hid behind. “Would she tell me?”

Mrs. Wilcox’s bony shoulders twitched in a shrug. “That I don’t know and it’s up to the two of you to figure out. But your potential for romance is not the reason I sent Ana off to the bedrooms.”

She lowered the needles and leaned forward, her eyes large and serious behind a pair of bifocals. “I popped around to see her dad a few weeks back. Something was up with him, I could tell. John wouldn’t tell me at first, but I dragged it out of him eventually. He was worried someone was watching him—and Ana, too—because he thought he saw the same car parked in Ana’s street a couple of times. He tried to make light of it and he wouldn’t confide in me much more.” She let out a deep sigh. “We’ve kept in touch, John and I, but I was always closer to Lily. I think he thinks I took sides after it all came out about…well, there goes my mouth running away with me again.”

She fiddled with the yarn twisted around her fingers. “It’s not like him to jump at shadows or make mountains out of molehills. If he says someone was watching him, then someone most likely was. If he was worried enough about Ana to mention it to me…” She started to knit again, her fingers flying. “Just keep her safe, Daniel.”

“I can do that,” he said.

But his agreement, the responsibility of it, settled across his tense shoulders in a leaden weight. Failure was not an option.