The Valley and the Flood by Rebecca Mahoney (i wanna iguana read aloud TXT) 📕

I do. He has my number, I gave it to him during that first appointment—it won’t exactly be hard for him to figure out it was me.

Maybe it’ll go to voicemail. He told me it almost always goes to voicemail. But even then I still have to tell him something. And not about Flashback Theater in 3D. Or that I ruined my visit with Flora. Or that I might soon be responsible for the destruction of an entire town.

Rescheduling. I’ll tell him I need to push back a week. And then I’ll sound like I don’t need to see him the second I get back.

So I’m completely prepared. For everything except the possibility that he’ll pick up.

“Hello?” he says.

“Oh, shit,” I blurt out.

“Rose?” he says.

And I immediately hang up.

The phone sits flat in the palm of my hand. It’s silent for a few beats. And then it rings.

I suck in a deep breath through my teeth, and I pick it up.

“Hi, Maurice,” I say.

“Hello, Rose?” Maurice sounds totally, enviably even. “I think I just missed a call from you?”

Oh my God. That was way more generous than I deserved.

“Um. Yes. Sorry,” I say. “I was going to leave a message. I thought you had a separate work phone.”

“That’s right,” he says.

“You’re checking your work phone at midnight?” I say.

“It was next to me.” I can hear the jovial shrug. “I was awake anyway.” Probably at his desk, learning a fourth language. Goddamnit, Maurice.

“You know,” I say, “there’s this thing called work-life balance—”

“And I’ll be sure to look into it,” he says. “Something on your mind?”

I straighten. Mild as it sounds, that’s as direct as I’ve ever heard him. I can waste time all I want in our appointments. But if I’m going so far as to call him, he’s going to know something’s up.

I think. It’s not like I know a lot about him personally. His office is in a first-floor apartment, facing the street. He takes clients in French, English, and three dialects of Arabic. When I ask if he had a nice week, he always says that he did, in a way that suggests we’re stopping there. He has two framed paintings of cities behind his chair. The first is Paris. When I asked about the second, he told me it was Algiers.

And he’s a ridiculously, frustratingly kind person. Kind in a way I’ve never doubted.

So. What’s on my mind.

I laugh. “Can I have an easier question?”

“Okay,” he says. “What would help, then?”

I start tapping my feet in a rhythm. The beat echoes. “What helps other people, when they call you?”

“Sometimes it helps to just talk,” he says.

“Hard pass,” I say, smiling despite myself. “What else?”

I can hear him mulling it over. “Well . . . I’m not sure how to put this, but oftentimes what people are looking for is a . . . I’m trying to think of a better phrase than reality check.”

“Reality check is an excellent phrase,” I say. “But you’re probably not talking about the ‘blue just isn’t your color’ type.”

“Blue is everyone’s color,” he says very seriously.

This time, I laugh for real.

“So you mean, like . . .” I rub my thumb against the inside of my palm. But the cuts I’m thinking about are long gone. “If someone’s seeing things?”

“Could be like that,” he says. If he reads anything into the question, it doesn’t show. “Or maybe they see what’s there just fine, but they don’t know how to interpret it.”

Somehow, sitting on a street I know is hundreds of miles away, watching a night from seven months ago—it feels about ten times more surreal now, talking to someone so unrelentingly grounded. But I know what he’s saying. Everything I’ve ever asked him, since that first appointment, has been some form of “Is this happening or not?”

I swallow, hard. “You get texts, right?”

“I do,” he says.

“So . . .” I stare into the floodlights of the house across the street until it hurts my eyes. “If I texted you a picture, right now, could you describe what’s in it without asking any questions?”

There’s a beat of silence. And this is the one thing that annoys me about him. No matter what I say, he never seems that surprised.

“And that’d help?” he says.

“Yeah. I think it would.” It’s my turn to pause. “I’m going to hang up now.”

“You can always call back later if you want to talk.” After some consideration, he adds, “Maybe not later tonight.”

“Sure, yeah,” I say. “Sorry again.”

“Not at all. Take care, Rose.”

I hang up. And for a second, I consider not taking the picture. But maybe this will help.

I angle my phone’s camera straight down the middle of the street, I take the shot, and I text him the picture. No context.

An ellipsis pops up on his side of the screen. He’s typing.

Cul-de-sac with three trees in the middle, says the text. The same thing I see.

But when I look up again, that cul-de-sac is gone. I’m in the middle of the street, but a street back in the Lethe Ridge housing development. That ever-present stirring over my shoulder feels farther away now, like whoever it was took a big step back. And Marin’s neighborhood isn’t there.

But if my reality check saw it, too, then there we are.

The phone buzzes again. Maurice sent another text. Why?

I shake my head as I text back. I said no questions. ☺

I read his message again. And this time, it lands. Cul-de-sac. There had been a cul-de-sac on the public access channel when I had that little jolt of panic, back at the house. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I saw that and thought of Marin’s neighborhood. It’s the kind of logic leap that hypervigilance is so good at. But I didn’t consciously connect the dots.

So how did this thing—this flood—recognize what I didn’t?

I close out my messages and go back to my home screen. It’s midnight. If I’m going to trust Cassie, that means that in exactly three days, whatever I’ve brought to this town will be here.

And it suddenly