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summer before Jenny died, Hurricane Noreen came barreling up the East Coast. They’d watched it on TV, seeing houses on the Outer Banks battered by surf that crashed over their rooftops, knocking down chimneys and sweeping several houses out to sea. People in Black Hall and weather forecasters were saying this might be the storm to rival the Great Hurricane of 1938, the last one to really devastate the Connecticut shoreline.
    Jenny and Timmy went to Black Hall Hardware to stock up on supplies. They bought extra candles, flashlights, water jugs, and two-by-fours to secure the shutters over the windows. Peter was in Denver, taking depositions, but he called to make sure the boat was hauled and the terrace furniture stowed in the garage.
    Timmy’s parents needed his help at home, up Route 156, near the Connecticut River. Julia had watched the two kids clinging to each other, as if the hurricane might rip them apart forever. They were together constantly, and when that was impossible, texting and phoning. There was almost bound to be a power outage, and Julia could already imagine Jenny’s panic. But she was secretly glad to have her daughter to herself.
    Together she and Jenny shuttered the windows, and nailed in the two-by-fours to reinforce the wrought-iron closures on the house’s most vulnerable east- and south-facing sides. Julia let Jenny climb the ladder and bang in the nails. Together they climbed out on the gently sloping roof over the seaward sunroom and cleaned out the gutter, to keep the rainwater flowing.
    Bonnie felt the change in barometric pressure before they did, and began barking and running down to the beach and back. The temperature rose and felt damp and tropical. The air was still, the sky blue with high thin clouds. When the wind barely started picking up, it turned the leaves on the maple and oak trees upside down, and the sky became the color of a yellowing bruise.
    Julia and Jenny changed into their bathing suits and ran through the yard and down the long sandy oak-lined path, Bonnie flying ahead of them. This stretch of beach was wild, part of a nature sanctuary. It was backed by marshland, with fine green grasses rippling in long patterns.
    Hard against the marsh grass were huge tree trunks, wood silvered by countless storms. Julia could name each hurricane or blizzard during which each tree had washed up.
    She wondered whether Noreen would uproot oaks and pines, wreck docks and cottages, and deposit the detritus along the shoreline. And Jenny was right—storms sometimes shifted the sand and earth, revealing artifacts from the Indian period, and here on this very beach was revealed a nineteenth-century 350-ton warship that had fought the British in the War of 1812 and been wrecked here during a hurricane.
    For now the elements were just starting to rise, the normal-sized waves swelling to giant rollers that broke on the bar and came seething into shore with a layer of white foam.
    Julia and Jenny dropped their towels and dove in. The air was so warm, but so was the water, as if the tropical storm were already here but hadn’t yet fully shown itself.
    One year a message in a bottle had washed up. Jenny had opened it immediately.
Hello, my name is Willa, I am 12. The storm is coming. My family lives on Chincoteague, Virginia. If you find this, please write me.
    Jenny had written back, and for a few years she and Willa had been pen pals, but the friendship had trailed off. Since then, during every serious storm, Jenny had sent her own messages in bottles, and had heard back twice—once from a girl in Bass Harbor, Maine, and once from a World War II veteran in Devon, England.
    Julia and Jenny swam for a long time, then dried off and headed back to the house. Julia had stocked up at the A&P and Ritter’s farm stand with provisions that would last if the power went out. They had the outdoor grill for cooking, and an antique oak ice chest that had come with the old house. Just in case, Julia had