Josephine hung up the phone with a shaking hand, a wounded sound escaping her mouth as she surveyed what used to be her family’s pro shop. When law enforcement had officially declared it safe to drive on the roads, she’d jumped into her ancient Camry immediately, steeling herself for the worst the entire way. Yet she still hadn’t been prepared.
Half of the inventory of clubs was gone. Floated away in the flood waters or possibly looted. The cash register was on its side in a bank of sludge. The display of rangefinder binoculars she’d arranged only last week was sticking out through the broken back window.
All she could do was stare at the mess. She had no idea where to begin cleaning up. If there was a place to sit down, she would do it now. In her haste to get out of her apartment, she’d forgotten to eat breakfast and the beeping on her phone reminded her of that now. Her low-blood-sugar alert was going off.
Movements lethargic, Josephine rooted in her purse for her plastic roll of glucose tabs and popped a few into her mouth, chewing, willing the sugar to bring her back up quickly, though the movements of her jaw felt unnatural. At least the deafening buzzing in her head had one advantage—it was drowning out the conversation she’d just had with the insurance company. The one who was no longer providing coverage.
She centered herself with a deep breath and called her parents.
“How bad is it, kiddo?” asked her father right away.
“It’s bad, Dad.”
Her parents both let out breaths that brushed up against her eardrum. She could picture them standing right beside each other in the kitchen, sharing the single phone they owned. Her mother would still have a pink towel on her head from the shower, her father sans pants. “That’s okay, you two. We knew it was going to be a challenge, but the Doyles are up for it,” said her mother, always the optimist. Forever finding the bright side. “We have flood insurance on the shop. It’ll take a while to come through, but that’ll just give us time to plan our grand reopening.”
Josephine’s legs turned so rubbery, she almost sat down in the foot-deep water.
She could see the late notice in her hand, remember reading the order to renew four months ago. Where had she stuffed it? Was it floating in the debris somewhere?
Oh God. Oh God.
Josephine looked around, swallowing hard at the sight of black-and-white pictures stuck in the sludge, their frames shattered, along with the frame holding the first dollar bill ever spent inside those walls. Her grandfather had opened the Golden Tee Pro Shop in the mid-sixties. It was attached to Rolling Greens, a landmark golf course in West Palm Beach that was open to the public. The little shop, where customers could rent clubs, buy merchandise, and talk golf, had seen much better days, before the ritzy private clubs had started popping up all over southern Florida, but Josephine had aspirations to change that in the coming years.
A putting green out front, more on-trend merchandise, a beverage bar.
She’d been giving extra lessons lately to save up the money to make those dreams a reality, but in one fell swoop, those possibilities had been swept out to sea by Mother Nature.
The Golden Tee belonged to her family, though she largely ran it solo these days. She’d been a late-in-life baby for her parents and they’d retired a few years ago. But the shop was still their very heart and soul. How would they react if they knew business had dwindled so drastically that she’d used the insurance money to buy insulin, instead?
She absolutely, 100 percent, could not tell her parents that. They were hoverers by nature. Throw in the fact that she’d been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age six and she’d grown up with two full-time human helicopters that watched her every move. In her late teens, she’d managed to convince them that she could take care of herself. They’d stopped following her on the app that allowed them to see her blood glucose number. They’d trusted her to make good decisions.
Failing to renew flood insurance in Florida was soooo not a good decision.
Nor was forgoing her own private medical insurance at age twenty-six so she could afford the monthly rent on the Golden Tee. Buying insulin out of pocket did not fall under the category of smart moves. Sure, several drug companies had capped insulin at thirty-five dollars recently, which was a tremendous help, but those vials were small and the costs added up. And insulin was only one component of living with diabetes in the age of smarter technology. Medical devices, such as her glucose monitor, had an astronomical price tag out of pocket. Necessary trips to the endocrinologist weren’t cheap, either, without that little white card with numbers on it.
She’d hoped to skate by for a super brief period of time without a policy, borrowing supplies from the doctor when possible, but she’d leaned on that goodwill too long . . . and now her chickens were coming home to roost.
“Joey?”
She gulped at the sound of her mother’s voice. “Yes, I’m here.”
“Do you want us to come down?” asked her father.
“No.” She molded her palm to her forehead. “You don’t want to see it like this. I’ll, um . . .” She turned in a circle, ordering the prickle behind her eyes to cut it out. “Let me clean up a little before you come by. Maybe a few days?”
“Joey, you don’t have to take this on alone,” her father said sternly.
“I know.”
That’s what she said out loud. However, the truth was that she took on everything alone. She didn’t know any other way to feel like a capable adult. Growing up as a diabetic meant a lot of people assuming she was incapable of certain things. Are you okay? Do you need a break? Should you eat that? That constant concern from others had led to Josephine’s being determined to prove she could do anything without issue or assistance. And she could do mostly anything—except for be in the military or fly a plane.
Unfortunately, staring at the mess that was her family’s shop and having no clue if she’d be able to salvage it, she didn’t feel capable of diddly-squat.
“I’ll call you guys back in a while, okay?” she said brightly. “Love you.”
“We love you, too, Joey-Roo.”
That prickle behind her eyes got stronger and she hung up, blowing out a pent-up breath. She’d give herself five minutes to gather some courage, then she’d come up with a plan. Surely the government was allocating funds for disaster victims, right? Although she knew from past experience with hurricanes that it could take years to see that money—
“Hello?”
Josephine froze at the sound of that voice, calling from outside the shop.
She would know that raspy baritone in the middle of a monsoon.
It sounded like Wells Whitaker, but she had to be mistaken. Low blood sugar tended to make her slightly dizzy, her thoughts fuzzing together like cotton. The man who had fallen off the face of the planet three weeks ago was not knocking on the last remaining intact window of the Golden Tee Pro Shop.
“Belle, you in there?”
Belle.
No one called her that but Wells.
No. No way.
No.
She turned around and nudged the door open with her toe, which wasn’t very difficult, since it hung by a single hinge. “Uh . . . hi? Whoever you are?”
A rush of breath. “Josephine.”
None other than Wells Whitaker’s face appeared in the doorway. Also, his body. It was there. All of him was there. He wasn’t dressed for golf, as she was used to seeing him. Instead, he wore a black hoodie, jeans, his signature backward ballcap, dark hair sticking out from every side. His sideburns were overgrown, on course to collide with his unshaven facial hair where it scaled the sides of his sculpted face. His eyes were bloodshot and the smell of alcohol was basically the third occupant in the room.
Yet, despite the fact that he currently looked like human roadkill, he somehow retained his mystique. His Wells-ness. This was the guy who would lead the ragtag group of strangers in a dystopian universe. Everyone would just follow him without question. No one would be able to help it, because he had this way of moving and observing that said, Yeah, okay, civilization is dead, so what?
And he was here.
“What . . . is going on?”
His eyes moved sharply over her body, as if assessing for injury. “You’re okay.” A beat passed, his gaze meeting hers and holding. “Right?”
Physically, she was fine.
Just a little worried about the obvious hallucination taking place.
“Yes. I’m . . .” She blinked several times, trying to get her eyes to stop playing tricks on her. “What are you doing here?”
He rolled a single shoulder. “I just happened to be staying with a friend, not too far away. I remembered you saying something about your family owning . . . a pro shop? While I was out walking around, looking at the damage, I kind of just stumbled on this place by accident.”
Josephine gave all of that a moment to sink in and none of it made the remotest lick of sense. “But . . . really? You came to stay with a friend in the direct path of a hurricane? And . . . this course is two miles from any residential area. You’d have to walk—”
“Josephine, you know a lot about me, right? Probably way too much.”
“A Sagittarius raised in southern Georgia, you were discovered by one of golf’s most legendary masters, Buck Lee, while—”
“Then you also know I hate answering questions.”
That was the understatement of the century. Wells had once spent a full thirty minutes scrolling on his phone during a post-tournament press conference, completely ignoring the rapid-fire questions about a shouting match that had ensued with his caddie on the sixteenth hole. When his time was up, he’d calmly gotten up and swaggered out of the media tent, earning himself the nickname the Media unDarling.
“Yes, I do know that about you.”
“Good.”
Leaving that single word hanging in the air, Wells waded into the water left standing in the shop, charting the damage from beneath a furrowed brow. Josephine was grateful for the break in conversation, because now that her initial shock over Wells Whitaker appearing out of the blue had worn off, she was remembering all the reasons she’d made the painful decision to relinquish her fangirl status.
True, fangirls didn’t quit. They were loyal to the end. But that day on the golf course, when he’d torn her sign in half, he’d ripped apart something inside her, too.
Apparently there came a point when a fangirl needed to be more loyal to herself.
And she didn’t deserve to be treated like yesterday’s garbage.
Her faith in that decision was stronger than ever that morning, faced with the potential loss of something that truly mattered—her family’s legacy and livelihood.
“Have you called the insurance company yet?” Wells asked, hands propped on his hips, slowly bringing his attention back to her. “Were they able to give you a timeline?”
“Um.” Oh no, her voice was shaking. She swallowed the thick feeling in her throat and looked down at her hands. “Um . . .”
“Hey.” He stabbed the air with a finger. “Uh-uh. Are you crying?”
“I’d give it a sixty percent chance,” she said on a sucked-in breath, blinking rapidly at the ceiling. “Can you please go?”
“Go?” She heard him shifting in the water. “I see what you’re doing here. You’re telling me to leave this time. You’ve gotten it out of your system, okay? We’re even.”
“I’m not keeping score. I just have a lot of important things on my mind and you are not one of them.”
He caught that statement on the chin, his jaw giving a sharp flex. “Tell me the important things on your mind,” he said in a lower tone.
“Why would I do that?”
“I’m asking you to.”
“Do you even remember what happened last time I saw you?” Her curiosity was genuine. Did he think he could just walk into her shop and demand that she detail the way her life had taken a catastrophic left turn? She couldn’t even tell her own parents. “Do you?”
Briefly, his gaze flickered down to the water. “Yes, I remember.”
“Then I don’t think it should come as a surprise that I’m kicking you out.” How symbolic that her attention should be drawn to a framed poster of Wells on the other side of the shop. His image was water damaged to the point of distortion. “I’m not your fan anymore.”
