A Safehouse of My Own

Willa Ames, 27, has already lived through the end of the world once, and she has been sent back with thirty days to prepare. She knows when the rain starts. The world does not. Her parents are dead and left her a ground-floor shop with a small supermarket inside it and an old low-lying house on the same street, and she spent three years with a man who did not work. What she has now is thirty days, a bank account, a store room, a mortgage, and neighbours who will become a different kind of danger long before the water arrives. Half of this story is shopping, logistics, weight, volume, paperwork and money: every purchase deducts a stated amount, every purchase requires a receipt, and a loan approval is a scene. The other half is water rising. Revenge and preparation turn out to be the same activity, and the game never lets that be comfortable. The questions stay open: how far she is willing to go to be ready, and whether being ready means becoming the kind of person who once let her die.