The Apartment Below the Water Line

When the upriver dams fail, the town of Cadence floods three stories in nine days, and the survivors climb into the tall brick apartment blocks that still stand above the waterline. Wren Ostrowski, a shipping dispatcher, keeps a nightly log by headlamp: who's on which floor, how much clean water is left, how many stairs are still passable. On night four she finds the door of the apartment below hers nailed shut from the outside. Inside, the rooms are dry. The table is laid for four. And on the table is a stack of typed pages describing this exact flood — dated eleven years before the dam was built, counting the dead by name as the numbers rise down the stairwells. Someone in this building knew the water was coming. Someone stocked the rooms. And as Cadence sinks floor by floor, Wren starts asking the survivors a question nobody wants to answer: was this a disaster, or a decision? A dark psychological thriller and apocalyptic mystery of floods, secrets and the ledger of who lives.