The Long Walk Inland

The Gulf flooded permanently eight weeks ago. Rhea Delacroix is walking inland with her sister's dog, a bag of antibiotics, and one address in her head: a clinic in Hattiesburg where her niece was last seen. She doesn't want company. She gets Cass Mbeki — an engineer with a flood map and an agenda he won't explain. Together they trade skills across three hundred miles of standing water: her medicine for his routes, her dog for his night watch, her reasons for going for his reasons for coming. At a checkpoint, the contractor who ruined the levees offers Cass a truck, a tank of diesel, and a statement that blames the flood on nobody in particular. All he has to do is walk away from a woman he barely knows. He doesn't. And in the eleven days that follow, Rhea learns that survival is not the same thing as living. A tender, clear-eyed survival romance for readers who want love built out of shared distance.