No Judgments: A Novel (Little Bridge Island Book 1)

The high winds of a hurricane sweeping across the ocean can produce a dangerous storm surge, a wall of water that can cause massive flooding even hundreds of miles inland.

Some people like to say that Little Bridge Island was discovered by the Spanish in 1513, but of course that isn’t true. You can’t “discover” something that’s already been occupied for thousands of years before you ever even got there. Little Bridge, a small island in a chain of similar islands off the coast of the tip of Florida known as the Florida Keys, was home to the Tequesta Indians for many centuries before the Spanish invaded it. The Indians were enslaved, and eventually the Keys were turned into U.S. territory.

Little Bridge got its name due to the fact that it’s connected to the rest of the Keys by a bridge.

But since most of the Keys are connected to one another by bridges, it makes no sense that Little Bridge is named after the fact that it has a bridge.

But that’s part of its quirky appeal, and probably what drew my father to it when he was a young man and began planning our family vacations. He liked quirky places, and Little Bridge, with its odd name and even odder residents, is one of the quirkiest.

So Little Bridge was where we vacationed every year, even though my mother was pretty vocal about the fact that she’d have preferred to go somewhere more cosmopolitan, such as the Hamptons, Paris, or Ibiza.

But like my father, I grew to love our vacation house on the canal, waking to the smell of the salt water, finding manatees drinking from the hose of our dock, watching egrets pluck their delicate way through the sand. I loved boating, the rush of wind through my hair, the glassy stillness of the water near the sandbars, the challenge of painting that water, making it look as mirrorlike and gleaming on my canvas as it did in real life.

And of course walking through the quaint, sun-drenched town, the historic buildings—by law none were allowed to be more than two stories tall, because anything higher might impede a neighbor’s view of the sunset—each painted a different shade of pink or blue or yellow, stopping for ice cream or groceries at the locally owned shops. I could see why my father loved Little Bridge, why he would have moved there if his job as a successful defense attorney in Manhattan—and my mother’s dislike of the town—hadn’t made such a dream impossible.

I loved it, too. I felt safe in Little Bridge—not that, back then, I had any reason to feel unsafe anywhere.

It made perfect sense to me that it was to Little Bridge that I fled when my safety felt threatened. My father—if he hadn’t passed away last year—would have understood.

But now the new comfortable, safe life I’d put so carefully together seemed to be crumbling. I knew it the minute I walked into my apartment after I got off work and found my roommate, Daniella, throwing clothes into a suitcase.

“Where are you going?” I asked, though I had a sinking feeling I already knew. “You’re not evacuating, are you?”

“Sure am.” She took a slurp from the frozen margarita she’d poured herself. I’d seen the pitcher from the blender sitting on the kitchen counter as I’d walked into the two-bedroom apartment we shared.

The place was tiny—each of the bedrooms hardly large enough to fit a queen-size bed—but I considered myself lucky to have found it . . . not the place so much as the person who’d come with it.

A curvaceous, good-humored ER nurse, Daniella was outgoing and bubbly—exactly the kind of person I needed to be around after what I’d gone through this past year back in New York, just like the job at the Mermaid was exactly the kind of job I needed now. I was up and out the door by five thirty every morning, even on my days off, since Gary was used to being fed that early and woke me like clockwork daily at dawn.

This worked out well since Daniella was a morning person, too—not to mention extremely social. She seemed to be friends with nearly everyone on the island, which wasn’t surprising: at some point, she’d either given a stitch, shot, X-ray, or bandage to nearly all of them.

That’s how she’d snagged her two-bedroom rental for such a (comparatively) low rate: because she’d treated the landlady’s son for chronic asthma. Two-bedroom apartments were rare on Little Bridge—at least ones that were affordable to locals, since most living spaces on the island proper had been snatched up by vacation rental companies and were hawked at astronomical prices online to tourists.

But since our landlady, Lydia, like most people, adored Daniella, she rented to her at a discount.

“Mandatory evac for all city employees,” Dani was explaining to me, with her usual infallible cheer. “That includes the hospital. I’ve been reassigned to beautiful, sunny, downtown Coral Gables.”

“Coral Gables?” I lifted Gary, who’d rushed over to give me his customary greeting (sprawling supine at my feet, then rubbing his face all over my shoes), and took a seat. “That makes no sense. Why would they send you to Coral Gables when the hurricane is supposed to be headed here?”

“You’re asking for local bureaucracy to make sense?” Daniella let out a delighted laugh. Dani found everything delightful, even medical emergencies. She loved making sick people feel better. “You should know better than that by now, Bree!” Then she sobered and said, “No, but really, it’s because they don’t want people thinking it’s safe to stay here. If they know hospital and emergency services will still be staffed and up and running, no one will leave, because they’ll be lulled into a false sense of security. So all of us—ER staff, police, the firehouse—have been assigned to work at hurricane shelters out of the direct path of the eye. They hope that by doing this, the good citizens of this fine isle will follow. They’re sending us all out on buses later this afternoon. Which is why I’m drinking this.” She wagged her margarita at me. “I don’t have to drive.”

I stared glumly at the sunlight streaming in through her bedroom window. Given the blue sky and steamy temperature outside, it was hard to believe any sort of storm was on its way.

But the Weather Channel, blaring in the other room, was telling a different story, as were the dozens of text messages piling up on my phone, many from Caleb. And my mother.

“What’s bugging you?” Dani asked. “You’re not upset about this hurricane, are you? Chances are it will lose a ton of steam over Cuba, you know. It’s a terrible thing to say, and poor Cuba, but that’s usually what happens. We’ll just get a lot of wind and rain. But they have to evacuate us anyway, you know, just in case.”

I smiled wanly at her.

“Not the storm,” I said. “Just . . . whatever. My ex called earlier and offered to come pick me up in his private plane.”

Dani, who knew most of what had happened between me and Cal—though not the most sordid details, which were hard for me to discuss—almost spat out the sip of margarita she’d taken. “I hope you told him to stick his plane where the sun don’t shine!”

“Of course I did. Well, not in so many words. But I kind of regret it now that everybody’s evacuating. Drew Hartwell even told me I should go. He called me Fresh Water.”

Now Dani did spit, or looked as if she wanted to, at least. “Drew Hartwell can kiss my butt. He thinks he’s God’s gift to the ladies. Hey, look, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you come with me? They’re getting us all hotel rooms. I’m sure it will be super nice. Last time they put us up at the Westin. It had a pool and a generator and everything. And, oh my God, there were these firemen from Key West—you won’t believe how we partied. It was like The Bachelorette, but on steroids.”

I smiled again, but less wanly. “Thanks, but I can’t. I’ve got this guy to worry about.”

We both eyed Gary, who’d crawled off my lap and was now sniffing the side of Daniella’s suitcase suspiciously. He either knew something was going on or was looking for a new place to curl up and sleep. Knowing Gary, it was the latter. His survival instincts weren’t exactly stellar. A middle-aged gray tabby cat who had spent years living in an animal shelter farther up the Keys before I’d come along and adopted him, he wanted only to be in the presence of human beings at all times, no matter what they were doing . . . even something as mundane as packing.

“Bring him along,” Daniella suggested. “I’m sure the hotel’s pet friendly. Or, if not, we can smuggle him in.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But you know Gary doesn’t exactly travel well.”

It was true. Gary howled up a storm when in moving vehicles, even when medicated, and a four-hour bus ride to the mainland with him sounded like one of the circles of hell.

“And besides, I don’t want to sponge off the city’s dime. I’d feel guilty.”

“Oh for God’s sake.” Daniella leaned over to sweep some jewelry off her dressing table and into a pouch. The minute her back was turned, Gary leaped into her suitcase and began sniffing the inside. “The administration said it was okay for first responders to bring their families on the bus, and into their hotel rooms. You’re the closest thing I’ve got to family around here.”

“Aw.” I was genuinely touched . . . though relieved that she hadn’t noticed what Gary was doing now, which was pawing through the clothes she’d neatly folded into the suitcase, in order to make himself a comfortable place to sleep. I stepped toward the bed and swiftly lifted his nearly twenty-pound girth from the suitcase, as he let out a tiny squeak of protest, then plopped him on the floor. “That’s sweet. But I think Gary and I would be better off here, especially given his recent medical issues.”

Daniella frowned, but I could tell she agreed with me. I hadn’t meant to adopt a cat as needy as Gary, whose personality was a joy but whose health, from having spent so many years on the streets and then in the shelter, was a wreck. Just a week earlier I’d ended up shelling out twelve hundred dollars for the removal of every last one of his teeth due to his having something called feline stomatitis, a painful inflammation of the mouth.

And while he already seemed to be on the mend, in a lot less pain (and a lot less smelly), I was in no hurry to take him on a weekend jaunt out of town, hurricane or no hurricane. He was still on antibiotics and several other medications and could eat only soft canned foods that I carefully mashed for him.

But it was all worth it. At night, after thoroughly grooming himself and making a careful inspection of the entire apartment, he climbed onto my bed, curled up close to me, and dozed off.

And for the first time since that last morning with Caleb, I was finally able to get a good night’s sleep. It seemed to me that this was only because of the sweet, heavy, purring warmth beside me.

I hadn’t wanted to mention any of this to Caleb, let alone my mother or any of my other friends back home. Only my dad, a fellow animal lover, would have understood.

But Dad was gone now.

Daniella looked down at Gary as he wandered over toward her laundry basket full of dirty clothes, sniffed it, then leaped inside, molding a soft nest out of her scrubs, pajamas, and underwear from the day before while purring so loudly we could both hear him.

“I get it,” Dani said. “He’s your boy, and he’s not really travel ready at the moment, storm or no storm.”

I smiled at her gratefully. She really was the perfect roommate. She’d been fine with my asking if it would be all right if I got a cat (my first, since my mom had never wanted animals in the house. “So dirty!” she always said. “And they scratch up the furniture”). Gary had instantly won Daniella over with his big green eyes, foot-to-face-rub greetings, and constant purring.

“But,” she said, returning to her packing, “if you change your mind, you can always take my car and come up. It doesn’t have much gas in it, but I’ll leave it parked over at the hospital with the keys under the visor anyway. Otherwise I’d say grab a rental car, but I heard the tourists snaked all of those in a panic to get out of here early this morning.”

“Oh. Well, thanks, Dani. I might take you up on that.” I doubted I would, actually, but a car low on gas was better than no car at all.

As if she’d read my mind, Dani said, “Lots of people stay, you know, Bree, even with mandatory evacs. Locals worry about looters and want to guard their homes or businesses, or they’re sick, or have loved ones who are sick, like your boy Gary, or they can’t afford to leave, or whatever. Evacuating is expensive. If you want to stay, you’ll be totally fine. Even though the hospital will be closed, there’ll be plenty of people around, even a skeleton crew of emergency responders.” She gave a mischievous grin. “But of course, a couple firehouses are going to be stationed up with us. I’m looking forward to meeting some fresh probies.”

Smiling, I rolled my eyes. Daniella often complained that dating apps were useless on such a small island—you basically ended up having already slept with everyone or being colleagues with the rest. The only way to meet anyone new was to travel or hook up with tourists.

I didn’t suffer from that problem—not because I was new to the island, but because I was on a dating hiatus. I wasn’t sure when, or if, my lady parts would ever be open again for business.

“But, hey, this place—” Dani thumped the side of her fist against the bedroom wall. “Solid concrete. Once Sonny gets the shutters on, it’ll be like a fortress. So you’re good here.”

Sonny Petrovich was our landlady Lydia’s son, a boy who was so extremely fond of video games that he would talk to you about them ad nauseum if you expressed the slightest enthusiasm, so I’d learned it was best not to.

“The only thing you have to worry about,” she went on, “is flooding.”

“Flooding?”

“Yeah. I wasn’t living here then, but I heard it happened during Hurricane Wilhelmina—not too bad, only a foot. But Lydia had to replace the fridge and stove and stuff—”

I stared at her. Flooding?

“But every hurricane’s different,” Daniella went on. “Some are rain events, some are wind. You just never know. If it’s only wind, you’re golden in this place.”

“I think,” I said, getting up, “I’ll just go check my messages.”

“Yeah.” Daniella nodded. “You should. Also, you should probably go to the store and buy some supplies before they run out, just in case. Like bottled water. And food for Gary. And alcohol. I have a list the Red Cross gave us to hand out to people. Alcohol’s not on it, of course, but I wouldn’t even go through a tropical storm without tequila, let alone a hurricane.”

I took the paper she plucked from the top of her dresser. Many of the things we already had—canned goods, bread, a manual can opener. But others—flashlight, batteries—it had never occurred to me to purchase. Daniella must have read my expression since she laughed and said, “I have all that stuff in the closet by the kitchen. Bought it for the last storm that headed our way, then never used it because it veered out to sea. You just might want to buy fresh batteries. But you’re welcome to the rest of the stuff.”

I felt relief wash over me. “Thanks, Dani. You’re a lifesaver. Literally!” Suddenly overwhelmed by how lucky I was to have found a roommate—and friend—like her, merely by answering an ad, I added, “I’m going to miss you.”

“I’m going to miss you, too,” she said, and opened her arms to give me one of her “Dani hugs,” which she handed out frequently at the hospital (but never, she’d informed me, to the “drunk frat boys during spring break.” Even Dani had her limits).

And then she was gone. Her last words to me were to be sure to look after her sourdough starter—Daniella was an avid baker—that she’d inherited from her grandmother, but which would spoil in the fridge if the power went out.

I swore I would.

She’d barely been out of the apartment for five minutes before I became convinced that I was never going to see her again.