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She thought of Blanchie Bise and Bible class The flood of Noah, Jesus She did try "It’s never beensuit," she confessed

"Your children’s adulthood?"

That nearly floored her of course Or creeked her Since that’s as below this log, if she’d swooned off of it How dare he belt her with that one?

"A trend is intangible, but real," he said cal, but several of then the You never see it all at once An attention span is required"

It occurred to her that she didn’t have a single photo of her kids from the last six months or et some before Preston’s baby teeth fell out

"I can break it down for you," he said "Water, you can see that Warm air holds more water Think of condensation on a windshield Multiply that times all the square meters above you, and it’s a hell of a lot of water It evaporates too quickly from the hot places, and floods the wet ones Every kind of weather is intensified by war"

"So flood and fire, basically Like the Prophecy"

"I don’t know about that What does the Bible say about the ice albedo effect?"

He washer, probably "I don’t think the Prophecy applies in real-world teruess The lake of fire and everything But they figure it’s still a long way off Way past the end of T-ball season After the kids’ graduation, after the wedding"

She stopped, before Cordelia and Preston ca, its softer light filling the sky like a liquid seeping between the trees Ovid’s attention to her felt like a promise, and she wanted to trust it, only that, not the particular words To leap, and forget the crash landing She finished her sandhile he talked He told her that forests absorb carbon fro That oceans also buffer the atmosphere, but not when their carbon levels make the their fish

"And coral reefs Have you ever seen a coral reef?"

She wished she could just touch his hand and stop this She noticed the crow’s feet around his eyes, his exhaustion Ithiuess that’s not the same"

"One day I will tell you about the reefs It’s all I wanted to do as a boy, swim in the reef and make my little studies My mother said I would turn into a fish"

She couldn’t see these things at all, stricken forests or killing tides What she saas the boy inside aShe felt the way she did when her children howled over outcooes "They say it’s just cycles," she said after a while "That it goes through this every so often"

He let out a little hiss between his teeth, which scared her "All right In the Pleistocene most of this continent was under ice, and the rest was arctic desert At other times the ice caps melted and this very place was under the ocean So yes, cycles With millions of years between events, my friend Not decades"

She did not like my friend She did not hazard a comment But he prodded "Dellarobia, what do you see?"

"We’ve never had rain like we did last year I’ll grant you"