The crawl space was breathing again.
That wet exhale through the floor vents, salt and rot pushing up against the vapor barrier. 2:14 AM. Eighty-one degrees with the window unit running. The sheets stuck to her back. His laptop between them on the bed, mortgage calculator in one tab, Zillow in another, and now this: a Google Doc titled "Flood Obs — Beaufort/Cedar St Area," 1,247 rows, started in 2027 by someone named Dr. K. Watanabe, retired marine biologist.
The first entry:
1/15/27 — 9.4 in. above daily mean high — Cedar St storm drain backup — clear sky, no rain — duration 3 hrs
By 2029, other names appeared. The entries grew more frequent. The water levels climbed.
"Scroll down," he said.
"I am scrolling."
"To this year. Go to this year."
She'd been reading for forty minutes while he worked the calculator on his phone, thumb pressing numbers like he was counting down to something. Their insurance renewal sat on the kitchen counter downstairs. $11,400. Up from $8,200 when they'd bought the house two years ago, when the FEMA map said Zone X, minimal risk, and the seller had checked "No Representation" on the flood history disclosure.
They hadn't known to ask what that meant.
6/3/33 — 16.8 in. — Cedar to Marsh, both sides — crawl space took water, 6 in. standing — no storm
6/3/33 — confirming. my yard sensors read 17.1. third time this month.
"Seventeen inches," she said. "Clear day. No storm, seventeen inches."
"The elevation estimate is one eighty-five."
"I know what it is."
"One eighty-five plus the forty-two we're under. Two twenty-seven thousand dollars. Before we find somewhere to live for three months while they jack the house up on — what did it say, helical piers—"
"We should elevate."
"With what."
"I don't know. With what we have. A loan. Something."
"We're forty-two thousand underwater on the mortgage and you want to take out a loan for one hundred and eighty-five—"
"The insurance alone is eleven four. Next year it'll be thirteen, fourteen. If we elevate it drops fifty, sixty percent. You run that out five years—"
"We don't have five years. Look at it." He grabbed the laptop, scrolled. The biologist had added a column in 2031 labeled "Duration." In 2027, floods lasted two to four hours. By 2032, entries read "8+ hrs." One from March of this year: did not fully recede before next tide. "Look at the duration column. It's not getting better in five years."
"So what, we sell? For what?"
"We'd bring forty-two to closing. But we'd be out."
"Forty-two thousand dollars to walk away from our house. That's your plan."
"It's not a plan, it's math."
"It's giving up."
The window unit cycled off. In the silence, the crawl space exhaled. She could feel the floor give slightly under the bed frame, that softness that hadn't been there when they moved in. The bathroom door she'd shimmed twice. The wood swelling from underneath, the house taking water into itself the way a body takes fever.
Her eyes burned. 2 AM and the laptop glare and the humidity working up through the floor, through the carpet, into the mattress, into their skin. She could taste it. Salt and mildew and the faint sweetness of wood going soft.
"You're the one who said the inspection was fine."
"Don't."
"You said it looked solid. You said the crawl space was—"
"I said don't."
She scrolled. Some of the names in the early entries stopped appearing by 2031. New names replaced them. Some of those stopped too. The biologist kept going. Every entry. Six years. 9.4 inches becoming 12 becoming 16.8 becoming—
7/8/33 — 18.3 in. — Cedar/Elm/Marsh — full street coverage — storm drain overwhelmed by 14:20, water entering crawl spaces by 15:00 — sunny, 91°F — duration: ongoing at time of entry
Ongoing at time of entry.
He put his phone down. The calculator dimmed, went dark. He was looking at the ceiling stain above the window. Brownish. Growing since June.
Outside, across the street, the Huangs' house sat on new pilings, lattice panels bright white underneath, the old foundation line still visible on the concrete. Next to it, a ground-level place, dark, FOR SALE since April. Next to that, an empty lot where a house had been. Spartina coming up through the driveway cracks.
"What if we just—" he started.
"Just what."
He didn't finish. He reached across the laptop and put his hand on her wrist. His fingers were hot. Everything was hot. She didn't pull away. She didn't move toward him either.
"We have to decide," he said.
"I know."
"Tonight."
She pulled up the mortgage calculator. $185,000 at 8.7% over fifteen years. Monthly payment $1,847. Plus the $11,400 insurance, which might drop to $5,700 if they elevated, or might not, because the map still said Zone X and the spreadsheet said 18.3 inches on a sunny day and nobody in the Duration column was writing "receded" anymore. She typed the numbers in. Deleted them. Typed different numbers. The crawl space breathed. His hand was still on her wrist.
$227,000 to stay. $42,000 to leave. Either number meant they couldn't afford the other number. She started typing again.
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The maps were wrong: A First Street Foundation study found North Carolina's actual flood risk is three times greater than FEMA's maps indicate, with thousands of properties rated "low risk" based on models that ignored smaller waterways.
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Sunny-day flooding, documented: Researchers with the Sunny Day Flooding Project installed sensors in NC stormwater drains and found that Carolina Beach's Canal Drive flooded 60 days in a single year during clear weather, far exceeding federal projections of 4–8 high-tide floods.
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An uninsurable country: An NRDC report warns that enrollment in state-created insurers of last resort surged 61% between 2020 and 2024, as millions of Americans are denied or priced out of homeowners insurance by climate-driven disasters.
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The data goes dark: Federal funding cuts have made historical weather data increasingly unavailable, prompting one Kansas City meteorologist to begin manually copying 150 years of records into a personal spreadsheet before the servers go offline.