The water came on a Tuesday morning and nobody was really ready for it even though Rhys had been saying it was going to happen for nearly two weeks.

By six o'clock Aroha could see it from the Four Square carpark. The Clutha had burst its banks and was spreading out across the flats slowly but definitely. It was brown and there was a lot of it. She stood there with Pip on her hip and just watched it cover the bottom paddock and then the fence and then the road. It was kind of unreal.

banks and was spreading out across the flats slowly but definitely. It was brown and there was a lot of it. She stood there with Pip on her hip and just watched it cover the bottom paddock and then the fence and then the road. It was kind of unreal. She went inside and turned the sign to Closed, then changed her mind and turned it back to Open. People were going to need things. Brendan opened the pub at eight without really announcing it, he just left the door open and put the coffee on.

By ten o'clock there were about seventeen people inside which was a lot for a Tuesday morning. Someone brought a transistor radio that picked up one station from Dunedin if you stood it near the window. Mavis arrived at half past ten with a big pot of soup she'd made the night before like she'd known this was going to happen. She put it on the bar without asking Brendan if that was okay. He didn't say anything about it. The two of them hadn't really spoken properly in eleven years because of something that had happened with some land, and they weren't going to suddenly start talking now, but they had a kind of silent agreement that seemed to work okay.

The last person to arrive was Rhys the hydrologist. He was wet up to his knees and had mud on his jacket and he was holding his laptop bag really tightly against his chest. He looked around the room like he was expecting someone to say something to him. Lena noticed this from where she was sitting in the corner on her phone. "Rhys," Mavis said. "Mrs Hargreaves." He found a stool at the far end of the bar and sat down and opened his laptop. His internet dropped within the hour. After that he just sat there. The power went out on day three.

The afternoon just kind of got darker and darker and then Brendan lit all the candles he had under the bar and suddenly the pub looked really different, almost cosy actually. Pip who was four years old thought this was the greatest thing that had ever happened to her in her entire life. She went around re-lighting candles that were already lit with a long match Mavis gave her and everyone just let her do it. Rhys had been pretty quiet the whole time. He helped when people needed help and he answered questions but he kind of kept to himself and people left him to it.

On the third night Ron Gillies started asking about the flood, was it climate change, did the council know, is this going to keep happening. He was asking the whole room but it was pretty obvious he meant Rhys. Rhys looked up. "The snowpack was always going to cause a significant melt," he said. "But the timing of everything—" He stopped and picked up his mug and put it down again. "I sent a report to the council eleven days ago. I told them exactly when the risk window was." No one said anything for a moment. "They replied and said thanks basically," he said. "That was it." Lena had been watching him from the corner.

She was sixteen and she was Mavis's granddaughter visiting from Queenstown and most of the adults had been kind of ignoring her all week which she was used to. But she'd been watching everyone really closely because she didn't have anything else to do once the data dropped out. "Do you think the dam made it worse?" she asked. "Like the releases upstream?" Everyone looked at her which was a bit awkward. Rhys stared at her for a few seconds. "That's complicated." "I know," Lena said. "But do you think it?" He didn't answer her. But she could tell from his face that the answer was yes.

On day five it snowed on the hills above the flood which looked really strange and beautiful, white above brown, and the morning light was golden and cold. Aroha put Pip down for a nap on a pile of coats in the back room and came out to find Mavis sitting alone at the bar. Brendan was outside. Most of the others were asleep or reading. Mavis had found Brendan's expensive whisky from the high shelf and she was clearly not on her first glass. "Sit down," Mavis said. Aroha sat down. "I knew your mum," Mavis said. "Before she moved to Dunedin. She was a really good person. People didn't appreciate her enough." "Yeah," Aroha said.

"She was." Mavis turned her glass around and around on the bar. "I did something once," she said, not really looking at Aroha. "A long time ago. Something I've never told anyone." She looked up. "I'm not going to tell you either though. I just want you to know that I have this thing that I've been carrying around." Aroha didn't really know what to say to that so she just nodded. "The reason I can't tell you," Mavis said, "is because it involves someone who is literally in the next room. And I haven't had enough whisky yet to do it properly." Aroha looked at the door to the yard. "Brendan," she said. Mavis didn't say yes but she didn't say no either.

"People say it was about land," Aroha said carefully. "People could see the land part," Mavis said. "That doesn't mean that's all there was." She poured another glass. "Eleven years is a really long time to keep something secret in a town this small." Outside the light moved across the water and it was actually really beautiful even though the whole situation was kind of a disaster. That evening Aroha found Lena out the back sitting on a milk crate in the freezing cold just looking at the flood. It had nearly reached Brendan's section and in the last of the light it looked almost like it wasn't even moving. "You're going to get hypothermia," Aroha said. "Probably," Lena said. She didn't move.

"Can I ask you something personal?" Aroha sat down on the other crate. "Okay." "Why did you come back here? Like everyone I know whose parents grew up in a small town, they left and they just stayed gone. You left and then came back. And you came back by yourself with a baby." She paused. "I'm not trying to be mean. I just don't understand it." Aroha looked at the water for a while before answering. "I had a whole life in Dunedin," she said. "Flat, job, friends, everything. It looked completely fine from the outside." She leaned forward on her knees. "And then Pip happened and I looked at all of it and I realised none of it was actually solid.

Like I had built this whole life but it was kind of like a stage set. If someone pushed it, it would just fall over." "So you came home." "I came back to something real. Even if it's boring. Even if there's nothing to do and everyone knows your business." She looked sideways at Lena. "Does that make sense or does it sound completely pathetic?" Lena actually thought about it for a while instead of just saying no it's fine. "It makes sense," she said. "Actually it makes a lot of sense." They sat there in the cold together not saying anything. The water reflected what was left of the light and it was pretty in a weird way.

"I think your grandmother is about to do something tomorrow," Aroha said. "I'm not sure what. But I'd stay around." On day seven the radio finally had good news. The road crew said SH8 would be open by mid-afternoon. Suddenly everyone was on their phones at once and the pub was really noisy with people calling their families and laughing with relief. But in the morning before all that it was still quiet. Lena woke up early and came out and saw Mavis and Brendan at the far end of the bar. The candles had burned really low. Outside the floodwater had dropped overnight and you could see the fence posts in the paddock again with bits of dead grass and rubbish stuck to them.

She didn't walk over to them. The window was all steamed up from the cold and she could see them through it like a blurry photograph. Mavis was talking and her hands were wrapped around her mug. Brendan had his arms crossed and then he didn't, he leaned forward on the bar and listened to her in this way that was really focused, like what she was saying was the most important thing he'd heard in a long time. Lena stood there for a minute and then went to make coffee. It wasn't her moment to be part of. Rhys left first once the road was clear. He shook hands with a few people and when he got to the door he turned around.

"I'm going to write the full report," he said. "Everything. The dam releases, what the council did with my warnings, the timeline. All of it." He looked like he'd been thinking about this for a while. "I don't know what's going to happen when I do." Nobody said anything for a second. Then Aroha said from behind the bar: "Write it anyway." He nodded and left. Lena watched everyone else leave through the afternoon. There were hugs at the door and people saying they'd check on each other, and actually in a small town like this they probably would. That was one thing about Roxburgh. She helped Aroha clean up the tables.

Pip was finally asleep in the back room after a week of being extremely excited about everything. "Are you glad you came to visit?" Aroha asked. Lena thought about the foggy window and Mavis and Brendan on the other side of it. She thought about Rhys's face when she asked him the question he hadn't wanted to answer. She thought about sitting on the milk crate in the cold with the floodwater going pink in the sunset. "Yeah," she said. "I actually am." Mavis was the last one to leave. Brendan walked her to the door and they stood there for a moment looking out at everything.

The water was pulling back across the paddocks and the hills were gold above where the flood had been and the air smelled really clean the way it does after bad weather. Eleven years of not talking hadn't ended exactly. But it had changed into something different, something that might actually get better over time. "Same time next flood," Brendan said. Mavis made a sound that was almost a laugh. She walked home along the edge of the water which was still there but retreating. The cold air was sharp in her lungs and the hills were burning orange in the last of the light. She hadn't told anyone her secret.

But she had told two people that it existed, and for some reason that actually helped. It was like when you're carrying a really heavy bag and you just put it down for a second, not forever, but enough to remember that your arms belong to you. The river ran fast beside her like it always had and always would.