TWO WEEKS AFTER the levees buckled and the waters rushed in, Marc Delpit sits in the belly of a helicopter and looks out over his house. At what used to be his house.

He and his wife, Endya, designed it themselves, six years earlier in '99. They had grown up in New Orleans East, been high school sweethearts, then stuck around the neighborhood to raise their own family there too. The city gets into your blood, Endya says. It's a tough place to leave. The kitchen had an open floor plan, and Endya loved that. There was enough space for a playroom, plus Jack and Jill bedrooms for their kids, Grant and Grace. She loved that too. Their backyard sat on the 18th fairway of a golf course, a sprawling, green panorama where Marc taught 3-year-old Grant how to field punts. Marc would throw ducks skyward -- wild, ugly heaves -- and tell his toddler he had to catch the football, take off sprinting, then make Marc miss on the runback.

Before Grant Delpit would star at LSU, before he'd be one of the 2020 NFL draft's most coveted safeties, that patch of fairway is where he'd learn to play football.

Now, in 2005, Marc looks down at the water that buries all that. It's just a one-story house, this collaboration of his and Endya's, and the gray waters rise so close to their gray roof -- close enough that it seems as if one strong wind and the tide could swallow the home entirely in a quick, greedy gulp.

A few weeks earlier, he had watched New Orleans East drown on television after they evacuated. He had driven through a band of the storm -- Endya dozed in the passenger seat of their Buick Rendezvous, while his mother slept in the second row next to Grace in her car seat, with Grant passed out in the row behind them -- and seen the trees downed along I-55. One hundred-mile-an-hour winds rocked the car that night, but he passed closed gas station after closed gas station and decided he had to keep driving on to Texas.

He knew to expect devastation when he came back to New Orleans, and devastation greets him now that he's here.

But what a strange, unearthly sight. The sun shining outside the helicopter like any other day. The 5 feet of standing water -- all that festering evidence of this natural and human disaster -- corroding the home they love, the life they built. Life goes on and life freezes in place. Marc steps off the helicopter and calls Endya, 350 miles and a world away in Houston with Grant and Grace, to relay to her what he has seen.

"There's no need to come back," he says to his wife days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall. "It's done."

"I HAVEN'T SEEN that picture," Grant says. Fifteen years after Marc took the photograph of his family's house underwater, Grant grabs his father's phone to, finally, bear witness.

Grant eyes the water in the photo, stagnant and all-consuming. It had been two weeks since the hurricane, and the flood had receded some -- enough for the doorway of the house to peek through, at least. He hands back the proof of what happened to his childhood home to Marc.

"They don't like to show me," he says.

Grant is seated -- slumped, really -- in a sleek gray lounge chair in a polished gray lobby in a glossy gray hotel on IMG Academy's sprawling, country-club-worthy campus. It's early March, and he's back in Bradenton, Florida, because the 3-year-old who learned how to run back punts on an 18th fairway is now Mel Kiper Jr.'s third-ranked safety prospect for 2020. He spent his senior season of high school at this sports academy, and he has returned to the west coast of Florida to train for the NFL combine and LSU's pro day.

Chaos would upend this part of his life too.

The day before Grant flew back from Indianapolis, where he attended but did not participate in drills at the combine because of a lingering ankle injury, the first reported case of the coronavirus hit the Bradenton area. Two weeks later, the NFL would ban all in-person draft visits, including campus pro days, because of the pandemic. Seven days after that, with nothing left to train for, Grant would return to a New Orleans being ravaged yet again -- the city didn't just spiral into one of the United States' COVID-19 epicenters; it became home to one of the country's most devastating death rates.

The world turned upside down, so now Grant won't have the chance to prove to interested NFL parties that he's finally fully healed from the ankle sprain that dogged him for much of the past season. Or post a 40 time compelling enough to deflate ballooning concern that his 2018 breakout year at LSU outshined his most recent -- albeit Jim Thorpe Award-earning -- season in 2019. (Though in early April, he'd participate in a makeshift Baton Rouge pro day for area athletes and log a 4.39 40-yard-dash.) Still, the 21-year-old safety made a safe bet by leaving Baton Rouge after his junior year, because the NFL's prognosticating masses agree: He's not a top-10 lock like early-season forecasters envisioned, but he's straddling the cliff between coveted first-round royalty and less shiny second-round caste.

Grant's existing film, at least one critical subset of it, is too tantalizing for him to plummet far. "If you go off of the 2018 tape, this is one of the best 10 players in the country," NFL draft wizard Todd McShay said just a few weeks before Delpit's combine and pro day plans went bust. And his skill set is too perfectly suited to combat modern offenses to pass over him for long. "The game is more horizontal than it's ever been," says former NFL defensive back and current ESPN NFL analyst Matt Bowen. "The counter to that is safeties and linebackers that can play in space, match guys in space, tackle in space, play the ball in space. Delpit gives you that."

Mock drafters like to call the 6-foot-2, 213-pound Delpit "versatile," an accolade so sweeping it might mean nothing at all if Delpit's numbers and three-year track record as an LSU starter didn't bear that out precisely. He forced incompletions at a higher rate than any other top safety in this year's draft (18.2%) and accounted for more career run stops (42), according to Pro Football Focus. (That's nearly 10 percentage points and 20 stops better than the presumptive first safety off the board, Xavier McKinney of Alabama.) In Baton Rouge, Delpit played near the ball in 2018, then deep in the post in 2019. Dave Aranda, LSU's former madcap genius defensive mind, used him in a madcap genius smorgasbord of ways, fashioning Delpit into a hodgepodge of safety and corner and outside linebacker.

It's apt, really, this versatility of his. He has spent his young life learning how to exist in more than one way, in more than one place.

The week before Katrina, Grant was picked first in his youth football league. They'd had a kiddie combine of sorts -- catching and throwing and kicking the ball -- rudimentary drills to suss out the football IQ of 6-year-olds, like Grant in the summer of 2005, old enough to play tackle football in the state of Louisiana. He was going to be a Lakeview Viking, and the coach called Marc all lathered up. I got Grant! I picked him first!

That was the third Saturday in August.

"The next weekend, Katrina hits," Marc says. "Everything was done."

Even with Katrina looming over the Gulf of Mexico, it was glorious outside their last few days in Louisiana -- and Saturday, Aug. 27, especially. Gov. Kathleen Blanco had declared a state of emergency on Friday. By Saturday, Mayor Ray Nagin had instituted a voluntary evacuation for New Orleans residents. But Endya looked skyward, at a baking sun and a clear sky, and found it hard to fathom the havoc heading their way. Beautiful, normal things are powerful drugs.

So they went to a neighborhood birthday party on Saturday, not realizing yet that it would be their last there. And they came home afterward to plot their evacuation, without knowing they were planning their displacement. Marc took out his Rand McNally maps, a huge book that housed all their possible destinations, and asked Endya, "Where do you want to go this time?"

New Orleanians speak a unique language, they say. Marc asked where Endya wanted to go this time because there was a time before and presumably there would be a time after. When hurricanes come calling, as they do in southeastern Louisiana, you pack up for three or four days and move to higher ground. Uptown in the city. Or out of the city altogether, if you can manage it. Then you come home.

"It's the drill," Endya says. "You're not planning for the future. You're planning for the weekend."

So this time, Marc and Endya pored over Rand McNally and chose Memphis because they'd never been there together and an evacuation was as good a time as any to plan a family trip. They packed one duffel with overnight clothes for their family of four, then Marc drove to his mother's house a little after midnight, as Saturday turned to Sunday, to bring her along on their impromptu road trip. Before she agreed to set foot in their Rendezvous, she made Marc store all her photographs -- tubs of them -- on top of her cabinets. Marc tried to reason with her. It's time to get on the road. The water won't reach that high anyway. All he had done in his own home was move his photos to a bench. But his mother said she wasn't leaving with her memories in danger, so he climbed up the counter and started loading tubs of pictures.

They spent that weekend in Memphis at the National Civil Rights Museum. Some of it at the zoo. Grant doesn't remember the trip that well, just driving in the Rendezvous. He recalls the photo of the zoo -- him standing alongside Marc; Grace slouched and asleep in her stroller -- more than the zoo itself. ("That picture is from that trip!?" he asks Endya, incredulous. "Yes, that was the day Hurricane Katrina hit," she assures him.) Before smartphones, before Twitter alerts, before the ability to know everything at every time, the Delpits had a pretty carefree day exploring this city in Tennessee. Then they returned to their hotel Monday evening.

In the lobby, guests gathered around the television watching New Orleans sink further underwater. Marc looked at the screen, recognized New Orleans East -- their neighborhood -- and thought, It looks like a lake.

"It really was a great trip," Endya says now, all these years later. "Until that moment."

"WHY DIDN'T Y'ALL move back?"

Grant is still holding court in his gray lounge chair, still slightly slouched, though he leans in now, closer to his parents.

We designed that house from the bottom up, they say.

So why didn't y'all move back and stay in the house? he asks again.

We always knew we were going back home, they say.

So why didn't you go back earlier? he asks again.

When Marc and Endya returned to the hotel, to that throng of onlookers, to that TV screen that showed New Orleans East turning into flotsam, they made a choice. That choice splintered their lives, a million hairline cracks in a glass shattered by the blow of failing levees. They had one duffel bag and a weekend-long reservation at a hotel in Memphis that had no more vacancy; they couldn't stay in Tennessee. Their home was underwater; they couldn't return to Louisiana. So on Monday night, less than 48 hours after they had arrived, they drove southwest, to Houston, to Marc's sister's home, seeking refuge.

Eleven people -- parents and stepparents and cousins -- crowded Marc's sister's home on the west side of Houston. In a house meant for two, Marc and Endya and Grant and Grace started their lives over on a pair of air mattresses in a spare room. By the end of that first week, Marc and Endya knew: Houston would have to be more than their fleeting sanctuary. They wouldn't move back to New Orleans.

Why didn't y'all move back?

They didn't move back for Grant. And for Grace. When Endya closes her eyes and conjures up New Orleans in the weeks and months after Katrina, she sees the sea of blue tarps on homes across the city, bandages for broken limbs. She sees the numbers the National Guard spray-painted on each house, tattooing the number of people found inside for neighbors and the world to see. Marc still smells the stench of mold and mildew from the three months he spent toggling between Houston and New Orleans -- building a new life in Texas and cleaning out and tearing down the one they left behind in Louisiana. "Just deterioration," he says. "That smell never leaves."

Through that fall, Marc hauled clothes and pictures and books and food and furniture from their house to the curb -- everything they hadn't packed into that duffel bag for Memphis now relegated to an ever-growing trash heap. Endya rescued some waterlogged photos, cut out the parts she couldn't salvage and made collages. Marc sanded and pressure-washed their kitchen table, the lone piece of furniture the saltwater didn't eat alive. Nothing else survived, just the blue tarps and spray paint, the mold and mildew. They didn't want their children to have to see that devastation, to smell the deterioration. Marc and Endya had jobs that allowed them to transfer to Houston, to start over there. So they did.

Grant enrolled in an all-boys Catholic school, like the one he knew from home in New Orleans. The school's director showed Endya to the lost and found; used uniforms and old books and gently worn shoes are precious currency when you have none. And Grant joined a new football league, almost like the one he knew from New Orleans, the one where he was drafted first. In Texas you had to be 7 to play tackle.

That too came in time. By middle school, Grant landed on a powerhouse squad -- the Fort Bend Express -- that masqueraded as a select youth team. Three or four times a week, Marc would load Grant into the Buick Rendezvous that had seen them from New Orleans to Memphis to Houston and trek across the city for practice. Those drives would take an hour in the snarling Houston traffic; on the way there, Grant would eat -- Chick-fil-A a lot of times -- then he'd do homework by flashlight during the drive home. In between he'd practice with his Express teammates, a slew of fellow future Division I players. Hezekiah Jones, eventual Texas A&M Aggie. Kenneth Murray, eventual Oklahoma Sooner. CeeDee Lamb, another eventual Sooner.

CeeDee, though, he was the one you couldn't take your eyes off back then, Grant says, a little mistily. He pulls up an old YouTube clip on his phone as proof.

"Look at this, he ran this kid over right here. Boom! And then scored. They just started laying on the ground!"

It's true, a bunch of black jerseys lay prostrate on the field as CeeDee, in white, lopes into the end zone. And though the 9-year-old footage is grainy, it's also true that the vanquished middle schoolers don't look particularly compelled to stand back up.

"This play made them quit!"

They formed a band, these middle schoolers, even had a name for themselves ("STP," for Showtime Players) and a hand signal (palms open; thumbs meeting in an upside-down V). They had sleepovers on weekends. They kept up on an Instagram group chat as they grew older and grew into four- and five-star blue-chip prospects. And they shared history. CeeDee was from Louisiana too. He was displaced by Katrina too.

Grant didn't know that about CeeDee then. Most people, most friends, didn't know that was Grant's story either. The Delpits' uprooting, their desperate scramble from New Orleans to Houston, was uniquely devastating. But it wasn't unique. Something close to 250,000 New Orleanians fled to Houston in Katrina's wake. As many as 40,000 stayed there. CeeDee and his family. Grant and his family too. Gerard Lewis, the football coach who trained Grant one-on-one from the time Grant was 9 until the day he left for IMG Academy for his senior year of high school.

Lewis knew a lot of Grant Delpits. After he started over in Houston, he worked at the city's MacArthur Ninth Grade School, and 350 of its students were displaced New Orleanians like him. "They just walked in," he says. "No records. No report cards. No nothing."

He also coached a select youth football team on the side, a rival, in fact, that faced off against Grant's Fort Bend Express. The Express lost two games in the three years Grant played -- both to Lewis' squad. In that second defeat, a championship game, Lewis fought a little dirty. Grant, his pupil, was now his opponent. Grant lined up at defensive back; from the sideline, Lewis hollered at E.J. Thompson -- also a future collegiate player, at Division II Texas A&M University-Commerce -- to run a slant. Trickery ensued: The ball was snapped; E.J., a running back lined up at receiver, ran a fly instead; Grant took a false step on the slant; E.J. ran past him, then caught the ball for a 30-yard gain.

E.J. was a Katrina survivor too.

There were legions of them, Houstorleanians, as Mtangulizi Sanyika came to call the displaced droves caught between a duality of place and culture. Sanyika chaired the New Orleans Association of Houston after Katrina, helping those thousands start over in Texas, and says there are still churches in the city, 15 years after the storm, whose congregations are mostly New Orleanians.

Grant was also caught in those dualities, and he clung to threads from New Orleans as if they were lifelines. He asked Lewis about Mardi Gras. He asked Lewis about the parades, just to hear Lewis crow about walking 30 miles in a day, starting on one end of Canal Street, finishing on the other, and then doing the whole thing over again. He asked Lewis about the neighborhood and how late everyone used to stay up back in the Seventh Ward, where Lewis grew up and lived until Katrina pushed him out. He asked and he asked and he asked.

Houston was good to the Delpits. Houston wasn't good to everyone, maybe even to most. Sanyika kept his Louisiana license plate for years and says he was pulled over by police seven or eight times; when he finally relented and procured a Texas tag, those pullovers stopped. Lewis watched it dawn on children born in New Orleans but living in Houston that they weren't really from this place, as time passed and words such as refugee and evacuee turned into epithets.

But Houston was good to the Delpits, Endya says, and especially to Grant. It was good, but it wasn't home.

"I wish we didn't stay," he says. "I wish we'd just gone back right after."

THEY DIDN'T GO back right after, but they did go back.

Grant committed to LSU the summer before his senior year of high school because of course he did. By the end of his high school career, he'd be the 47th-best prospect in the country and a starter at IMG, one of college football's most fertile pipelines, so he'd have his pick of FBS offers -- but he'd been angling to get back to Louisiana for years, and here, at last, was his ticket in.

And when Grant moved to Baton Rouge, Marc, Endya and Grace followed him back east. They returned to New Orleans.

The place they came home to was not the place they had left behind. They're in the Lakeview neighborhood now, not New Orleans East, though the kitchen table that survived Katrina now sits in their new home. But holes remain. Grace just had her Sweet 16 party; Marc was Endya's date to hers, and she would've liked to show Grace those pictures. They're lost to the New Orleans they knew before.

Grant came home and liked to call it home -- liked to tell people he was from New Orleans -- but he heard the chirping. But you moved! But you went to Houston! But you only just came back!

"You know how much heat I had to take," he says, then shakes his head.

By choice and by chance, he spent three years in Baton Rouge tautening the cord that tethered him to this state. His first game as a Tiger, against BYU in 2017, was meant to be played in Houston, a reverse migration, but a storm, again, uprooted those plans. After flooding from Hurricane Harvey, the game was moved to New Orleans, and Grant began his collegiate football career in the same place he first learned to love this game. He change his uniform to No. 7 in his last season at LSU, a maneuver that was as subtle as a sledgehammer. Tyrann Mathieu and Leonard Fournette wore that number. Louisiana greats wore that number.

"Fans, they kind of expect you to be Superman then," he says.

And he'd finish his LSU career where it started, winning a national championship in the Superdome in New Orleans. There was poetry in the bookend. Marc used to take Grant to Saints games in that stadium before they left the city for Houston. Grant loved football, but even a toddler football junkie is a toddler, and his reservoir of patience sapped quickly. Marc would let him run up and down the ramps to burn off energy, dodging and weaving and juking by the fans in their section.

Before Grant would go on to the combine, before he'd meet with 20-odd teams -- among them, the Saints -- those fans would watch him game in and game out and joke to Marc that Grant would be out there one day on the Superdome field as a Saint himself.

Whatever comes next -- wherever comes next -- there's always been someone or something calling him home.