"I brought two."
She didn't say anything for a second. Then, "You brought two staffs."
"I figured you might need one."
"You figured." She took the staff I held out and weighed it in her hand. "And if I'd said I had one?"
"Then I'd have had a spare."
She made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh and started up the trail. I followed. The morning opened up around us the way it did up here—bigger than the valley, the mountains pulling back from the river to let the sky in.
She set a good pace. I'd expected that. What I hadn't expected was the quiet—the easy kind, not the forced kind. Not two people pretending to be comfortable with each other. She wasn't filling the silence. I wasn't filling the silence. We just walked, and the river ran below us, and it was the most uncomplicated forty minutes I'd had in longer than I could account for.
The wade came up to her knees, then her thighs, and she took it without hesitating—staff planted, weight back, reading the bottom the way her father had taught her. She didn’t look at me for confirmation.
She just crossed.
The canyon opened up above it, the stretch coming into view—wide, cold, clear. The current braided around gravel bars, cutthroats holding in every good seam.
I heard her go quiet. Not nervous but something else.
"Nobody fishes this," she said.
"Not that I've found."
"How long have you known about it?"
"Two weeks."
She looked at me sideways. "You sat on this for two weeks?"
"I was waiting for the right day."
She held my gaze for a beat, and I let her. Then she turned to the water, and I could see her reading it the same way I'd read it the first time—picking apart the currents, identifying the holds, building the picture. She pointed at a long flat against the far bank where the water darkened.
"Bank feeders," she said.
"They were rising yesterday evening. Size eighteen comparaduns if you have them."
"I have fourteen." She was already stripping line. "Close enough."
We spread out and fished, and the morning went the way good mornings on good water went—slowly, with no desire to hurry it. She was a better caster than most guides I'd worked with. Cleaner loop, better timing, no wasted motion. Her father had taught her well.
An hour in, she waded over to where I was working a run along a submerged boulder and stood beside me without crowding me, watching the drift.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
"Yes."
"What did you actually do? The contracting work."
I made a cast and watched the fly settle. "Close protection, mostly. Executive security. Some higher-risk assignments that I'm not going to detail."
"But you were good at it."
"I was good at it," I said. "I knew how to read environments. Threat assessment. I knew how to keep people safe in situations where safe wasn't the default."
"That sounds like an exhausting way to live."
