"You stop noticing after a while." I mended the line. "That's probably the problem."
She was quiet, watching the water. "What changed?"
I'd answered this question in my own head about four hundred times since I'd walked away. I hadn't said it plainly to another person. I found I didn't mind saying it to her.
"They wanted me to sign off on intelligence I knew was wrong," I said. "Not wrong like an honest mistake. Wrong like someone had decided the outcome before they looked at the data and needed a signature to make it official." I watched the fly drag and picked it up and recast. "If the operation had gone ahead on that intelligence, people who had nothing to do with any of it would have gotten hurt."
"So you didn't sign off."
"I didn't sign off."
"And then?"
"And then I wasn't useful to them anymore. I knew too much about too many things, and I hadn't done what they needed me to do, so the question became what to do with me." I kept my eyes on the water. "They can't charge me with anything. I didn't do anything wrong. But they have enough reach to make life inconvenient."
"How inconvenient?"
"Three cities in four months. New phone every six weeks." I paused. "I'm not in danger. I want to be clear about that. It's more like—noise. Designed to keep me off-balance."
She stood beside me with her rod at her side and looked at the river. "And Hollow Peak is where you ended up."
"Rowan asked no questions, and the valley is remote enough that noise doesn't travel well." I looked at her. "I told myself it was temporary."
"What do you tell yourself now?" she asked.
"I'm working on that."
She held my gaze with the same steadiness she brought to everything—no performance, no agenda. Then she turned back to the water and made a cast that dropped a fly into a seam I hadn't identified yet, because she'd been reading the river while I was talking and she'd found something I'd missed.
A cutthroat came up and ate it.
I watched her play the fish and tried to recall the last time I'd said any of that out loud. I couldn't remember it. My lawyer knew the facts. Rowan knew enough to understand why I needed to keep a low profile. Nobody knew the rest—the part about refusing to sign off, about standing in a room full of people who'd made some decisions and watching them realize I'd made different ones.
She released the fish and straightened and looked at me over her shoulder. "Thank you for telling me."
"You asked."
"People ask things they don't actually want answered all the time," she said. "You answered."
"You would have known if I hadn't," I said. "Not the specifics. But you would have known I was giving you something partial."
She considered that. "Probably." She waded back to her earlier position. "My father is going to run your name."
It wasn't a question, and it wasn't a warning. It was just information, offered straight.
"I know," I said.
"He won't find anything criminal."
"No."
"But he'll find the gaps." She looked at me. "He's good at reading gaps."
"So am I," I said. "I imagine we'll understand each other."
Something shifted across her face—not worry. Relief, maybe. Like she was glad I wasn’t pretending this was simpler than it was.
She nodded once and went back to fishing. I did the same. The river kept moving around us, the canyon holding the morning light like nothing had changed.
