It was a ritual.
But it was more than that. The Hollow Peak River was the one place where Cal Granger forgot to be a sheriff for a few hours. Out there, he wasn't the man everyone turned to when something went wrong. He wasn't the one carrying the weight of a town that trusted him to keep it safe.
Out there, he was just my dad. And I was just his kid, standing ankle-deep in cold water, trying to cast a line straight instead of tangling it in the brush behind me.
I'd learned to read water the way other kids learned to read books—slow at first, sounding it out, getting it wrong more often than not. But eventually, it started to make sense. The shifts in current. The subtle changes in color. The places where the surface looked calm but wasn't, where something moved just beneath if you knew how to look for it.
Most people saw a river. I saw patterns. Signals. Warnings. I saw what was hidden.
And lately—whether I liked it or not—I'd started to feel that same pull when Hale Nichols walked into the café. Like there was something there, just under the surface. Something I couldn't define yet, but something I couldn't quite ignore.
Something that made me pay attention. Even when I told myself not to.
So it wasn't unusual for me to be out here at dawn, knee-deep in the current with a five-weight rod. It was a little unusual that I'd come to this specific stretch. The lower bend, where the current slowed around a gravel bar and the overhanging willows held the morning shade an extra hour. The stretch where I'd seen a truck parked three mornings running.
His truck was there now.
He was upstream, maybe forty feet, working the deeper channel where the water darkened. He was casting—not the mechanical loop-and-throw that tourists managed after a lesson, but the real thing. The kind that came from understanding how a line wanted to move through air. His back was to me. The current covered sound, and he hadn't heard me arrive.
I watched two casts before I said anything.
"You're mending too early."
He went still. Not startled—more like a man who'd learned to absorb surprises rather than react to them. Then he turned, and I got the full weight of him in a way I hadn't let myself in the café.
Dark hair pushed back from his face, damp at the temples. A jaw that looked like it had been put there to win an argument. His eyes were an interesting color—somewhere between gray and green, the exact shade of the river right before a storm changes the light. Ink covered both forearms where his sleeves were rolled, disappearing up past his elbows. There was nothing soft about any part of him, but he wasn't looking at me like a threat. He was taking inventory. Deciding what was there.
"The mend," I said, because he hadn't spoken, and I was committed now. "You're throwing it before the line has time to land. You're correcting drag that isn't there yet."
He looked at the water, then back at me. "You've been watching me cast."
"I've been watching your mend."
"There a difference?"
"Yes."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile—the suggestion that one had considered appearing and thought better of it. He looked back at the water. "Show me."
I waded upstream until I was close enough to be useful, stripped some line off my own reel, and made a cast into the current below his. "See how I'm waiting? The fly lands, the line settles, then you throw the mend. You're doing it in the wrong order."
He watched. "I learned on moving water. Faster current."
"This river looks slower than it is. The drag sets up before you expect it." I lifted my rod tip and demonstrated. "Give it two beats after the fly lands. Then mend."
He tried it. The adjustment was immediate and clean—he'd understood on the first explanation. The line lay on the water the way it was supposed to.
"Better," I said.
"Thanks." He said it without looking at me, eyes already back on the drift. Then, "You always correct strangers' casting technique?"
"Only when they're doing it wrong."
"And if I'd been doing it right?"
"I'd have kept quiet and fished my own stretch." I waded back to where I'd been. "Mia Granger. I work at the Switchback—you've come in a few times."
"I know who you are."
