Her throat moved.
"I stopped running the math," I said. "Not last night. Not on the overlook. Before any of that—I stopped running it sometime around the third morning at your counter when you refilled my coffee without asking and didn't make anything of it."
I waded in. The cold water came up over the top of my boots, and I didn't care.
"I've been temporary my whole adult life,” I continued. “Every place, every assignment, every room I've ever been in—I came in knowing how I'd leave. That's how I operated. It's the only way I knew how." I stopped in front of her, close enough that the current moved between us and around us both. "I don't know how to leave here. I've run it every way I can think of and I can't find the version where I go, because you're in every version and you don't fit the leaving part."
She looked up at me. Her eyes were bright, not full of tears—just full, the way eyes got when something landed that they'd been waiting for.
"You brought two wading staffs," she said.
"I did."
"On the third time we ever spoke."
"Yes."
"You don't plan for people you're going to leave," she said.
The words were what she'd said on the canyon river, handed back to me now, and they settled in my chest the way her words always settled—exactly where they were supposed to go.
"No," I said. "You don't."
She looked at me for a long moment—doing the thing she did, the full honest assessment, the one that didn't ask permission and didn't apologize for itself. I waited. I'd learned how to wait for her.
"I was afraid last night," she said. "I want you to know that. Not of you—of the math. Of being someone who believed something and was wrong." She paused. "I've been careful my whole life because careful felt like the way to keep things from disappearing."
"I know."
"It doesn't work," she said. "I know that too. Careful doesn't actually keep anything." She looked at the water and then back at me. "My mother was careful. My father was careful. It didn't matter."
"No," I said. "It didn't."
"So I have two options," she said. "I can keep being careful and miss this. Or I can do the thing I did on the overlook and choose you on purpose." She looked at me with steady eyes. "I already chose you on purpose. I'm not un-choosing."
Something moved through me—solid and final, the feeling of a thing settling into place that had been unsettled for a long time. Not relief exactly, though there was relief in it. More like arrival. The place you'd been heading toward before you knew you were heading anywhere.
"Mia," I said.
"I know," she said. "I know."
I reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, thumb brushing her jaw like I had on the overlook. She leaned into it, small and sure.
I held her face in my hand, looked at her in the morning light on the river where it had started, and felt nothing about her—or us—was temporary.
I kissed her there, cold water running around our feet, willows overhead. She kissed me back with the kind of certainty that comes from making a choice and not looking back.
When she pulled back, she was almost smiling—the real kind, the one that reached her eyes. “You ruined your boots,” she said.
“Worth it.”
She glanced down at the water running over my boot tops, shook her head, and the almost-smile became real. “Come on,” she said.
She took my hand and waded toward the bank. I followed, out of the current and into the morning. Easy. Warm. Just like it was supposed to be.
EPILOGUE
MIA: 5 YEARS LATER
