"It's the river's stretch. I just know where it is."
She studied me again. The glasses made it more direct—like being examined through a lens designed to catch what the naked eye might miss.
"How long have you been running Wildwood River Co.?" she asked.
"Twelve years. Built it when I was twenty-three."
"From scratch?"
"Had a raft, a truck, and a permit. That was it. Slept in the truck for the first season because I couldn't afford the cabin and the insurance at the same time. Insurance won."
"And now you've got—what, a full operation? Guides, equipment, commercial trips?"
"Six guys, four raft rigs, a fleet of kayaks and canoes, and a fishing guide service. We run everything from Class II family floats to Class IV whitewater. Busiest months are June through August, but we get shoulder season traffic from fishermen in spring and fall." I picked up my burger and prepared to take a bite. "The river's the business. Everything else is logistics."
She was quiet for a moment as I bit off a chunk of burger and chewed. I could see her filing the information the way she'd filed my answers about Hadley Bend—methodically, without waste.
"You were twenty-three," she said.
"Same age as you."
"I'm not building a business. I'm trying to finish a degree that takes longer than most people's patience."
"How long?"
"If I go straight through to the PhD—which is the only way the fieldwork means anything—five or six years from where I am now. I'm one year in." She pushed her glasses up with one finger. "Most people hear that, and their eyes glaze over."
"Most people haven't spent twelve years on a river waiting for something to make sense."
She went still. Not frozen—still. The way the surface of a pool goes flat in the moment before a shift in the current reaches it.
"Why fireflies?" I asked.
The question came across differently than I expected it to. Her shoulders dropped a quarter of an inch—barely visible, but I'd been watching her closely enough to catch it. Like I'd asked the one question nobody asked, and she'd stopped bracing for the ones they usually did.
"Because they're the thing most people see and never look at," she said. "Everyone's seen a firefly. Everyone thinks they know what they're watching. But nobody asks how it works—why that specific flash pattern, why that specific interval, how the females choose which signal to answer and which to ignore. There's an entire language happening in the dark, and people just call it pretty and move on." She caught herself. The glasses had slid down her nose again, and she pushed them back up. "Sorry. That's—I do that. The lecture thing."
"It wasn't a lecture. It was an answer."
She looked at me. Held it. Something shifted behind her eyes—not softening, not surrender. Recognition. The slow, disorienting shock of being met where she actually stood instead of where someone assumed she was.
West came by with my tea and a coffee pot. He refilled Breanna's mug without being asked. He glanced at my basket and walked away without a word.
"Cheeseburger and fries," she said, looking at my plate. "Is that what you get every time?"
"Yes. And always with pepper jack."
"You don't ever shake things up a little? Maybe try something else?"
"I know what I like."
I held her eyes when I said it. She heard it. I watched the heat move up her neck—slow, starting below the collar of her shirt and climbing to the line of her jaw. She picked up her coffee mug and drank from it, and I let the moment sit without pushing it.
We ate. She finished her cold burger and I worked through mine. The fries were good, the way West's fries were always good—crisp, salty, piled high. She asked about the river, and I told her about the sections I knew best, the way the water changed character every half mile, the bend where the current doubled back on itself and created a pocket of dead water that held trout in the summer. She asked about the chute below Hadley Bend, and I described the line—how to read the water, where the rockssat, the way the hydraulic at the bottom looked worse than it was if you knew how to angle into it.
She listened the way I listened—with her whole body. Leaning forward, glasses forgotten on her nose, coffee going cold again. When I talked about the river, she tracked every detail like she was mapping it in her head. And when she talked about her work—the signaling behavior she was studying, the way different species used different flash patterns to find each other in the dark, the evolutionary pressures that shaped those patterns over millions of years—I understood something about her that I didn't think she understood about herself yet.
She wasn't just smart. She was passionate in a way that made other people uncomfortable because it was too specific, too focused, too much. And somewhere along the way, she'd learned to apologize for it. To cut herself off. To say "sorry, I'm lecturing again" and pull back before anyone had to pretend they were still interested.
