She glanced back at me then, like she’d expected a longer answer and wasn’t sure what to do with not getting one. I kept paddling.
The morning was easy. No wind, water running clear and low—the kind of conditions that made the river feel like it was on your side. A heron lifted off the far bank, and she tracked it until it disappeared over the tree line. I noticed she didn’t point it out or say a word. She just watched. That told me something.
We came around a long bend, and the current slowed where the channel widened. I let the paddle rest across the gunwales for a stretch. The canoe drifted lazily.
“What made you pick the float trip?” I asked. “Instead of the rapids.”
She was quiet for a second. I watched her shoulders do something—not tense exactly, more like she was deciding something.
“I needed slow,” she said.
“Okay.”
“That’s it?” She looked back at me again. “You’re not going to ask why?”
“Figured you’d say if you wanted to.”
Something shifted in her face. She turned back to the water, and I gave her the quiet to do whatever she needed to do with that.
“I just finished nursing school,” she said after a while. “ETSU. Four years. Boards. The whole thing.” She paused. “I’ve been running so long, I forgot what it felt like to stop.”
“Hard program.”
“Yeah.” She exhaled. “The kind of hard where you don’t really notice how bad it is until it’s over and you’re standing there thinking, ‘Okay, now what?’”
“And you don’t have an answer.”
“I have too many answers.” She picked at a thread on her cover-up. “My parents have answers. My inbox has answers. Everybody’s got an opinion about what comes next.” She let the silence sit, then looked up at me. “Sorry. You didn’t ask for all that.”
“I asked why you picked the float trip.”
She laughed, short and quiet. It was the first unguarded thing she’d done all morning.
“Fair enough.”
“So what do you want?” I asked. “Not your parents. Not your inbox. You.”
She went still for long enough that I thought she might not answer. The river curved, and I kept us in the current. Easy strokes, nothing she’d notice.
“I don’t know,” she finally said. “I think that’s the problem.”
“That’s not a problem.”
She looked back at me. “How is that not a problem?”
“Means you haven’t decided yet. Different thing.”
She held my gaze for a second, like she was checking whether I meant it. I did. She turned back around, and I watched the tension in her shoulders drop about half an inch. Not gone, but less.
We drifted through a long straight stretch where the water ran shallow over pale gravel and the tree canopy opened up overhead. The sun was getting some heat behind it now. She pushed her sunglasses up into her hair and tilted her face toward the light with her eyes closed, just for a second. Something about the way she did it—surrendering to the warmth, even briefly—caught me low in the chest.
“How long have you been running this?” she asked, eyes still closed, face still tilted up.
“Wildwood River Co.? Six years. Give or take.”
She opened her eyes and looked back at me. “You own it?”
“Co-own. Six of us.”
