The morning came back in pieces, the way things do when you’re trying not to let them. The turtle crossing the gravel in eight inches of water. The rope in my hands at the top of that oak. The way my heart had slammed against my ribs before I pushed off. The cold rushing up to meet me. The underwater hush surfacing into my own laughter.
You jumped without thinking about it.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and the tears came anyway, quiet and determined, the way things come when you’ve been holding them back long enough. I wasn’t crying about him. I was crying about all of it—four years of running, a house I hadn’t chosen, a life that fit perfectly on paper and felt like wearing someone else’s clothes, and one morning on a river with a man who looked at me like I was exactly where I was supposed to be. A man who made me believe it for a few hours.
I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling and let myself feel it—all of it—because there was nobody here to see me do it.
The phone buzzed on the nightstand.
I didn’t move.
Outside somewhere, a car pulled into the lot. A door opened and closed.
Soon enough, I heard footsteps, unhurried, coming down the hall. Then a knock at the door.
6
CADE
Kyron waited until she was out of the parking lot.
“You going to let her just drive away?”
That was all he said. He didn’t look up from the clipboard. Didn’t make a thing of it. Just put the words out there in that flat, practical way he had. The same way he’d tell you a dry bag fitting was loose or the river level was running high. Here’s the situation. Here’s what needs doing.
I was already moving. “Kayaks,” I said.
“I’ll handle it.” He pulled the pen from behind his ear. “Go.”
I grabbed my keys from the bench by the building on the way past and was in the truck before I’d fully thought it through. I stopped once on the road that ran along the river. A stand of black-eyed Susans had been coming in thick along the shoulder all summer, yellow and stubborn and completely unbothered by the heat. I gathered what I could—maybe a dozen stems, the kind of bundle that said I stopped for these and not the kind that said I planned ahead.
I didn’t want her to think I’d planned ahead. I wanted her to know I’d stopped.
I knew what they were called.Rudbeckia hirtaif you wanted to be exact about it, which I usually didn’t, but I knew their name the way I knew the name of every plant that grew along this river. Knowing this land was part of the job, and the job was something I’d had a hand in building from the ground up. I was proud of that.
I changed at the house. Clean jeans, the dark flannel I saved for things that weren’t work, boots that hadn’t been in the river recently. I looked at myself in the mirror for about three seconds and decided that was enough of that.
Bobbi Ludington was behind the front desk when I came through the door of the inn. She looked up and took in the flannel and the flowers. Something in her expression settled, like a thing she’d suspected had just been confirmed.
“She came through about forty-five minutes ago,” Bobbi said without even asking who I was there for. “I noticed.”
“She okay?”
“She was doing that thing women do when they’re not okay but they’ve gotten very good at looking okay.” Bobbi reached under the desk and produced a key card, then thought better of it and set it back down. “You planning to say something worth her time?”
“I’m planning to try.”
She studied me for a moment the way women like Bobbi did—all the way through. Then she wrote something on the notepad by the register and slid it across the desk.
Room 8. Second floor, end of the hall.
“Don’t waste her time,” she said.
I took the stairs. The hallway was quiet, afternoon light coming through the window at the far end. I walked the length of it, stood in front of Room 8, and knocked before I could think too hard about what I was going to say.
I didn’t have a speech. I wasn’t built for speeches.
The door opened, and she was standing there in the same cover-up she’d had on the river. Her hair was dry now, and it was clear she was trying very hard to look like she hadn’t recently been crying.
