He Cheated With Our Guest's Wife (He Cheated With... #6)

Chapter One

I CHECK THE GAUGE AT Sunbeam before I leave the truck. The reading is forty-two hundred cubic feet per second. The upper section will fish well tomorrow for Jim Fleming, who has been booking the same first-week float since my father ran this stretch.

I climb down to the put-in and wade out to the seam line.

The water is cold and clean after last week’s rain, running clear over the cobble, and the stonefly nymphs are already moving along the bottom.

I check for new debris where spring runoff shifted a couple of log jams and mark the spots where I’ll need to adjust my drift line tomorrow.

The river changes every season. You can’t memorize it.

You have to read it fresh every time you push off the bank, and I’ve been reading this one since I was twelve years old, standing in my father’s drift boat with a net in my hands and my feet braced against the frame.

By seven I’m back at the lodge, checking the boats in the equipment shed.

I replace a worn oar lock on the sixteen-footer and tighten the frame bolts on the smaller boat I use for half-day trips.

The anchor system on the second boat needs new straps, so I add it to the list I keep on a clipboard inside the shed door.

I’ve used this same clipboard since I bought the lodge from Clint Emerson ten years ago with every dollar I’d saved guiding and bartending through my twenties.

Cody is on the phone when I walk back to the main lodge, pacing the gravel lot with his coffee, confirming an August corporate retreat for four executives from a Boise tech company, three days of guided floats and lodge dinners.

He’s good at this. I’ve never pretended otherwise.

In six years together, he’s doubled our corporate group revenue, rebuilt the website from scratch, and gotten the lodge featured in enough fishing blogs and travel posts that we pull bookings from people who’ve never set foot in Idaho.

Last fall, he brought Jim Fleming’s business partner out for a four-day corporate float that paid for the new roof on Cabin Three.

Cody handles the parts of this business I don’t enjoy and don’t have patience for, and he handles them well.

He hangs up and walks toward the shed, already dressed for guest arrivals.

“Flemings get in around two,” he says. “Same cabin. You want me to do the grocery run, or wait until after check-in?”

“After. I’ve got a list on the counter.”

He nods, sips his coffee, and scrolls through something on his phone.

Six years ago, he would have leaned against the doorframe and asked about the water, wanted to know what I found at the put-in, and whether the stoneflies were hatching, whether Jim would need a six-weight or an eight.

He doesn’t ask anymore. I’ve told myself that’s marriage settling into its lanes, two people dividing territory instead of sharing it.

This morning the word I’d use is separate.

I took a pregnancy test at five a.m., standing in the bathroom with the door locked while Cody slept.

The result was negative, the fourteenth in fourteen months.

I wrapped it in toilet paper and buried it in the trash under a wad of tissues, same as every time.

Every time I’ve brought up seeing a specialist, Cody has found a reason to wait.

After season. After the holidays. After we’ve had a few more months to try on our own.

We’ve been saying “a few more months” for over a year, and I’ve stopped bringing it up.

I should mind more than I do. Mostly I’m just tired.

The Flemings arrive at ten after two. Jim parks the rental SUV in the same spot he’s used for nineteen years, under the big Douglas fir at the edge of the gravel lot.

“There she is,” Jim says when I come out to meet him.

He pulls me into a side hug, firm and warm.

Jim Fleming has earned that hug. He’s been coming to this lodge since I was a teenager stringing fly rods for tips, and he’s sixty-one now, silver-haired, broad across the shoulders, and the most consistent presence in this lodge’s history besides the river itself.

He started coming here when my father was the lead guide, back when Clint still owned the place and the cabins didn’t have heat.

Jim sends a Christmas card every year with a handwritten note, and the notes are always specific.

Last December, he wrote about a brown trout he’d caught on the South Fork and asked whether the lodge could handle a small corporate group in September.

“How’s the water?” he asks, already looking toward the river.

“Forty-two hundred at Sunbeam. Stoneflies are moving. You’re going to have a good week.”

He grins. “Your dad used to say that. Exact same words. ‘You’re going to have a good week, Jim.’ Then he’d put me on fish before lunch.”

“I learned from the best.” I mean it in a way that has nothing to do with modesty.

My father taught me every inch of this river.

He died four years ago, the summer Cody and I got married, and some days, his absence is loudest on the water, in the middle of a drift, when I reach for something he would have known and find only my own answer.

Gigi climbs out of the passenger side and stretches. She’s twenty-eight, tall, blond, and pretty in a way that looks maintained even after a three-hour drive from Boise. She’s Jim’s second wife. They married four years ago. This is her third summer at the lodge.

“Mac.” She rolls her neck. “Please tell me there’s wine. That drive is brutal.”

“There’s wine. Cabin Four, same as last year. Cody put a bottle on the counter for you.”

“He’s the best,” she says, and starts toward the cabin without waiting for Jim to unload the bags. She doesn’t look at the river. She doesn’t check the trail map by the lodge door or glance at the cabin signs. She walks straight to Cabin Four without hesitating or checking a single sign.

This is her third summer, so she knows the layout.

Cody comes out of the main lodge and crosses the lot to help Jim.

He shakes Jim’s hand, asks about the flight, picks up two bags and a cooler, and heads toward Cabin Four.

He shifts Gigi’s duffel on his shoulder, moves the cooler to his other hand, and holds the cabin door open for her with the easy attentiveness that made me look twice at him six years ago at a search-and-rescue clinic in McCall.

He’s always been good with people, better than I am. It’s one of the reasons I married him.

Something about this particular moment snags. I can’t name it or isolate what’s wrong. It’s a small misalignment, like a picture frame hanging a degree off level. You might not notice if you weren’t paying attention.

I’m paying attention.

I turn back to Jim, who is pulling his fly rod case out of the SUV with careful, steady hands.

“Early morning tomorrow?” I ask.

“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” he says.

He carries his rod case toward Cabin Four, and I stand in the lot with the river running at the bottom of the hill. The current sounds the same as it always does. Everything else feels shifted by a fraction I can’t measure.

The season is starting, and my hands are already full.