Chapter 17 Alex
We rowed on the Kingswell side that day and the boat felt dead.
Not heavy—dead. The specific lifelessness of a shell carrying two rowers who weren't connected. I could feel it in the hull, in the way it sat too low in the water, in the resistance on every stroke that shouldn't have been there.
We'd been rowing for twenty minutes. The river was flat and grey beneath an overcast sky. The mist had burned off an hour ago but the air still carried the damp, and the cold crept through my uni and settled into my ribs.
Liam was right in front of me. His back—broad, strong, the muscles I knew by touch as well as sight—moved through the drive phase with mechanical precision. Catch. Drive. Finish. Recovery. Technically sound. Emotionally vacant.
I matched him. Blade entering a half-second after his, finding the water at the right depth, the right angle. My catches were clean. My drives were controlled. On paper, we were rowing.
But the boat knew.
A double is the most honest shell on the water.
An eight can hide a weak rower—seven other bodies absorb the inconsistency.
A four can compensate. A double has nowhere to hide.
Two people, two oars each, and the hull between them acting as a lie detector.
When you're connected, the boat sings—lifts and runs and feels like it's moving without effort.
When you're not, it drags. Fights you. Every stroke a negotiation instead of a conversation.
We weren't having a conversation. We were filling silence with oars.
And the worst part was how easy the pretending was.
We'd slipped back into it without a word—the performance of two people who were fine.
Just rival double partners having a quiet practice.
No tension. No history. No four AM fight that cracked us both open and left the pieces on the floor of my dorm room.
He hadn't texted.
I hadn't texted.
We'd shown up this morning and nodded at each other across the boathouse like acquaintances.
Like the last two months hadn't happened.
Like Brackett Lake hadn't happened. And part of me—the Harrington part, the part trained since birth to perform through pain—was relieved by how naturally the mask went back on.
The other part of me was drowning.
Because I could see him doing it too. The set of his shoulders. The way he'd looked past me when we carried the shell down to the dock—not through me, not at me, just past. Like I was scenery. Liam had his own version of the mask—anger and indifference. Less polished than mine. But just as thick.
We'd both retreated to our defaults. Him behind the wall. Me behind the composure. And the boat was carrying the weight of everything we wouldn't say.
"Ready to build?" Liam said. First words in ten minutes.
"Yeah."
We built the rate from twenty-two to twenty-six. The boat responded—faster, but not better. Like pushing a car that was out of gas. More effort, same emptiness.
From the coaching launch thirty meters to our port side, I could hear the low idle of the engine. Hale was driving. Eldridge beside him. Neither had said anything through the megaphone in the last fifteen minutes, and from Hale that silence was worse than any correction he could give.
Remy was in the launch today. I caught a glimpse of him when we turned at the bridge—sitting behind the coaches, watching.
His face unreadable from this distance, but I knew what he was seeing.
The same thing the footage would show later: two rowers going through the motions, making the right shapes, producing nothing.
Later, we did a race-pace piece. Five hundred meters. My lungs burned and my quads screamed and at the finish I was gasping—head between my knees, oar handles resting on my thighs. Our split was five seconds off what we'd posted a week ago.
Five seconds. In a five-hundred-meter piece. That wasn't a bad day. That was a broken boat.
Liam didn't say anything. Just sat there. Breathing. Staring at the water off the stern.
We paddled back to the dock in silence.
Racking the oars. Wiping down the shell.
The post-practice routine I could do with my eyes closed.
Liam was on the other side of the hull, toweling the rigger bolts.
We moved around each other with the careful precision of two people who knew exactly where the other was and were determined not to get closer.
The boathouse was emptying out. Tyler and a few of the Riverside guys headed for the showers. Derek was talking to Mason by the erg room. The usual post-practice noise—voices, lockers, the clang of oar handles being sorted into racks.
I hung my oars and turned toward the hallway that led to the upper level.
Eldridge was there. Leaning against the doorframe.
Arms crossed. He'd changed out of his launch jacket into the charcoal quarter-zip he wore to meetings—the one that meant he was about to be Coach Eldridge, not river Eldridge.
"Harrington. A moment."
Not a question.
I followed him down the hall. He didn't go to his office—stopped in the corridor between the trophy cases, which was somehow worse. His office was formal. The hallway was casual. Casual meant this wasn't a meeting. It was a correction delivered as a favor.
"I won't keep you," he said. Hands in his pockets. The river visible through the window behind him, flat and grey. "That piece today was concerning."
"Yes, sir."
"I've watched you row for years. I know what you're capable of. What I saw out there wasn't capability. It was compliance."
The word landed precisely where he intended.
"There's a difference between rowing and going through the motions," Eldridge continued. "Your blade work was technically sound. Your drives were adequate. Your connection to Moore was nonexistent." He paused. "A double with no connection isn't a crew. It's two people in a boat."
I didn't respond. There was nothing to say that wouldn't make it worse.
"The Charles is nine days out. Scouts. Media.
This program's reputation." He looked at me.
The look that carried thirty years of coaching and a lifetime of friendship with my father.
"I don't know what's happening between you and Moore.
I don't want to know. But the water doesn't lie, Alex. Whatever it is—resolve it."
"Yes, sir."
"One more thing." He uncrossed his arms. "I had a call this morning from a journalist at New England Rowing Magazine. They'd like to profile the double. The joint program. It's excellent visibility—for the program, for both schools. Interview and photo shoot, probably Thursday at the boathouse."
My stomach dropped.
"I've already spoken with Hale. He's on board. I'll send you the details."
"Okay."
He studied me for a moment. Whatever he saw, he kept to himself.
"Get some rest, Alex. You look tired."
He walked toward his office. The door closed behind him.
It was the kindest thing Eldridge ever said to me.
I stood in the hallway between the trophy cases.
The afternoon light catching the glass, the engraved silver, the decades of Kingswell excellence displayed in rows.
Somewhere in there was my father's name.
Somewhere in there was the weight I'd been carrying since I was old enough to hold an oar.
A double with no connection isn't a crew. It's two people in the same boat.
I knew that. I knew it because three days ago the boat had been alive and now it was dead and the only thing that changed was us.
***
My dorm room was exactly how I'd left it, so clean and organized that Liam would have said something about it.
I set my bag down. Showered. The hot water loosened the knots in my shoulders but not the one in my chest. I dried off, pulled on sweatpants and a t-shirt, sat at my desk.
Opened my laptop. Stared at the screen. Closed it.
My phone was on the nightstand. I'd been checking it every ten minutes since Saturday—not for the anonymous number, though that fear was constant.
For Liam. For the text that hadn't come.
For the reaching-out that neither of us was doing because reaching out meant cracking open the thing we'd sealed shut the other morning.
No new messages.
I picked up the phone anyway. Opened my photos. Scrolled past the screenshots of training plans and class schedules and the one picture of my mother's garden she'd sent last month.
Found it.
The bridge. Marlow. A week and a half ago—before the texts, before the party, before any of this.
The two of us standing on the old stone bridge over the creek, the trees behind us turning gold and copper in the late autumn light.
Liam's arm slung around my shoulder. Both of us grinning—not posing, not performing, just happy.
I'd saved it the second it came through. Hadn't opened it since.
Now I stared at it. Zoomed in on his face.
The way his eyes crinkled when he smiled.
The way his whole body leaned into mine like gravity worked differently when we were close.
The ease in his expression—no walls, no armor, no calculation.
Just Liam. The version of him I only got when nobody else was watching.
The version I'd pushed away.
My thumb hovered over the delete button. A reflex. Maybe instinct—eliminate the evidence, control the narrative, leave nothing that could be used against you.
I couldn't do it.
I locked the phone. Set it face-down on the nightstand.
Got into bed. The sheets were clean—I'd washed them Sunday afternoon.
But the pillowcase.
I'd changed the left one. My side. The right one—Liam's side, the one he'd slept on Friday night, the one his head had rested on while I'd pressed back against his chest and his arm held me in place—I'd left it.
It was pathetic. I knew it was pathetic. The kind of thing a person did when they were holding onto something they'd already thrown away. Like keeping the wrapper from a gift you'd returned.
But when I turned onto my side and pressed my face into the fabric, I could still smell him. Faintly. Soap and something else—the scent of his skin. It felt like home. It was fading. By tomorrow it would be gone.
I breathed it in. Closed my eyes.
The fragments came again. Not the fight. The before.
His hands untying my shoes. Setting them by the desk, lined up, the way I'd want them.
Lie down. On your side.
The blanket tucked around my shoulders. Careful. Firm. Like I was something worth taking care of.
Then the other fragments. The ones that made my skin burn.
You're the best thing that's ever happened to me.
My own voice. Slurred. Stripped. Saying things I'd spent years not saying.
You're so fucking hot.
My hand on him. His dick hard. The way he'd grabbed my wrist—not rough, not rejecting. Just firm. Like holding something that could break.
Not like this.
Every other time we'd been together, it was equal. Both of us wanting. Both of us there. This was different. I'd been falling apart and he'd caught me. I'd offered myself and he'd said no—not because he didn't want me, but because he wanted it to count.
Nobody had ever been that careful with me before.
And I'd repaid it by telling him we were a mistake.
The ache in my chest wasn't heartbreak. It was something worse—the specific, surgical pain of knowing exactly what you had and watching yourself destroy it. Not because you didn't want it. Because wanting it was the most terrifying thing you'd ever done.
I pulled Liam's pillow closer. Pressed my face into it. Let the fading scent of him fill my lungs.
Tomorrow there would be practice. The boat that felt dead. The coaches watching. The interview to prepare for—sitting next to Liam in front of a journalist, performing the partnership that was crumbling behind closed doors.
But that was tomorrow.
Tonight it was just me. In a perfectly organized room. With a pillow that smelled less like Liam than it had yesterday. Holding onto something that was already disappearing.
The quad was quiet through the window. The lampposts casting their circles of light on the empty pathways.
I didn't sleep for a long time.