Chapter 20 Liam
The river was black.
Not dark—black. The kind of pre-dawn black where the water and the sky were the same color. The soft lap of current against the dock pilings. The hiss of my blade entering the surface.
I pushed off alone. The single rocked beneath me—lighter than the double, more responsive, less forgiving. But someone missing.
Just me and the water.
The first few strokes were rough. Cold hands.
Stiff back. My body protesting the 4 AM alarm and the fact that I'd barely slept.
But by the tenth stroke my muscles remembered.
They always remembered. Legs compressing on the slide.
The coil of power in my hamstrings. The explosive drive—legs, back, arms—and then the release, the blade lifting clean, the boat surging forward on its own momentum.
The run between strokes. That's what Jerry called it. The glide. The moment when you've done everything right and the boat rewards you by moving without effort. Like the hull is breathing.
Jerry standing on the dock at Brackett Lake. Summer before eighth grade. A borrowed single that was too long for me, the oar handles too wide for my hands. "Don't muscle it, kid. Let the water do the work."
I'd been terrible and couldn't keep the boat level. Caught crabs every third stroke—the oar snagging underwater, the handle slamming into my ribs hard enough to leave bruises my mom would ask about at dinner.
But Jerry kept putting me in. Every morning before my shift. Thirty minutes on the water while the lake was still glass and the summer rich were still asleep in their massive houses on the north shore.
"You feel that?" Jerry said, the morning I finally held a clean stroke for ten in a row. "That's the run. That's what you're chasing. Every stroke for the rest of your life, you're chasing that feeling."
He was right. Fourteen years old, blistered hands, a borrowed boat on a lake where I'd never belong to the right side—and the water gave me something nobody could take.
Not my father, who'd already left. Not the summer families, who looked through me like furniture.
Not the bills on the kitchen table or the second job my mom picked up in September or any of it.
On the water, I was free.
The memory dissolved. The river materialized around me—narrower than the lake, colder, the current stronger. Mist hanging low over the surface. The boathouses on both banks barely visible. Just shapes in the dark.
I settled into steady state. Twenty strokes a minute. Long and clean. The rhythm taking over—that meditative place where thought stopped and the body just moved.
And then the other memory came. The one I hadn't invited.
Alex behind me in the double. First time.
The boat alive beneath us in a way I'd never felt with anyone else.
His blade matching mine—not following, matching.
Like his nervous system was wired into mine.
The hull lifting. The speed building without effort.
Both of us breathing in sync and neither of us deciding to.
"God, this is amazing," he'd said.
And I'd known. Right then. That this was different from anything Jerry had given me on the lake.
This wasn't just the run. This was the run with someone.
The boat carrying two bodies that moved as one—not because of technique, not because of practice, but because of something underneath that had no name.
It felt like flying.
My blade caught wrong and the handle kicked sideways. I corrected—adjusted the depth, steadied the hull. Blinked the memory away.
But the feeling stayed lodged in my chest. The ache of knowing exactly what the boat could be and watching it die because we couldn't figure out how to stop hurting each other.
I rowed harder. Not punishing—searching. Trying to find the feeling on my own. The run. The glide. The thing Jerry promised would always be there.
It was there. Fainter. Lonelier. But there.
I was on the precipice of everything I'd ever wanted.
The Charles was days away. Scouts would be there—the same people who'd looked at Jace and written his name on a clipboard.
The national team pipeline. The thing I'd whispered to Alex in a late-night text like it was too big to say out loud: I want to go to the Olympics.
It was all right there. Within reach. The kid from the south side of Brackett Lake, the one who learned to row in a borrowed boat before dawn—he was about to race on the biggest stage in college rowing.
And the person who made him fastest, the person whose rhythm matched his like they'd been built for the same water—
I couldn't lose that.
Not over a fight. Not over fear. Not over the pattern of two people who loved each other and kept choosing the worst possible way to show it.
The sound of another hull cutting water. Faint at first—then closer. A single materializing out of the fog to my port side. Long, clean strokes. Unhurried.
Jace.
He didn't announce himself. Didn't wave or call out. Just fell into pace alongside me—two singles moving through the mist, matching rate, matching rhythm. The way rowers greeted each other when words would break the spell.
We rowed like that for a while. Side by side. The only sounds our blades and our breathing and the water running under our hulls.
"Ready for the Charles?" Jace said. Not looking over. Eyes ahead. Just two guys rowing.
"I think so."
"You good?"
The question was simple. The answer wasn't. But Jace didn't need the long version. He never did.
"Getting there."
"Good enough." Three more strokes. Four. The fog thinning. The east bank solidifying. "How's the boat feeling?"
"We're having a little rough patch."
Jace nodded. "Always happens the week before—race jitters."
We rowed in silence for another minute.
"This is my last race in a Riverside jersey, Moore." He turned his head. Looked at me across the water. "Don't waste yours."
He didn't say anything else. Didn't need to. We rowed until the mist burned off and the dock appeared and that was the whole conversation. But it sat in my chest for the rest of the morning like something handed to me that I wasn't sure I was ready to hold.
We docked without another word. Jace gripped my shoulder as we hauled our singles up the ramp. One squeeze. Firm. Then he walked toward the boathouse and didn't look back.
I stood on the dock. The mist burning off. The river going from black to grey to the first hint of silver where the sunrise would come.
Don't waste yours.
My mom's voice moved in underneath it. Who's carrying you?
I'd spent the whole week carrying it alone—the fight, the 18:23, the texter, the silence.
Carrying it the way I always carried things: quietly, privately, until my back gave out.
The way I'd learned from watching my mom do it for years after my dad left.
The way I'd decided was strength and was actually just loneliness with better posture.
I wanted it to be Alex.
That was the whole answer. Simple and terrifying and true.
Not the boat. Not the Charles. Not the scouts or the pipeline or any of it.
I wanted the person in the bow seat. The one who'd shown up at every broken moment and matched me anyway—on the water, in the dark, in the ugly middle of things neither of us knew how to say.
And if Alex wasn't going to initiate this, I would. And I'd be honest—I was done carrying it alone.
I opened my texts. Found Alex's name.
My thumb hovered. The cursor blinking in the empty message field.
What do I say? How do I start?
I didn't know. Didn't have the right words. Probably never would.
Liam
We need to talk. The bridge. Tonight. 6.
Sent it. Watched the blue checkmark appear.
Set the phone on my knee. Stared at the quad. Waited.
My phone buzzed.
Alex
I'll be there.
Relief was coming. He responded… quickly.
I put the phone in my pocket and stood up from the bench.
The bridge was hours away. The Charles was six days away. And somewhere between the two, we'd either find our way back to each other or we wouldn't.
But at least we were about to show up.
Both of us.