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 hirta if 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.
She looked at me. Her eyes dropped to the flowers. Something moved across her face, and she pressed her lips together and didn’t say anything.
“Black-eyed Susans,” I said.
She blinked.
“Rudbeckia hirta.” I held them out. “They grow along the river road. I can’t turn off the guide part of myself, apparently.”
Something broke open in her expression—not quite a laugh, not quite a cry, somewhere in between—and she took the flowers and looked down at them. I watched her try to find solid ground.
“Cade—”
“You don’t have to say anything yet.” I leaned against the doorframe. “I need you to hear something.”
She looked up.
“You’ve been running somebody else’s race your whole life,” I said.
“I could see it the second you stepped onto that dock. The way you held yourself. The way you were standing on that dock like you had somewhere more important to be. The way you said thank you like you’d practiced it.
” I paused. “And then I watched you climb twenty feet up an oak tree and jump into a river because you wanted to. Not because it was on a list. Not because it looked good. Because you wanted to.”
Her eyes were bright. She wasn’t bothering to hide it anymore.
“Whatever you decide,” I said. “I want it to be a decision you made. Not one that got made for you.”
“And if what I decide involves staying in Wildwood Valley?”
Her voice was quiet. Careful. Like she was testing the weight of the words before she set them all the way down.
“Then I’d say the river’s got good fishing year-round and the rope swing works in every season.” I held her gaze. “And I’d say I’ve never brought anyone to that spot before. In case that matters.”
She looked down at the black-eyed Susans in her hands. Then back up at me.
She stepped back from the door and opened it wider.
I went in. She turned to the nightstand and set the flowers in the water glass, stems first, yellow heads tipping slightly to one side.
She picked up her phone. She held it for a long moment—the missed calls, whatever was waiting for her there—and then she turned it off, set it on the nightstand, and turned back to me.
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.
I crossed the room, and she met me halfway. That was the end of running somebody else’s race.