Chapter 3 Mia
MIA
By Thursday, he had a usual.
I didn't know if that was deliberate on his part. I suspected it was.
The conversations had started small and gotten longer without either of us making a decision about it.
Monday had been the river—what the upper bend looked like after rain, whether the cutthroats would move off the riffle if the water rose.
Tuesday had been Hollow Peak itself—how long I'd lived here, what it was like growing up in a town where everyone knew your father's name.
Wednesday, he'd told me about a client who'd never held a fly rod in his life and had, on his third cast, put a dry fly into a seam that Hale had been working for twenty minutes with no result.
He'd said it with the dry straightness of someone reporting a fact, and it had taken me a second to realize he thought it was funny.
Thursday morning, he was already on his stool when I came out of the back. He looked up from his coffee and said, "The upper bend. How early is too early?"
"For the cutthroats?"
"Before the sun moves off it, you said."
"You want to go today?"
"Client canceled. I've got the morning."
I had a shift that ended at eleven. I told him that, and he nodded like that settled it, and Mae appeared from the kitchen at that exact moment and set his sandwich down. Her expression told me that she'd heard the entire exchange and had opinions she was choosing not to voice.
She made it about four minutes before she voiced them.
I was pulling an espresso when she came up beside me and spoke at a volume calibrated specifically to carry no further than my left ear. "He comes in every morning."
"He likes the coffee."
"He likes something," she said. "It isn't the coffee."
"Mae."
"I'm just noting the pattern." She untied her apron and retied it, which was what she did when she was settling in for a conversation.
"A man who can make coffee anywhere comes into a café every morning for a week and sits at the same stool and talks to the same woman for forty-five minutes and then leaves.
That's not a coffee habit, sweetheart." She looked at me over the top of her reading glasses. "And you keep making that face."
"What face?"
"The one you make when you know something and you're waiting for permission." She retied her apron and went back to the kitchen. "You don't need permission."
I'd opened my mouth to say something reasonable when the door opened and June Vega came in. That was either perfect timing or terrible timing, depending on how the next five minutes went.
June was grease-smudged at the wrist even this early, which meant she'd already been into something at the shop. She had the look she always had—like she was moving faster than the room and had decided to let it catch up on its own time.
She dropped onto the stool two down from Hale, looked sideways at him with the unfiltered assessment of someone who had never once worried about being caught looking, and said nothing. Then his phone buzzed on the counter. He glanced at it and stood.
"I'll be right back," he said, and took the call outside.
June waited approximately one second after the door closed. "That's him."
I kept my expression level. "June."
"What." It wasn't a question. "Mae told me."
"Mae," I said.
"I tell people things," Mae said, from the kitchen, without any apparent guilt.
June propped her chin on her hand and looked at me. "So. Are you going to talk to him or keep making his coffee until one of you dies?"
"I talk to him," I said. "Every morning."
"About fish."
"Among other things."
"Among other things," June repeated. She picked up the coffee I'd set in front of her and pointed at me over the rim. "You never do anything your father would lose sleep over. This one could change that."
The door opened and Hale came back in, phone in his pocket, crossed to his stool, and picked up his coffee like he'd never left. He didn't look at me right away—just settled, patient, giving me the counter and the conversation without making anything of it.
That. That was the thing I couldn't account for, the thing that had been weighing on my mind since Monday.
The way he gave me room. I'd spent twenty-three years in a town full of people who loved me and who filled every available space with that love, and Hale Nichols sat three feet away and left room. Somehow, that felt like more.
June looked at him, then back at me. Her expression said she'd clocked the whole thing in about two seconds.
She didn't say another word about it, which from June was its own kind of statement.
June left at 7:40 with her coffee and half her sandwich and a parting look that communicated several complete sentences without a single word. Mae went back to the kitchen and stayed there.
I refilled Hale's mug and he looked up. "Friends of yours?"
"June is. Mae is—Mae." I leaned on the counter.
He lifted the mug. "They care about you."
"They have opinions about me."
"Same thing, where they're standing." He looked at me steadily. "You've lived here your whole life."
"Born at the clinic in town. Never left for more than two weeks."
"You want to?"
I thought about that a moment before answering.
"Sometimes I think I should want more than I do," I finally said.
"But I know this place the way I know the river.
I know where the depth is. I know where it shelves off.
" I paused. "Most people spend a long time looking for somewhere that feels like something. I already have it."
He was quiet for a moment. "That's not nothing."
"No," I said. "It isn't."
He left at eight, and I finished my shift. At 11:10, I was pulling off the mining road in my truck with my rod case in the back. He was already there, leaning against his tailgate, looking up at the ridge.
We walked the game trail without talking much, which was easy in the way that quiet with him had gotten easy faster than I'd expected.
The willows gave way to open water, and the upper bend opened up ahead of us—wider than the lower stretch, shallower over the gravel, the cutthroats holding in the broken water behind the mid-channel rocks.
"There," I said, and pointed at the nearest seam.
He saw it immediately. That was something I'd started to notice—the way he read water. He didn't scan. He looked in the right place first, like he'd already calculated where the fish would be before he got there.
We spread out. He waded right, and I went left. For a while, there was just the river and the sound of line in the air and the comfort of fishing water you knew.
"How long has Rowan had PeakBound?" he called from across the channel.
"Twelve years, maybe. He left for a while and came back." I made a cast upstream and let it drift. "This whole valley is full of people who left and came back."
"And people who just came."
"Those too." I watched my fly. "You're the second new guide he's hired. The other one lasted a season."
"What happened to him?"
"He missed the city." I looked over at him. "Do you? Miss wherever you were?"
He considered it. "No," he said. "I don't miss the work. I miss thinking I knew what I was doing."
"You knew what you were doing," I said. "You just didn't know what they were doing."
He looked at me across the current. Something moved in his expression—not surprise, more like recognition.
The look of a man who'd heard something accurate.
He turned back to the water without answering, and after a while, he made a cast that was about as good a cast as I'd ever seen anyone make.
A cutthroat came up out of nowhere and ate it cleanly.
He played it without rushing, and I watched him the way I'd been watching him all week. The patience of it, the way he gave the fish exactly enough and not one bit more.
"She said you were perceptive," he said, while the fish was still on.
"Mae?"
"June." He kept his eyes on the rod tip. "While you were in the back. She said, ‘Don't let the sweet face fool you, she sees everything.’"
I felt heat move up the back of my neck and was glad he wasn't looking at me. "June doesn't have a filter."
"I know." The fish came to his hand, and he held it in the current and let it go. Then he looked over at me. "She wasn't wrong, though."
I held his gaze across the water and didn't fidget, which cost me something. The river moved between us and the mountains stood up on every side and I thought about what Mae had said that morning—the face you make when you know something and you're waiting for permission.
"No," I said. "She usually isn't."
He almost smiled. The almost was becoming familiar enough that I'd started to look for it, which was its own kind of information.
We fished until two and walked back to the trucks. I drove home with my waders still damp and the kind of tired that came from being outside all day doing something you loved.
June texted me before I'd gotten my boots off. So?
I looked at the message for a second.
So nothing, I wrote back. We fished.
Her response came in four seconds. You're going to be so annoying about this, aren't you?
I set the phone down and didn't answer, which was answer enough. I pulled up my waders to dry and thought about the way he'd said she wasn't wrong like it was just a fact he was comfortable with.
I was going to have to do something about that.