Chapter 3
Marissa
It’s raining, Claire is vindicated, and I am going to lose my mind.
“I said twelve percent,” she announces from the couch, where she is curled up with a book and a mug of tea and the energy of a woman who has been right about something and intends to mention it several more times today. “I said twelve percent chance of afternoon thunderstorms. And here we are.”
“It’s ten in the morning,” I say. “These are morning thunderstorms. You predicted afternoon.”
“Precipitation is precipitation, Marissa.”
She’s not wrong. It’s pouring. The kind of steady mountain rain that turns the windows gray and erases the tree line.
The Day 2 plan was a hike to a ridge overlook I found on a trail map.
The hike is not happening. I’ve checked three weather apps (Claire has checked seven) and it’s rain until at least three. Everyone else is fine with this.
Jules is in pajamas. Not “just woke up” pajamas.
“I packed pajamas specifically designed for cabin lounging” pajamas.
Silk. Vintage. She has a brand, even when sleeping.
Tori claimed the big armchair by the window and fell asleep in under four minutes.
She does this anywhere, instantly. It’s her superpower.
Jenna is at the kitchen table editing raft trip photos on her laptop, zooming in on water droplets and canyon walls with the focus of a woman who has forgotten other people exist. Paige is curled up on the other end of Claire’s couch with a novel, and she looks more relaxed than she has since we arrived.
Something about yesterday’s river loosened a thing that’s been tight in her for weeks. I notice. I don’t push.
I am the only person in this cabin who is not at peace.
I’ve reorganized the kitchen cabinets. I’ve wiped down counters that were already clean. I’ve confirmed the dinner reservation twice. I’ve paced the living room enough times that Jules is watching me over the top of her coffee mug with the calm expression of a woman who has seen this before.
“You’re doing the thing,” she says.
“I’m not doing a thing.”
“You’re doing the thing where the schedule broke and your brain is eating itself.”
“The schedule didn’t break. It adjusted.”
“You organized the spice rack alphabetically.”
“That’s just good kitchen layout.”
I need to go somewhere. I need to DO something. I need a project.
And I have one. It’s been sitting in my head since yesterday, taking up space, refusing to be filed away.
A business with a homepage that uses stock photography of a river in Colorado.
A booking system that loses customers at step two.
An Instagram account gathering dust since March.
A man running a solid operation on a gorgeous river with the digital presence of a lemonade stand.
“I’m going to run into town,” I say, grabbing the van keys from the hook by the door.
Five women look at me. Four of them look back to what they were doing. Jules does not.
“Town,” she says.
“Yes.”
“In the rain.”
“I have a jacket.”
“You’re going to the river guide’s place.”
“I am going into town. If I happen to pass by the Outfitters, I might stop in and offer some professional observations about his digital marketing. As a courtesy.”
“A courtesy.”
“I’m a consultant, Jules. This is what I do.”
“You consult men with forearms during rainstorms.”
“I’m leaving now.”
“Drive safe. Tell forearms I said hi.”
I do not dignify this with a response. I take the keys and walk out into the rain and drive.
~~~
The lot at Wylde Mountain Outfitters is empty.
No groups, no trips, no women in life jackets crowding the equipment rack.
In the rain, the place looks different. Smaller, quieter.
The gravel is dark and wet, the equipment trailer buttoned up, the river louder than I remember.
I can hear it from the parking lot, heavier with the rainfall.
I look at the sign above the office door.
WYLDE MOUNTAIN OUTFITTERS in green paint.
And underneath, for the first time without a helmet and a PFD competing for my attention, I notice a shadow.
Faded lettering in a different font, painted over but not gone.
Like something used to be written there and someone covered it up.
Not recently. Years ago. I file it. I don’t know what it means.
The office door is open.
Levi is at the desk. Not what I expected. I expected him on the water or rigging gear or doing something physical and scenic. Instead he’s squinting at a laptop that looks like it predates broadband, and he’s frowning at the screen.
He looks up. The frown vanishes. The grin arrives.
“Trouble.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“You showed up at my office in the rain while on vacation. What should I call you?”
“Marissa. My actual name.”
“Doesn’t fit as well.” He leans back in the chair. He’s wearing shorts and a t-shirt and his hair is damp like he was outside earlier. He looks different without the guide uniform. Less performed. “What are you doing here?”
“Your Instagram hasn’t been updated since March.”
“That’s why you drove here? In a rainstorm?”
“I’m a digital marketing consultant. Watching a good business sabotage itself online is physically painful. It’s like watching someone light money on fire.”
He stares at me. Then he laughs. The real one. Not the guide laugh. The one from the raft that surprised him before he could smooth it over. It fills the small office and I feel it in my chest.
“You drove here in the rain to yell at my Instagram.”
“I drove here to assess the full scope of the problem. The Instagram is a symptom.”
He waves at the laptop. “Be my guest.”
He stands and I sit in the chair. One desk. One chair. A filing cabinet. The room feels bigger than it needs to be for one desk. There’s a space along the far wall, empty, and I can see faint dents in the floor where something heavy used to sit.
The laptop wakes up. The website loads. It’s worse than I remembered.
“The header image is a stock photo,” I say.
“I know.”
“Of a river in Colorado.”
“That part I didn’t know.”
“The logo is pixelated. The navigation has seven tabs and two of them go to the same page. The booking form asks for a phone number, a mailing address, and an emergency contact before the customer has even picked a date. You’re losing people at step two.”
He’s leaning against the filing cabinet with his arms crossed, watching me. Not the laptop. Me. “You’re enjoying this.”
“I’m horrified. This is not enjoyment. This is professional triage.”
“You’re smiling.”
I am smiling. I stop. I go back to the website.
“Your review section links to a Google page that hasn’t been claimed. You have forty-seven five-star reviews and nobody can find them unless they go searching. Forty-seven people telling other people you’re great and the message is stuck behind a broken link.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “Forty-seven?”
“Forty-seven. I counted.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
He looks at me. I hear what I just said. I went home after the raft trip and looked up his business and read forty-seven reviews about how Levi Carrington is the best guide on the Wylde River.
“Professional research,” I say.
“I didn’t ask.”
“You were about to.”
“I was going to say that’s a lot of reviews to read for a man you met yesterday.”
“It’s relevant market data.”
His grin is doing something I don’t like. Or I like too much. Which is worse.
I turn back to the laptop and pull up his competitors. Three other outfitters within fifty miles, all with better websites. I show him. I pull up their Instagram feeds. Real photos, client testimonials, sunset canyon shots, a guide grinning in a raft. Good outdoor branding.
“You could be doing all of this,” I say, turning the screen toward him. “Your river. Your canyon. Your trips. You’re sitting on the most photographable stretch of whitewater in Montana and you’re posting nothing.”
He moves closer to see the screen. The office is small and now he’s behind me, one hand on the desk, leaning over my shoulder.
I can smell pine and clean cotton and skin that’s been in the sun.
His arm is next to mine on the desk. I am looking at the laptop screen. I am only looking at the laptop screen.
“You could do all this?” he asks. His voice is close.
“I do this for a living. This is the easy part.” I scroll through the competitor’s page. My voice is steady and professional and I am a professional. “A real website, cleaned-up booking system, active social media presence. You’d double your bookings by next season.”
“Next season.” Something in his voice shifts. Slightly. “I’ve been meaning to fix all of it. Just never got around to it.”
“You built this business yourself?”
The pause is small. If I weren’t sitting two feet from him in a room this size, I might miss it.
“Yeah,” he says. “I built it.”
There’s something in the way he says “I” that sounds like it used to be “we.” I glance at the empty space along the far wall. The dents in the floor. The one desk. The one chair.
I don’t ask. I don’t know why. Maybe because his face is doing the thing again, the one from the raft, where the grin goes somewhere else and what’s underneath is quieter than a man who laughs this much should be.
“Well,” I say. “You don’t have to fix it alone. I can put together some ideas. A proposal. What I’d recommend, what it would take, what the timeline looks like.”
“A proposal.”
“A professional proposal. Pro bono. Consider it a thank-you for not dumping me in the rapids.”
“Laminated?”
“Don’t push it.”
He grins. The crooked one.
We’ve been in this office for over an hour.
It feels like fifteen minutes. We’ve gone through his website, his social media, his booking flow, and I’ve sketched a rough rebrand on the back of a permit application because his office doesn’t have notepads.
He talked about the river. Not the rehearsed canyon stories from the raft.
Real talk. Which rapids change in high water.
Where the swimming holes are that tourists never find.
How the light hits the canyon at five in the afternoon and turns everything gold.
He talks about this river the way I talk about a brand that’s about to click. Like it matters in a way he can’t explain and doesn’t need to.
We end up by the door, looking out at the rain. He’s leaning against the frame. I’m holding the permit application with my notes. Neither of us is moving toward my van.
“Tomorrow,” he says. “The Class IV trip. You coming?”
“It’s on the schedule.”
He looks at me. The grin fades. Not gone. Just quieter. The same thing from the raft, the half-second where the charm goes somewhere else and the man underneath it shows up without permission.
“See you then, trouble.”
It sounds different here. Not like on the water, where it was performance and recovery. Here, in his office, with the rain and an hour of real conversation behind it, “trouble” sounds like something different. Something more.
“Still not my name.”
“I know.”
He doesn’t say “it’s better” this time. He just looks at me with the grin at half-wattage and the rain coming down behind him. I walk to the van before I do something I’d have to add to the itinerary.
The drive back is ten minutes. The rain is easing. The windshield wipers keep a steady rhythm and I’m thinking about a man who built a business on a river and says “I” when he means something else and has dents in his office floor where a second desk used to be.
I’m also thinking about the way the office smelled when he was standing behind me. And the way he said “trouble” at the door. And the forty-seven five-star reviews I read in my bed last night while my friends slept.
The mountain is green and wet outside my window. The river is louder today. Leena lives here. My sister moved to this mountain for a job and fell in love without looking for it. She has a life here that looks nothing like the plan. She’s happier than I’ve ever seen her.
I’m not Leena. I don’t do accidents. I do plans.
My life is in Atlanta. My business, my apartment with the good light and the organized closets, the coffee shop on the corner.
All in Atlanta. I am here for five more days with my friends.
I am not getting swept up in a mountain and a man with a crooked grin who doesn’t know he’s looking at me the way he looks at me.
I pull into the cabin driveway. Sit for a second with the rain on the roof and the permit application on the passenger seat, covered in my handwriting.
~~~
Inside, the cabin is warm. Jules looks up from the couch. Doesn’t say a word. Just raises both eyebrows.
“I did a consultation,” I say.
“Uh huh.”
“A professional consultation. About his digital presence.”
“His digital presence.”
“It’s terrible, Jules. It’s costing him real money. I’m putting together a proposal.”
“A proposal. For the man who calls you trouble.”
“Stop repeating everything I say.”
“I’ll stop when you stop lying to yourself about why you drove to a river guide’s office in a rainstorm.”
Paige is smiling at me from the other couch.
Tori is awake now, watching with the calm assessment of a woman who reads situations professionally.
Claire has her laptop open. Jenna lifts her camera and takes a photo of me standing in the doorway, wet-haired, holding a permit application covered in branding notes.
“Delete that,” I say.
“It’s for the group chat.”
“Jenna.”
“Already sent.”
I go to my room. Sit on the bed. Open my laptop. The proposal.
Professional, clean, thorough. The brand audit, the social media strategy, the website recommendations. I’ll present it like I’d present to any client. Because that’s what this is. A client with a marketing problem I can solve.
I start working. The rain eases outside. The mountain gets its color back through my window, green and gold.
Five more days on this mountain. I have a plan. I have a schedule.
I always stick to the plan.
I do.