Silas
One Year Later
Peyton leaves me a note on the counter every morning before she goes out to the river.
They say things like coffee's made and Koda needs her pill in her food and once, memorably, caught a cutthroat before you were even awake, just so you know. That one she taped to the rod rack. I left it there for a week.
She fishes every morning now. Better than she'll admit, not as good as she thinks, and I am keeping both of those facts to myself for as long as possible because I like the way she looks when she comes in off the river — waders still dripping, colour in her face, already talking before she's through the door.
She talks the whole time she's taking the waders off. She talks while she pours her coffee. She fills the cabin with noise and motion. I have lived alone in this cabin for years and I did not know how quiet it actually was until it wasn't anymore.
She rebuilt the guide business website in a weekend. Put in an online booking system, updated the rates, rewrote every word of the copy. Within two weeks the summer was fully booked six weeks out. She runs the bookings. I run the river.
This morning she comes in from the water earlier than usual and she's not talking. That's how I know something is happening.
Peyton comes through the door with her waders still on and she's got something in her hand. Her face has the look it gets when she's working up to something she doesn't know how to start.
She stops in the middle of the kitchen. "I went out early to clear my head," she says.
"Okay?"
"Before I told you something."
I set my coffee down.
She crosses the kitchen and puts a pregnancy test in my hand. Two lines. I look at it long enough to be sure I'm reading it right, then I look at her.
Her hands are shaking. She's pressing them against her thighs now, trying to hold still, watching my face with the focused attention she used to give the water when she was learning to read the current. Checking for information. Ready to interpret whatever she finds.
"Peyton."
"I know it's — I mean, we hadn't specifically —"
"Peyton."
She stops.
"Come here," I say.
She crosses the two steps between us and I pull her in. She exhales like she's been holding that breath since the bank, maybe since before the bank. Her arms come up around me, her hands grip the back of my flannel, hold on.
"Say something," she says into my chest. "An actual sentence. I need an actual sentence."
"We're having a baby."
She makes a sound that is mostly laugh and a little cry, then pulls back to look at me. Her face is a mess — bright eyes, unsteady mouth, colour high in her cheeks from the river and from this. She is the best thing I have ever seen.
I hold her face in both hands and kiss her forehead, then her mouth. She's still laughing a little when I do. That's fine. That's exactly right.
Koda has been watching all of this from her bed by the door with the alert patience of a dog who knows something is happening and has decided to wait for clarification.
When Peyton pulls back from me, still wiping her eyes, Koda stands up.
She's ten now, a little grey around the muzzle, a little slower off the mark in the mornings.
She crosses the kitchen at something close to her old pace and pushes her nose into Peyton's hand.
Peyton crouches down and takes her face in both hands.
"You're going to be a big sister," she tells her.
Koda's tail starts moving. She doesn't know what the words mean but she knows the tone and she leans into Peyton's hands. Then she twists to look at me like she's checking the information against a second source.
"It's true," I tell her.
Koda makes a sound low in her chest, not quite a whine, and then she does something she hasn't done since she was maybe three years old — she bounces.
Both front feet off the ground, tail going hard, that full-body enthusiasm she mostly keeps stored away now behind the dignity of her age.
Peyton laughs so hard she nearly tips over.
She grabs my leg to steady herself and I get her back on her feet.
Koda spins once, then sits looking very pleased, as if she has received news she was expecting and it is satisfactory.
"She understood that," Peyton says.
"She understands most things."
"She's going to be insufferable about this baby."
"Yes," I say. Already certain of it. Koda is going to appoint herself to a position of authority in this situation and none of us will be able to do anything about it.
Peyton leans back into me and looks out at the river.
I put my arms around her from behind and rest my chin on top of her head.
The morning light comes through the spruce the way it always does, long and gold.
The mountains are right where they've always been.
Koda leans against both our legs with the full weight of her feelings.
"Good?" she says.
I tighten my arms around her.
"Best thing," I say.
She covers my hands with hers and holds on. The river goes past. Koda sighs — deep and content and final. The morning just keeps coming.
I think about the morning Peyton Archer showed up at the bank in too-big waders and scared every fish in a hundred-metre radius and looked at me like I was supposed to apologise for the river being difficult.
I think about a balcony barely wide enough for two people and the longest speech I have made in my adult life, and how she said “okay” like it was the easiest word in the world.
The cabin behind us is full of her things now. Her laptop on the kitchen table, her good coffee in the cupboard, her handwriting on the notepad by the phone. The porch has two chairs where there used to be one.
The river goes past. It always goes past.
I have lived on this water my whole life and I thought I understood what it was for — the quiet, the rhythm, the way it stays exactly itself no matter what comes. I thought the river was teaching me patience.
It was teaching me something else entirely.
It was teaching me to be ready.
Summer Heat in Silver Ridge continues with Book 3: Rescued by the Fierce Mountain Man.