Chapter 2 #2
I see it before it happens. I read water for a living. The small wake pushing from upstream. The angle of the raft. The three-degree tilt that won’t matter to Marissa because she’s braced. The shift in Tori’s weight because she’s leaned back and laughing and her foot isn’t planted.
I’m already moving when she goes over.
She’s in the water. The laugh cuts off. The canyon and the river noise and everything else replaced by the single clean fact of a woman going under.
I’m in the water. I don’t remember deciding to go in.
The cold hits. I grab the perimeter line, kick hard, and angle the raft toward the shallows. The second it reaches the bank, I let go and swim for her. The door in the back of my brain opens. The one I keep shut.
A creek. Summer. A smaller body going under. My hands reaching and not reaching. The water pulling her away from me for thirty seconds that lasted the rest of my life.
Not now. Not this.
I find Tori. She’s already surfaced. She’s already swimming toward the bank with strong, deliberate kicks. She is handling this. I can see she is handling this.
It doesn’t matter. Nothing about her competence changes what my body is doing right now.
I get my arm across her and I pull her toward the bank and she lets me or she can’t stop me and I don’t know which and I don’t care because she was in the water and now she’s not and my pulse is running at a rate I haven’t felt since I was twelve years old on a creek bank watching my little sister cough up water.
My feet hit gravel. I stand her up. Hands to her shoulders. I turn her and look at her eyes because the pupil check is first. Equal. Reactive. Good.
She’s fine. I can see she’s fine. Her airway is clear. Her color is normal. She’s looking at me with the focused, irritated gaze of a woman who does not appreciate being on this side of a medical assessment.
“I’m fine.”
I find her wrist. I count.
I keep counting. Her pulse is fast under my fingers. Mine is faster. I know what my pulse is doing and it has nothing to do with the water temperature.
“Pulse is elevated,” I say.
“I fell in a river. It’s supposed to be elevated.”
She’s right. Medically, clinically right. I can see from her capable, annoyed expression that this woman knows exactly how fine she is.
That is not the issue. The issue is that she was laughing and then she was gone and for three seconds the river had her and the door blew open and everything I’ve spent sixteen years building (the readiness, the control, the ability to be the one who handles it) compressed into a single point and the point was her.
I let go of her wrist. I step back.
I do not stop watching.
“Are you okay?” Marissa calls from the raft where I had pulled it against the bank.
“I’m fine!” Tori pushes hair from her face. She’s soaked. Her braid is wrecked. She’s standing in the shallows telling us she’s fine with the flat certainty of a woman who has said those words a thousand times and means them and might be wrong about some of them.
“She’s fine,” I say. To Marissa. Because I need to say it out loud. I need to turn it from a hope into a fact I can hold.
Tori looks at me. I’m soaked. I went over the side fully clothed because a woman fell in calm water and I skipped the throw rope and every protocol I’ve followed for ten years.
She climbs back in. I put my hand on her lower back to help her up. Her shirt is wet and cold against my palm. The contact lasts one second too long. I know it’s too long. I don’t correct it.
We finish the trip. I guide from the stern. I call the lines. I do my job.
I watch her the entire time.
She tries to catch me. Every time she turns her head I’m reading the water or adjusting the paddle or scanning the bank. I’m never looking at her when she checks.
I’m always looking at her when she stops.
At the take-out point I secure the raft. Coil the rope. Pull the equipment. She’s standing on the gravel wringing out her braid and I am going to stop watching her now.
“Thank you,” she says. Direct. Professional. Not inviting conversation.
The corner of my mouth moves. “You had it handled.”
She did. She was swimming. She had the angle right and the kick pattern right and she would have been on the gravel in fifteen seconds without me. I mean every word.
I also mean: I went in after you anyway and I would do it again and I have no explanation I’m willing to give.
She walks to the parking lot with Marissa. I hear Marissa say my name. I go back to the rope.
Levi finds me in the equipment shed twenty minutes later. I’m hosing down PFDs. The PFDs need hosing. It has nothing to do with the fact that routine tasks are the only thing my brain will currently process.
“So,” he says. He leans in the doorframe. The full Levi grin. The one that means he’s about to enjoy himself at my expense.
I keep hosing.
“Marissa’s friend.”
I adjust the nozzle.
“The one you didn’t say a dozen words to despite being, and I’m quoting Marissa here, ‘the chattiest guide we have.’ Her words, not mine. Chattiest.”
“I was professional.”
“You dove into the river fully clothed.”
“She went in the water. I responded.”
“She was swimming to the bank.”
“Protocol.”
“The protocol is throw rope first, then enter the water if the throw fails. You skipped the rope, Kai. You went in like the river was on fire.”
I turn off the hose. I hang the PFDs on the line one at a time with complete attention to spacing.
“She’s nice,” Levi says.
“She’s a client.”
“She’s a client who you pulled out of calm water while she was actively swimming to shore. And then you took her pulse.”
“Standard field assessment.”
“You don’t take pulses. In four years I have never once seen you take a client’s pulse.”
I hang the last PFD.
“I’m heading home,” I say.
“I bet you are.” He pushes off the doorframe. Still grinning. “See you tomorrow, chatterbox.”
The drive home takes eleven minutes. My cabin is up the ridge road, backed against the river. I can hear the water from every room. I bought the place because of that.
I shower. I eat. I sit on my deck and listen to the river run below me in the dark and I think about Tori Lane.
Her eyes, hazel and gold, holding mine in the parking lot. Two seconds. Her hands on the paddle. Efficient. Strong.
Her laugh. The real one, full and loose, happening for the first time in what I’d guess is weeks based on the way she leaned into it like she was remembering how.
Her voice, flat and certain: “I’m an ER nurse. I know what fine looks like.”
She does. She is fine. She was fine in the water and she was fine on the bank and she’s fine right now. Probably on Levi and Marissa’s porch with a glass of wine and her hair drying in the late light.
I replay the pulse under my fingers. Fast. Strong. Alive.
The door in the back of my brain is closed again.
Lily is fine. She’s twenty-four and living in Bozeman and she would laugh until she couldn’t breathe if she knew her brother dove into calm water after a woman who was already swimming to shore.
She’d laugh and then she’d text me about it for six months.
But that’s not all this is. The door opened because a woman went under. It stayed open because the woman was Tori.
I didn’t need to go in. She didn’t need me to check her pulse. She didn’t need my hand on her back or my eyes on her for the next hour or any of it.
She didn’t need any of it. I did.
The river runs steady below my deck, readable and familiar. Every current, every eddy, every seam where fast water meets slow. I’ve read this river since I was eighteen. I’ve never been wrong about it.
Tori Lane is not the river.
I’m in trouble.