Chapter Five
I SPEND THE NEXT MORNING guiding a half-day float for the father and son from Cabin Two while Cody runs the lodge.
The boy is maybe fifteen, long-limbed and serious, and he handles the rod with the careful attention of someone who was taught correctly.
His father watches him fish with the quiet pride of a man who did the teaching.
I position the boat, call out the holding water, and let the kid work through his own mistakes.
From the river, I can see Cody on the phone in the parking lot, pacing the same strip of gravel he paces during every business call. I don’t know who’s on the other end, but I have suspicions.
He used to tell me. He’d come find me after a call and say, “Got a booking for September,” or, “That outfitter in McCall wants to do a referral deal.” He doesn’t do that anymore.
I told myself it was because he’d learned to handle things without checking in, and it was a sign of competence.
Now I watch him pace and gesture while I hold the boat steady for a fifteen-year-old’s backcast, and I understand that the reason he stopped telling me wasn’t independence.
It was separation. He was building something I wasn’t supposed to see until it was too late to stop.
The kid catches a cutthroat on his own fly, a scraggly Adams he tied at the lodge vise last night.
His father puts a hand on his shoulder and doesn’t say anything.
I net the fish and release it then row them into the next pool and do my job because my job is the only thing in my life that makes sense right now.
AFTER LUNCH, I GUIDE Jim for an afternoon float. He catches three fish and talks about retirement. He asks whether I’ve ever considered expanding the lodge, adding a few cabins or maybe a hot tub for the wives who don’t fish.
“Gigi would love a hot tub,” he says.
I bet she would.
“I’ve thought about it,” I say. “The permits are complicated out here.”
That evening, after the guests have gone to their cabins, I lock the office door and open the Devlin thread on Cody’s laptop, finally ready to face them. Fourteen emails spanning six months. I read them all.
Craig Devlin is a commercial developer based in Boise.
He buys properties in central Idaho’s outdoor recreation corridor, upgrades them, and markets them to wealthier clientele.
His interest in Burrson Lodge is straightforward.
He wants the location, the river access, and the existing client base, and he’s willing to either buy outright or take a controlling investment stake in exchange for funding a renovation.
What isn’t straightforward is who he thinks he’s talking to.
In every email, Cody presents himself as the owner and primary operator of Burrson Lodge.
He describes the revenue streams, occupancy rates, and growth over time.
He cites the corporate retreat bookings he built, the website traffic he generated, and the social media presence he developed.
All of this is real. Cody did these things. The numbers he’s sharing are accurate.
What Cody leaves out is that the lodge’s operating license, liability insurance, property deed, and entire guiding operation belong to someone he describes as “the head guide.” My name appears nowhere in this correspondence.
Where my role is mentioned, I’m characterized as “highly experienced, essential to day-to-day river operations,” a valuable employee in the business my husband is selling out from under me.
In one email, Cody explains that the property is held in my name “for licensing and liability purposes,” which is apparently enough to keep a developer from pulling county records on his own.
I get up from the desk and walk to the filing cabinet against the wall.
The property deed is in the top drawer, filed under my name.
I bought this lodge from Clint Emerson for three hundred and forty thousand dollars, ten years ago, six years before I married Cody.
It is my separate property under Idaho law, and no volume of corporate retreat bookings changes that fact.
My outfitter’s license from the Idaho Outfitters and Guides Licensing Board is in the same drawer.
It’s non-transferable, tied to my name, my credentials, and my documented experience on this specific stretch of the Salmon River.
Without this license, no one can legally run guided trips from this property.
My liability insurance policy is in the drawer below.
It’s also non-transferable and also in my name.
Every guided float, every client in a drift boat, and every piece of equipment on this property is insured through a policy that follows my license.
If I pull the license, the insurance goes with it.
I lay all three documents on the desk next to the laptop screen where Craig Devlin is asking Cody about “timeline for the ownership transition.”
Every structural pillar of this business is mine.
I go back to the affair correspondence on my phone and start cross-referencing dates with the Devlin thread. Gigi’s fingerprints aren’t in the developer emails directly, but they’re all over the timeline.
In November, three weeks after Gigi’s first off-season visit to Stanley, Cody emailed her about “the plan.” He wrote that he’d found a developer who might be interested, that they needed to be patient, and the timing had to be right.
Gigi replied that she’d been patient for two years and needed to know there was a real exit, because Jim was talking about renewing their prenup, and she didn’t want to wait until the terms got worse.
There it is. Gigi needs money to leave Jim.
The prenup limits what she gets in a divorce without cause, and three summers of sleeping with her host’s husband won’t win her a favorable settlement.
She’s been pushing Cody to sell the lodge or bring in an investor so they can build their new life on my equity.
Gigi doesn’t want the lodge. She wants the cash value of a business she’s never contributed to, run by a woman she’s been smiling at over coffee for three summers.
I think about the two of them planning this.
Sitting in the Hanson Creek meadow on my flannel, eating my bread, drinking my wine, talking about selling my lodge to fund their future together.
The affair was private. This is architectural.
They looked at my life and saw building materials for theirs.
The hole in their plan is enormous. Cody can’t sell what he doesn’t own.
Any developer running basic due diligence will pull the property deed in the first week and discover that the man presenting himself as owner-operator doesn’t hold the deed, the license, or the insurance.
Craig Devlin isn’t trying to steal my lodge.
He’s negotiating in good faith with someone who doesn’t have the authority to negotiate at all.
Cody’s strategy, if it qualifies as one, was to get the deal far enough along to pressure me into agreement.
He’d frame it as a great opportunity. He’d use his real contributions as bargaining power and the marriage as the rest, and he’d assume I would go along because Cody has always assumed I would go along.
He’s always mistaken my focus for agreement. I wasn’t agreeing. I was working.
I close the laptop and put the deed, the license, and the insurance policy into a folder. Tomorrow I’ll make copies at the hardware store in Stanley that has a copier in the back. The originals stay in my possession.
The affair hurt my marriage. The receipts insulted my business. This is Cody reaching for the thing itself, the lodge, the river access, the license, the ten years of work I did before he showed up with his charm and his booking spreadsheets. The affair made me angry.
This makes me methodical.