Chapter 15 #3
The storm we left behind has not touched this place. Here, the sun sits bright on the lake. Cicadas buzz from the trees. Somewhere far across the water, a boat engine hums and fades. The mountains hold the horizon in both hands.
Andi slips off her shoes and walks to the edge. I watch her put one foot into the water. She inhales sharply. “You said this wasn’t cold.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You implied it.”
“I implied nothing.”
She turns to glare at me over her shoulder. “This lake is practicing deception.”
“It’s mountain water.”
“It’s attempted murder.”
I laugh and walk beside her. The water closes around my feet, cool enough to bite, clean enough to make the heat seem less personal.
She looks down through it. “You can see everything.”
“That’s why I liked it.”
“As opposed to Lake Lanier, where the water looks like it’s hiding crimes.”
I grin. “Exactly.”
She takes another careful step in. The water reaches her ankles. I crouch, pick up a flat stone, and skim it across the surface. It skips twice and sinks.
Andi’s eyebrows rise. “I was promised improvement.”
“That was a warm-up.”
“That was a confession.”
I hand her a stone. “Your turn.”
She studies the water like it has become a strategic opponent. Then she throws. Five skips. Maybe six. I stare at the spot where it disappears.
She brushes her hands together. “Interesting.”
“That was luck.”
“Was it?”
“Yes.”
She picks up another stone. Seven skips.
I point at her. “You’ve done this before.”
“I had a childhood before the world caught fire.”
The words come out lightly, but something under them isn’t light at all. Then she throws another one, and it skips so beautifully across the lake that I forget the shadow for a second.
I shake my head. “You’re hustling me.”
“I’m not hustling you. You challenged a woman with unknown lake skills and paid the price.”
“I didn’t challenge you.”
“You handed me a rock. That’s mountain language for challenge.”
I walk toward her.
She backs up, smiling now. “What are you doing?”
“Reassessing the competition.”
“Luke.”
“What?”
“You’re getting that look.”
“What look?”
“The one where you’re about to do something charmingly foolish and pretend it’s tactical.”
I take another step. She backs into the water until it reaches mid-calf.
“You should think carefully,” she says.
“I have.”
“No, you’ve reacted with your shoulders.”
I simply grin at her.
She points at me. “Do not.”
I keep walking.
“Luke Woods.”
“You called the lake deceptive.”
“It is.”
“You insulted my childhood water.”
“That sentence doesn’t even make sense.”
“It makes mountain sense.”
“That’s not a legal category.”
I reach her. She puts one hand against my chest, but she’s laughing now, and that’s the problem. Once she laughs like that, I am useless against it.
“You wouldn’t,” she says.
“I absolutely would.”
“I have my phone in my pocket.”
“No, you don’t. You left it on the blanket.”
Her eyes narrow. “You noticed that.”
“I notice everything.”
I bend and scoop her up. She squeals. Actually squeals. The sound is so startling and bright that I almost stop just to hear it again.
“You are not doing this,” she says, both arms locking around my neck.
“I am.”
“Luke, I swear—”
“You swear what?”
“I will tell Mack.”
“He ordered this.”
“He did not order lake crimes.”
“He was vague.”
“You are impossible.”
“You love me.”
“I am reconsidering the terms.”
I walk deeper. The water climbs to my knees, then my thighs. Andi tightens her arms around me, laughing so hard she can barely threaten me properly.
“You’re going in too,” she says.
“That was always the plan.”
“No, the plan was for you to be sensible.”
“I don’t think that was ever the plan.”
She looks at me then, her face flushed from the sun and laughter, hair coming loose around her cheeks, eyes brighter than I’ve seen them in too long.
Something in me catches. I don’t fall right away. I hold her there for one more second because I want to remember her like this. Not braced. Not calculating. Not shouldering the whole brutal architecture of the world.
Just mine.
Just laughing in my arms on a late-summer afternoon.
Then I say, “Hold your breath, baby.”
Her eyes widen. “Luke—”
I let myself go backward. The lake closes over both of us. Cold. Clean. Sudden. We surface in a riot of water and laughter, Andi coughing and shoving wet hair from her face while keeping one hand hooked in my shirt like she plans to drag me under with her if necessary.
“You are a menace,” she says, breathless.
“I’m refreshed.”
“You look very pleased with yourself.”
“I brought you to a lake. Bought you peaches. Fed you ice cream. Improved your core temperature.”
“You tackled me into the water.”
“I carried you.”
“Into water.”
“Details matter.”
“They do, and that detail is the crime.”
She splashes me. I blink water out of my eyes.
“Oh,” I say. “That was a choice.”
She starts backing away, but water slows everything down, and she’s laughing again, already doomed.
I catch her around the waist, careful of her knee because I’m not actually deranged, no matter what she says.
She grabs my shoulders, and we go under again, less dramatic this time, more tangled, surfacing close enough that her forehead bumps mine.
For a few seconds, the world is water and sunlight and her hands on me. Then the laughter fades into something softer. She’s still smiling, but her eyes are different.
“What?” I ask.
She looks past me at the mountains, at the lake, at the oak tree shading the blanket on shore. “I forgot people could feel like this.”
The words are quiet. I don’t answer too fast. “How?”
She looks back at me. “Light,” she says. “I forgot people could feel light.”
I move closer, letting the water hold some of the weight neither of us can put down completely. “You do feel light.”
“Not usually.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know how to stop,” she says. “Even right now, there’s a part of my mind counting the hours back to Atlanta.
Who needs what. What could shift while we’re gone.
What Bill might find. Whether Mrs. Alvarez remembered to call the security company back.
Whether Kelly is okay. Whether Deja will stay.
Whether you’re really all right or just saying it because you don’t want me to worry. ”
“I’m really all right.”
“You’re better than you were this morning.”
“Yes.”
“But not all right.”
I let out a breath. “No. Not all the way.”
She nods, as if honesty were all she was asking for. I take her hand under the water.
“I don’t know how to stop either,” I admit. “Mack knew it. That’s why he kicked me out. I thought if I worked hard enough, I could force everything into place. Camp. The fight. The investigation. You. Me. All of it.”
“You can’t.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
I look toward the shore, toward the oak tree I climbed as a kid because I thought height meant courage. “I’m learning.”
Her thumb moves over my knuckles.
We stand there with lake water around us and sun on our faces, and I understand what Mack meant in a way I couldn’t have understood in the gym. You can’t remember who you are by hitting something harder. Sometimes you have to go somewhere that knew you before you learned to make fists.
“I used to jump off what was left of that dock,” I say, nodding toward the old posts.
Andi looks. “That dock?”
“It had more boards then.”
“I would hope so.”
“My dad told me not to.”
“Naturally, you listened.”
“Eventually.”
“How many jumps did eventually take?”
“Three.”
She laughs softly. “Of course it did.”
“He wasn’t even mad the third time. He just told me if I was going to be stupid, I needed to tuck my elbows so I didn’t break something important.”
“That sounds like practical parenting.”
“It was. Terrifying, but practical.”
“Were you happy here?”
I think about it. The answer matters. “Yeah,” I say. “I think I was. Not all the time. But here? Yes. Here I could be nobody for a while.”
“You were never nobody.”
“To the fish, I was.”
She smiles. “To the fish, you were probably loud.”
“Accurate.”
We stay in until the cold starts to win. Then we climb out, dripping and laughing again when my shirt clings to me and Andi wrings water from the hem of hers with an expression of grave betrayal.
I grab towels from the truck because I did plan that much. She wraps one around herself and sits under the oak on the blanket. I sit beside her, close enough that our shoulders touch, and open the bag of peaches.
They’re warm from the sun. I hand her one. She takes a bite and closes her eyes.
“Mr. Hanley was right.”
“About?”
“This could make me confess to things I didn’t do.”
“I told you he was credible.”
Juice runs down her wrist. She catches it with her tongue before it reaches her sleeve, and I look away because I’m a man with limits and wet clothes and no interest in proving how little discipline I have outside a ring.
She notices. “You okay there, champ?”
“No.”
Her smile turns wicked around the peach.
I point at her. “Don’t weaponize fruit.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You are absolutely doing something.”
“I’m eating a peach.”
“Provocatively.”
“I don’t think fruit can be provocative.”
“You’re wrong.”
She laughs again, and I lean back on my hands, letting the sound settle into me. This is what I wanted. This is what I didn’t know I needed. Not silence. Not rest. Her. Like this.
The afternoon stretches. We eat peaches and cookies Mrs. Alvarez packed because she is apparently wiser than both of us.
The lake moves in small bright pieces beyond the shade.
Andi leans back against the oak trunk, damp hair curling over one shoulder, a towel around her, bare feet crossed at the ankles.
I look at her and think of every version of her I’ve seen. Onstage. In boardrooms. In hospital rooms. In the kitchen at two in the morning, a notebook full of war plans. In the center, kneeling beside kids who needed someone to look them in the eye and mean what they said.
This version feels rarer than all the others.
“What’s going on up there?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“No,” she says. “You have the look now.”
“What look?”