Chapter 2
BISHOP
I'd been picking up the same to-go order from The Soda Jerk every Tuesday and Thursday for three years. Cheeseburger with pepper jack and fries.
The owner, West, had it bagged and waiting by the time I walked in most nights. I'd drop cash on the counter, grab the bag, and be back at the cabin in twelve minutes.
Tonight, I walked in, and Breanna Ingalls was sitting in the third booth from the door. She had her laptop open and her reading glasses on. The to-go order stopped mattering.
The glasses were small and round, and she wore them low on her nose, the way people did when they'd forgotten they were wearing them.
Her hair was still up in the same bun from this afternoon, but pieces had come loose around her face, and the blue light from the laptop screen caught the angle of her jaw and the line of her throat.
I stood in the doorway like an idiot for about three seconds longer than a man should stand anywhere.
She hadn't seen me yet. She was deep in whatever was on that screen—leaning in, one hand on the trackpad, the other holding a coffee mug she wasn't drinking from. Her lips were moving slightly, the way they did when someone was reading something dense and processing it in real time.
A food basket sat pushed to the side with half a burger and a few cold fries on it. My guess was she'd eaten without tasting any of it.
"Do me a favor," I said. "Plate it for me."
West's hand stopped on the bag. He looked at me. Then he looked past me toward the third booth. When he looked back at me, his expression didn't change as he pulled the burger and fries out of the bag, set them in a wax paper-lined red basket, and slid it across the blue countertop without a word.
I took it and walked to her booth. I slid in across from her.
She looked up—over the top of the glasses, not through them—and I caught the full sequence.
Surprise, recognition, a quick hardening behind her eyes.
She closed the laptop halfway. Not all the way.
Halfway, like she was reserving the right to return to it if this conversation didn't earn her attention.
"Bishop," she said.
"Breanna."
"Are you following me?"
"I pick up dinner here twice a week. I thought I'd dine in tonight."
"And you decided to sit down."
"I decided to sit down."
She glanced toward the counter. West was wiping it down with an indifference that made it clear he was absolutely listening to every word. He didn't look up.
"I didn't realize this was here," she said, meaning the diner. "I almost drove past it. The outside looks like—"
"Like it should be condemned. I know. Everyone says that. West considers it a feature."
The corner of her mouth moved. The beginnings of a smile she wasn't ready to commit to.
She opened the laptop back up, angling the screen slightly away from me. Not hiding it. Just establishing that the work was still the priority and I was an interruption she hadn't decided to allow yet.
"I'm reviewing habitat data," she said. "For tomorrow."
"Find anything useful?"
"I found six candidate sites along riparian corridors in Haywood and Jackson Counties before I started the drive out.
Three of them turned out to be inaccessible or wrong once I talked to local outfitters.
The fourth had the right canopy profile, but the water was too fast. The fifth—" She stopped. "You don't need the full report."
"I'm not in a hurry."
She looked at me over the top of her glasses. Assessing. Deciding whether I meant it or was faking interest the way men faked interest when they wanted something from a woman. Usually something sexual.
I let her look. I had nothing to hide and nowhere to be.
"The fifth was on a private stretch I couldn't get access to," she said. "The landowner told me to call the county extension office, which is a polite way of saying ‘go away.’ The sixth is Hadley Bend. Your stretch."
"It's the river's stretch. I just know where it is."
She studied me again. The glasses made it more direct—like being examined through a lens designed to catch what the naked eye might miss.
"How long have you been running Wildwood River Co.?" she asked.
"Twelve years. Built it when I was twenty-three."
"From scratch?"
"Had a raft, a truck, and a permit. That was it. Slept in the truck for the first season because I couldn't afford the cabin and the insurance at the same time. Insurance won."
"And now you've got—what, a full operation? Guides, equipment, commercial trips?"
"Six guys, four raft rigs, a fleet of kayaks and canoes, and a fishing guide service.
We run everything from Class II family floats to Class IV whitewater.
Busiest months are June through August, but we get shoulder season traffic from fishermen in spring and fall.
" I picked up my burger and prepared to take a bite.
"The river's the business. Everything else is logistics. "
She was quiet for a moment as I bit off a chunk of burger and chewed. I could see her filing the information the way she'd filed my answers about Hadley Bend—methodically, without waste.
"You were twenty-three," she said.
"Same age as you."
"I'm not building a business. I'm trying to finish a degree that takes longer than most people's patience."
"How long?"
"If I go straight through to the PhD—which is the only way the fieldwork means anything—five or six years from where I am now. I'm one year in." She pushed her glasses up with one finger. "Most people hear that, and their eyes glaze over."
"Most people haven't spent twelve years on a river waiting for something to make sense."
She went still. Not frozen—still. The way the surface of a pool goes flat in the moment before a shift in the current reaches it.
"Why fireflies?" I asked.
The question came across differently than I expected it to. Her shoulders dropped a quarter of an inch—barely visible, but I'd been watching her closely enough to catch it. Like I'd asked the one question nobody asked, and she'd stopped bracing for the ones they usually did.
"Because they're the thing most people see and never look at," she said.
"Everyone's seen a firefly. Everyone thinks they know what they're watching.
But nobody asks how it works—why that specific flash pattern, why that specific interval, how the females choose which signal to answer and which to ignore.
There's an entire language happening in the dark, and people just call it pretty and move on.
" She caught herself. The glasses had slid down her nose again, and she pushed them back up.
"Sorry. That's—I do that. The lecture thing. "
"It wasn't a lecture. It was an answer."
She looked at me. Held it. Something shifted behind her eyes—not softening, not surrender. Recognition. The slow, disorienting shock of being met where she actually stood instead of where someone assumed she was.
West came by with my tea and a coffee pot. He refilled Breanna's mug without being asked. He glanced at my basket and walked away without a word.
"Cheeseburger and fries," she said, looking at my plate. "Is that what you get every time?"
"Yes. And always with pepper jack."
"You don't ever shake things up a little? Maybe try something else?"
"I know what I like."
I held her eyes when I said it. She heard it. I watched the heat move up her neck—slow, starting below the collar of her shirt and climbing to the line of her jaw. She picked up her coffee mug and drank from it, and I let the moment sit without pushing it.
We ate. She finished her cold burger and I worked through mine.
The fries were good, the way West's fries were always good—crisp, salty, piled high.
She asked about the river, and I told her about the sections I knew best, the way the water changed character every half mile, the bend where the current doubled back on itself and created a pocket of dead water that held trout in the summer.
She asked about the chute below Hadley Bend, and I described the line—how to read the water, where the rocks sat, the way the hydraulic at the bottom looked worse than it was if you knew how to angle into it.
She listened the way I listened—with her whole body.
Leaning forward, glasses forgotten on her nose, coffee going cold again.
When I talked about the river, she tracked every detail like she was mapping it in her head.
And when she talked about her work—the signaling behavior she was studying, the way different species used different flash patterns to find each other in the dark, the evolutionary pressures that shaped those patterns over millions of years—I understood something about her that I didn't think she understood about herself yet.
She wasn't just smart. She was passionate in a way that made other people uncomfortable because it was too specific, too focused, too much.
And somewhere along the way, she'd learned to apologize for it.
To cut herself off. To say "sorry, I'm lecturing again" and pull back before anyone had to pretend they were still interested.
I wasn't pretending. I wasn't going to pretend. And I wasn't going to let her apologize for knowing things.
The diner had emptied out around us. West was stacking chairs on the far side of the room, working his way toward us with the patience of a man who'd close when he closed and not a minute sooner.
"I should go," Breanna said, looking at her fitness watch. "I need to prep my sampling kit and charge my headlamp batteries."
"Where are you staying?"
"The inn. Across the street."
Bobbi's place. That was good. Bobbi would take care of her, ask the right questions, not push.
"Seven tomorrow," I said. "I'll have the raft ready."
She closed her laptop and pulled her glasses off, and the shift was immediate—without them, her face was different. Not less sharp, just less guarded. Like the glasses were part of the armor, and without them, she was standing a half step closer to the world than she meant to be.
"Bishop."
"Yeah."
"Why are you doing this? The trip tomorrow. You own the company. You could send any of your guys."
I looked at her across the booth. The checkered floor and the blue countertop and the hot pink barstools and West stacking chairs in the background—all of it peripheral. She was the fixed point.
"Because you asked the right questions," I said. "And I want to see what you find."
It was true, but it wasn't the whole truth. The whole truth was that she'd walked into my shop and asked about my river and known things about it that I'd never thought to wonder. Something in me had locked into place like a compass finding north.
But she wasn't ready to hear that yet. So I gave her the part she could handle.
She nodded and slid out of the booth. She tucked the laptop under her arm and the glasses into her shirt pocket, and I watched her walk to the door. West watched me watch her, and neither of us said a word about it.
The screen door slapped shut behind her. I sat in the booth for another minute, looking at the coffee mug she'd left on the table. There was a faint lipstick mark on the rim—barely there, almost nothing.
I finished my sweet tea and left cash on the counter. West picked it up without looking at the amount.
"Same order Thursday?" he asked.
"Yeah."
He nodded. That was it. That was all that needed saying.
I drove back to the cabin with the windows down and the night air coming in warm and heavy with the smell of the river, and I thought about a woman in reading glasses who talked about fireflies like they were the most important thing in the world and apologized for it every time.
Tomorrow, I was taking her to Hadley Bend. Tomorrow, she'd see what I already knew was there. And she'd stop apologizing. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not the day after. But eventually.
I had time. I wasn't going anywhere.