Chapter 3
brEANNA
The kit was organized the way I organized everything—labeled, compartmentalized, each piece in its designated pocket. I'd prepped it all at the inn that morning, sitting cross-legged on the bed while the coffee Bobbi had left outside my door went cold because I forgot about it.
I was good at forgetting about things when the work was in front of me. Coffee. Meals. Sleep. The fact that a man had looked at me across a diner booth last night and said "I know what I like" while holding my eyes long enough to make my neck flush…
I was forgetting about that. Actively. With effort.
Bishop was at the dock with a two-person raft pulled up on the bank—not the commercial rigs I'd seen stacked on the racks yesterday, but something smaller, more maneuverable. He was checking the oar locks, moving through the inspection with the same calm I'd seen in everything he did.
He was wearing a faded T-shirt that fit him in ways I was not going to catalog, along with shorts and river sandals. He looked like he'd been doing this his whole life.
"You're early," he said without looking up.
"Fifteen minutes isn't early. Fifteen minutes is on time."
He glanced at me then. Down to the sampling kit, the nets, the headlamp around my neck. Up to my face. Something like approval—the look of a person recognizing someone who showed up prepared.
I loaded the kit and kept the notebook and thermometer out. He held the raft steady while I stepped in, and his hand came to my elbow—brief, firm, gone before I could decide whether it bothered me.
It didn't bother me. That was the problem.
He pushed off, and the river took us.
The first twenty minutes were spent on the chute—the Class II section below Hadley Bend that kept casual paddlers off this stretch, he said.
He read it without hesitation, finding the line through the rocks the way a person followed a path they'd walked a thousand times in the dark.
The water was fast and loud, whitewater folding over ledges and kicking spray across the bow, and he navigated it with an ease that made it look like the river was cooperating with him rather than the other way around.
I held my notebook and didn't write anything in it. I was too busy watching him work.
Then the chute opened up and the river changed.
The current slowed. The banks widened. The water went from white and churning to dark and smooth, catching the last of the light in copper and amber.
The canopy opened on the south bank where he'd said the hemlocks had come down, and the sky above it was enormous, going from blue to gold to the deep rose-orange that meant sunset was twenty minutes out.
Hadley Bend. He'd described it from memory, and he'd been exactly right.
I pulled the thermometer out and dipped it over the side. Seventy-two degrees. Exactly what he'd said.
"This is it," I said, and my voice came out quieter than I intended.
Bishop shipped the oars and let the raft drift. He didn't say anything. He just let me look.
I opened my notebook. Started recording—GPS coordinates, water temperature, time, sky conditions. The margins were perfect. Better than perfect. If the Photinus population here was anything close to what the habitat predicted, this site would anchor my entire field study.
"The bank on the south side," I said, pointing with my pen. "Where the hemlocks came down—what's growing there now?"
"Bee balm. Joe-pye weed. Black-eyed Susans. Some goldenrod coming in, but it's early for it. The grasses are mostly river oats."
He seemed to list them from memory, without effort. Not a botanist. Just a man who'd spent twelve years paying attention to a piece of the world and remembering what he saw.
"River oats are good," I said. "The stems give the adults vertical structure for perching and signaling. And the wildflower mix means pollinator activity, which means prey insects for the larvae." I caught myself. "Sorry—"
"Don't."
I looked at him.
"Don't apologize for knowing things," he said.
It landed like a hand on the center of my chest. Steady. The kind of pressure that didn't push you backward but held you exactly where you were and wouldn't let you retreat.
I opened my notebook again. Wrote nothing, because my hand wasn't steady enough to write.
The light changed. The gold deepened, went amber, and the shadows on the water merged until the river's surface was more dark than light. The sky turned from rose to violet, and the first stars appeared.
"Watch the margins," I said. "The shallow water along the south bank. That's where they'll start."
The first flash came from low in the grasses. A single pulse—yellow-green, two-thirds of a second, then dark.
A second flash. A third. A dozen.
They rose from the bank like something the earth was breathing out.
Not all at once—in waves, starting low in the grasses and lifting into the air in slow, drifting arcs, each flash a precisely timed signal in a language that had been running for a hundred million years.
Photinus carolinus—I was almost sure of it from the synchrony, the way clusters of males flashed in near-unison and then went dark together, a coordinated pulse that swept along the bank like a wave.
They moved out over the water. The surface caught their reflections, doubling every flash, so the river became a mirror of light—above and below, real and reflected, until I couldn't tell where the air ended and the water began.
I had the nets in the dry bag. The sample jars were right there.
I didn't reach for any of it.
I sat in the raft and watched the fireflies fill Hadley Bend. For the first time in my career, the scientist in me went quiet, and the rest of me opened up. Not because the data didn't matter. Because something was happening that was bigger than data.
Bishop was sitting three feet away, and he was watching me instead of the fireflies.
I could feel it without turning my head.
Not the way men usually watched me—the assessment, the inventory, the quick decision about what I was for.
He was watching me the way he watched the river.
Like I was something worth learning by heart.
"You're not looking at them," I said.
"I've seen them before."
"You've never seen them like this. The synchronous flashing—that's rare. That's—"
My voice caught. Not because of the science. Because of the way he was looking at me, and the fact that I wanted him to keep looking, and the fact that wanting that felt like the most dangerous thing I'd ever done.
He guided the raft toward the south bank, settling the hull into the shallows where the current couldn't reach. He caught a low-hanging branch of river birch and held it, keeping us steady. Anchored. Fireflies drifting above us and reflected below us, the current moving past in the dark beyond us.
We weren't going anywhere. He'd made sure of it.
"I don't do this," I said. "I don't—this isn't—"
"I know."
"Stop saying you know."
"I'll stop when it stops being true."
"You don't know me. You met me yesterday."
"I know you drove three hours because the work mattered enough to drive three hours.
I know you sat in a diner booth and told me about bioluminescent signaling patterns for forty-five minutes and apologized twice for being interesting.
" His voice was steady, the way the river was steady—not still, just constant.
"I know you showed up tonight with a sampling kit you haven't opened because something happened on this water that you didn't plan for and you're trying to figure out whether to be scared of it. "
"I am scared of it," I said.
"I know."
"If I let this happen—if I let you—" I stopped. Started again. "My entire life, people have looked at me and decided what I am before I open my mouth. Pretty. Friendly. Not serious. I have spent years proving that I am serious, that the work matters, that I'm not just—that I'm not—"
"A girl playing scientist."
I flinched. Not because he'd said it wrong. Because he'd said it exactly right.
"If I let this happen," I said, "every person who ever looked at me and saw something decorative gets to be right. ‘She went out to do fieldwork and came back with a boyfriend.’ That's the story. That's what they'll say."
"Is that what I am? A boyfriend?"
The word sounded small in his mouth. Insufficient. Like trying to describe the river by calling it water.
"I don't know," I said. "I've never—"
The words stopped. The fireflies pulsed, and his face was lit in gold and shadow, and I was about to say something I’d never said to anyone.
"I've never been with anyone," I said.
He didn't flinch. His expression didn't rearrange into surprise or the careful performance of tenderness that I'd imagined from a hundred hypothetical men who'd hear that and decide it meant something about me I didn't want it to mean.
He just looked at me. The same way he'd looked at me at the counter. At the diner. On the water. Like I was the fixed point and everything else was peripheral.
"Okay," he said.
Not a question. Not a reassurance. Just the acknowledgment of a fact that didn't change anything he already knew.
The branch held. The raft held. The shallows held us in the still water at the edge of Hadley Bend, and the fireflies kept rising. I sat three feet from a man who’d heard everything I was afraid to say and hadn't looked away.
Nobody had ever not looked away.
"Bishop."
"Yeah."
"I don't want to go back to the dock."
His hand released the branch—not to let us drift, but to reach across the raft and take mine. His fingers closed around my clasped hands, warm and steady, and he didn't pull. He just held on.
"Then we stay," he said.