Chapter 2
WELLS
I was on the dock checking the raft’s floor lacing when I heard the gravel crunch under her tires. Fifteen minutes early. I’d have put money on her being the early type, and I didn’t like how much attention I’d paid to the question.
I’d thought about her last night. Not in the way I usually thought about women—passing, surface-level, easy to set aside. I’d thought about her the way I thought about a rapid I hadn’t scouted yet. What’s the line? Where’s the drop? What’s she going to do that I’m not expecting?
She walked down from the lot carrying nothing but a water bottle—swimsuit under a tank top, river shorts, shoes that laced up tight.
Proper water shoes, not the sandals tourists wore and lost in the first set of rapids.
Her hair was pulled back in a braid that looked like it had been engineered to survive violence.
She’d followed every instruction I’d given her yesterday to the letter. That shouldn’t have mattered as much as it did.
“Morning,” she said.
“You’re early.”
“Fifteen minutes is on time.”
I nodded toward the flat stretch below the dock. “Skills check first. I need to see you handle the paddle, read the water, and respond to commands before I take you anywhere near the gorge.”
“I know. You mentioned that yesterday.”
“I’m mentioning it again.”
I handed her a paddle and a PFD. She cinched the life jacket without being told how—each strap snug, buckle checked by feel. I watched her hands. Fast, competent, familiar with the gear.
She caught me watching. “You going to grade me on how I put on a life jacket?”
“Already did. You passed.”
We got in the raft, and I ran her through the strokes. Every one was textbook—rotation from the torso, recovery clean. I shoved her shoulder to test her high brace—not gently—and she caught it without flinching. Came back upright and looked at me like she was waiting for me to try harder.
My heart started pounding for reasons that had nothing to do with activity. I was going to pretend that hadn’t happened.
“Fine,” I said. “You can paddle.”
“I told you that yesterday.”
“Yesterday was talking. Today is the water.” I pushed us off and worked the oars toward the gorge entrance.
“On the Tempest Run, I call every move. You hear me say right, you give me everything you’ve got on the right.
I say get down, you drop into the raft and hold on. No improvising. No freelancing.”
“And if I see something you don’t?”
Nobody had ever asked me that. Every customer I’d ever guided through this gorge had been content to be cargo. Even the good ones.
Lincoln was not going to be cargo.
“You call it,” I said. “Short and specific. ‘Rock left’ or ‘hole right.’ Don’t describe it. Just call it.”
“Got it.”
“And Lincoln, if I tell you to get down, don’t question it. Don’t look for it first. Just get down.”
She held my eyes across the raft. Morning sun behind her, loose hairs catching the light. Not defiance, not bravado. Readiness. The look of a person who’d been waiting for something to match the size of what was inside her.
“I trust you,” she said.
The words landed in me like a hook setting in deep water—clean, sharp, all the way through.
The gorge announced itself before we saw it.
The banks rose into sheer walls of granite and rhododendron, and the sound built ahead of us—the rumble of moving water over rock, growing louder with every stroke.
I felt her shift in the raft. She was leaning forward, paddle up, her whole body oriented toward the sound.
She wanted this the way I wanted it—the raw, physical demand of water moving fast through stone.
Jawbone came first. Three ledge drops in quick succession, spray kicking ten feet into the air. I read the line and called it.
“Left side, hard. Now right—right—dig.”
She dug. We cleared the first ledge clean, punched through the second with the bow riding high, and on the third drop, the water came over the side and soaked us both. I heard her laugh.
Not a scream. Not a whoop. A laugh—low, real, startled out of her by the sheer force of the river meeting her body. The sound lodged itself somewhere behind my sternum.
The Churn was next—a chaotic stretch where the current broke into competing channels over submerged boulders. The water didn’t follow rules here. The only way through was to read it faster than it could change.
“Forward. Forward. Draw left. Hard right—now, now, now.”
She was with me on every call. No lag, no hesitation. The raft threaded through like we’d been running together for years.
I was watching her too much. On any other trip, my eyes would be on the water—reading hydraulics, tracking rocks, planning two moves ahead.
But Lincoln kept pulling my focus. The way she braced into the waves instead of flinching.
The way her arms worked with a strength that shouldn’t have surprised me but did.
She called it before I saw it.
“Rock right—submerged.”
I snapped my head right. A dark shape just below the surface, exactly where my line would have taken us. I adjusted—one hard correction—and we slid past with inches to spare.
She looked back at me. Water streaming down her face, eyes lit, breathing hard. She didn’t say I told you so. She just looked at me with an expression that said I see the river the way you see the river, and something in me that had been locked in place for a long time shifted loose.
Dead Man’s Pocket was the last section—a dogleg bend where the full volume of the river compressed into a narrow chute and dropped six feet into a hydraulic that could pin a raft against the undercut wall. This was the one with a body count.
“Right side, as hard as you’ve ever paddled, for about four seconds. After that, get down and hold on.”
She nodded. No questions. She understood that the next thirty seconds didn’t leave room for anything except trust.
We came around the bend. The current grabbed the raft and accelerated us toward the chute. “Right side. Hard. Now.”
She paddled. I pulled on the oars. The raft angled into the chute—perfect, exactly the line I wanted—and then the bottom dropped out. The bow tipped forward, spray exploding around us.
“Get down.”
She dropped flat. The hydraulic hit like a fist—the raft bucked, spun forty-five degrees, the gorge wall close enough to touch. Then we cleared it. The current released us into the pool below, and the world went quiet.
Lincoln sat up. Braid half undone, tank top plastered to her body, breathing like she’d sprinted a mile. She looked at the gorge behind us, the calm water ahead, then at me.
Her face was open in a way it hadn’t been before—the confidence and the edge stripped away by five miles of water that had demanded everything she had. The rapids hadn’t scared her and they hadn’t humbled her. They’d met her. And she’d met them back.
“Again,” she said.
I laughed. Surprised. Real. “We don’t run it twice in one morning.”
“Tomorrow, then.”
She wasn’t looking at the river when she said it. She was looking at me.
I picked up the oars and rowed us toward the take-out. My hands were steady because they’d always been steady on the water. The rest of me was not steady.
I’d guided hundreds of trips through that gorge. I’d never lost my focus. Not once, not for anyone. Focus was the line between a good day on the river and a phone call nobody wanted to make.
Today, I’d watched her instead of the water. And she’d seen the rock I missed.
That was the part I couldn’t let go of. Not that I’d been distracted—though that was bad enough. But that she’d been there to catch it. That for the first time in my life, someone else had been reading the river with me instead of just riding it.
I didn’t know what to do with that. But I knew I wanted to find out.