Cade
She’d been ready to chew me out.
I’d seen it the second I came around the corner—the set of her jaw, the way she was standing at the edge of the dock like she was braced for something.
Four minutes. She’d clocked every one of them and she’d had something prepared. Then I looked at her and whatever it was didn’t make it out.
I knew the feeling.
I’d been doing this job long enough that customers blurred together after a while. Not in a bad way. Just in the way of a man who’d seen enough mornings on this river that he’d stopped looking for anything new. Most days, that was fine by me.
Today, I hadn’t expected her.
She was standing there in a cover-up and sunglasses with her bag over her shoulder and her chin up, and something in me went still the way it did right before the river did something the map didn’t account for.
I knew it immediately. Didn’t question it.
I wasn’t built for questioning things I already knew.
She’d called me out on the four minutes, and I’d let her. And now she was sitting in the bow of the canoe with her shoulders slowly unknotting and her eyes on the water like she was seeing it for the first time.
I kept my paddle moving and watched her without making it obvious.
She was trying to relax. I could see the effort in it, which meant she hadn’t done it in a while.
There was a difference between a person resting and a person attempting rest like it was a task on a list. She was the second kind.
She held herself like someone who was used to being needed, used to being the one who knew what came next.
Out here, there was no “next.” Just the current and the tree line and the way the light moved on the water.
It would either settle her or drive her crazy. I was betting on settle.
“You do this every day?” she asked. She was still watching the river.
“Most days.”
“Must be nice.” She said it quietly, almost to herself.
“It is.”
She glanced back at me then, like she’d expected a longer answer and wasn’t sure what to do with not getting one. I kept paddling.
The morning was easy. No wind, water running clear and low—the kind of conditions that made the river feel like it was on your side.
A heron lifted off the far bank, and she tracked it until it disappeared over the tree line.
I noticed she didn’t point it out or say a word.
She just watched. That told me something.
We came around a long bend, and the current slowed where the channel widened. I let the paddle rest across the gunwales for a stretch. The canoe drifted lazily.
“What made you pick the float trip?” I asked. “Instead of the rapids.”
She was quiet for a second. I watched her shoulders do something—not tense exactly, more like she was deciding something.
“I needed slow,” she said.
“Okay.”
“That’s it?” She looked back at me again. “You’re not going to ask why?”
“Figured you’d say if you wanted to.”
Something shifted in her face. She turned back to the water, and I gave her the quiet to do whatever she needed to do with that.
“I just finished nursing school,” she said after a while. “ETSU. Four years. Boards. The whole thing.” She paused. “I’ve been running so long, I forgot what it felt like to stop.”
“Hard program.”
“Yeah.” She exhaled. “The kind of hard where you don’t really notice how bad it is until it’s over and you’re standing there thinking, ‘Okay, now what?’”
“And you don’t have an answer.”
“I have too many answers.” She picked at a thread on her cover-up. “My parents have answers. My inbox has answers. Everybody’s got an opinion about what comes next.” She let the silence sit, then looked up at me. “Sorry. You didn’t ask for all that.”
“I asked why you picked the float trip.”
She laughed, short and quiet. It was the first unguarded thing she’d done all morning.
“Fair enough.”
“So what do you want?” I asked. “Not your parents. Not your inbox. You.”
She went still for long enough that I thought she might not answer. The river curved, and I kept us in the current. Easy strokes, nothing she’d notice.
“I don’t know,” she finally said. “I think that’s the problem.”
“That’s not a problem.”
She looked back at me. “How is that not a problem?”
“Means you haven’t decided yet. Different thing.”
She held my gaze for a second, like she was checking whether I meant it. I did. She turned back around, and I watched the tension in her shoulders drop about half an inch. Not gone, but less.
We drifted through a long straight stretch where the water ran shallow over pale gravel and the tree canopy opened up overhead.
The sun was getting some heat behind it now.
She pushed her sunglasses up into her hair and tilted her face toward the light with her eyes closed, just for a second.
Something about the way she did it—surrendering to the warmth, even briefly—caught me low in the chest.
“How long have you been running this?” she asked, eyes still closed, face still tilted up.
“Wildwood River Co.? Six years. Give or take.”
She opened her eyes and looked back at me. “You own it?”
“Co-own. Six of us.”
“Six people running one business.” She turned that over. “That’s either a great idea or a terrible one.”
“Little of both, depending on the week.”
She smiled. It was small and real, and the morning shifted around it.
“How do you keep everyone pointed in the same direction?”
“You don’t, mostly. You just make sure everyone knows their lane and you stay out of each other’s way.” I shifted the paddle to the other side, kept us straight. “We’ve got a good system.”
“You sound like you built it.”
“We all did.”
“No.” She was watching me. “I mean you sound like the one who actually built it. Like it runs the way it runs because of you.”
I didn’t answer that. She wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t something I talked about. Wells was louder about the business. Bishop held the vision. I just made sure the pieces fit together and stayed that way. Nobody needed to know that part.
She seemed to clock my silence. “Sorry. I read people. Occupational hazard.”
“Nurse thing?”
“You spend enough time in clinical rotations, you learn fast who’s actually in charge of a room.” She paused. “It’s not always who’s talking the most.”
She said it casually, like she was just making an observation. But she was watching me when she said it, and I had the distinct sense she’d just handed me something and was waiting to see what I did with it.
“No,” I agreed. “It’s not.”
The canoe drifted through a patch of shade where the hemlocks came close to the bank.
She trailed her fingers through the water off the side, then pulled them back and wiped them on her cover-up.
The gesture was unconscious. Comfortable.
She seemed like a completely different person from the woman I’d met at the dock.
We rounded a shallow turn, and I brought us in close where the water ran slow along a gravel bar.
A snapping turtle was making its way across the bottom in maybe eight inches of water, working against the current with the stubborn patience of something that had been doing this since before the river had a name.
I back-paddled once and held us still.
She noticed. “Why’d we stop?”
I nodded at the water off the starboard side.
She leaned out a little and looked down, staying quiet. The turtle made his slow, determined way across the gravel, not hurrying, not changing course, not particularly concerned with the canoe or the two people watching from above.
“He’s not even trying to go fast,” she said.
“Doesn’t have to.”
She watched him the whole way across. I watched her watch him. When the turtle finally reached the far edge and disappeared into the deeper water, she sat back and let out a breath.
“I can’t remember the last time I sat still long enough to watch a turtle cross a riverbed,” she said.
“How long do you think it took him?”
“I don’t know.” She sounded a little surprised by that. “I wasn’t counting.”
I picked the paddle back up and got us moving again. She faced forward, and the river bent south, and the tree line opened up. She still wasn’t counting. I could tell by the way she was sitting—looser, quieter, her hands resting open in her lap instead of wrapped around the strap of her bag.
That was enough for now.