4. Chapter Four
Chapter Four
Aileen
I keep waiting for the catch. There must be one.
Every man I've ever let close has come with terms and conditions. He wanted me to be less busy, or less driven, or less intelligent. Wanted me to make myself smaller so I'd fit into a life he’d already mapped out. So, I stopped letting anyone get too close. It was easier to just keep moving.
You can't disappoint someone who has no expectations.
But Forrest doesn’t seem like that at all. He finds my career interesting, and we work really well together.
By the end of the first week, he knows my whole workflow.
He runs the boat to my sites and cuts the motor before I even ask.
He nets my sample fish clean and quick and holds them steady while I measure, his big hands so gentle around them that I catch myself watching instead of writing down numbers.
He learns my shorthand, reads tag numbers back without mixing a digit, and sorts fish by species and length class exactly the way I need them.
He already knows every fish in this lake. He is learning how I work.
He calls me Doc. I've started calling him Guide, just to have something to call him back.
And in between the fish, we talk. About how much we love being on the water. About how great it is to be able to work outside for a living. About how neither of us could ever sit at a desk 9 hours a day.
This morning, the forecast promised calm water, but by the time we reach a narrow spawning cove on the west side, the wind is so fierce that whitecaps are pushing through the mouth, and the boat keeps swinging off my sampling line.
"We can come back tomorrow," Forrest suggests.
I shake my head. "The temperature drops tonight. I need this site under the same conditions as the first pass."
He studies the water, then nods once. No argument. No lecture. He eases us behind a stand of flooded willow and holds the boat steady while I bring the first fish aboard.
We are halfway through the sample when the recirculating pump on my portable holding tank coughs and goes silent. The largemouth inside begin crowding toward the surface.
"Fresh lake water, two buckets at a time," I say. "Keep the towel over the tank and do not release anything yet. I need the tag sequence intact."
Forrest moves before I finish speaking. He does not grab the pump away from me or tell me what he thinks is wrong. He fills buckets, shades the tank, and reads tag numbers while I pull the housing apart and clear a wad of stringy grass from the impeller.
The pump kicks back on. I check every fish, finish the measurements, and release them one by one. The last one disappears beneath the boat with a hard flick of its tail, healthy and thoroughly offended.
"You always carry a backup aerator?" Forrest asks.
"Two. I would carry four if the state budget would allow it."
His eyes meet mine across the tank. The look he gives me is quiet and warm and far too pleased.
"Why fish?" he asks after we stow the equipment. "You could survey anything. Birds. Elk. Even bats."
"Partly because I love being on the water,” I say. “But also, because it’s a mystery to be solved. You can't tell by just looking at a lake whether it's healthy or not. You have to get under the surface and pull the truth up, one fish at a time."
Forrest is quiet for a moment. "I get that.”
"What about you?" I ask. "Have you lived in Mercury Ridge your whole life?"
He looks toward the open lake. "I left for college, but I only went two hours away, so I still came home most weekends. Mercury Ridge is home. I can’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else.”
The wind rocks the boat gently behind the willows. I look down at my clipboard because looking at him feels suddenly dangerous.
Forrest makes me feel things I haven’t felt in a really long time.
And it’s not just Forrest. He’s right about Mercury Ridge. It’s the perfect small town—exactly the sort of place I imagine myself settling down whenever I allow my daydreams to drift in that direction.
And Forrest and I work so well together. We’ve fallen into a rhythm so easily it scares me.
Early mornings on the water. Then I process samples while he guides his paying clients, and I pretend I don't watch his boat come back in every evening.
Thursday pizza, where the crew has stopped even bothering to hide the fact that they're all watching us like a soap opera.
Ace has started a betting pool. Rayna keeps sending me home with Ooey Gooey Cinnamon Roll Sticks "for later," which I have decided is her love language.
I have been in Mercury Ridge for five weeks, working with Forrest for three, and I have started to recognize people.
The old man who fishes off the marina dock every evening waves at me now.
Mikki knows I take my coffee black. When I walk into the bait shop, Dani doesn't even look up, just says the good ice is in the back, Aileen.
Everybody knows everybody here. It should feel like a trap. Forty lakes, six states, and I have spent eight years making very sure that nobody anywhere knew my name well enough to miss me when I left.
Instead, it feels like a hand held out. An invitation to join them. To be one of them.
I'm halfway through my second pass of the north basin when Forrest cuts the motor early one morning, before we've reached the launch, and just lets us drift with the current.
"This Friday is the big festival. Pretty much the whole town shows up,” he says. “There’s a big fireworks show over the lake after dark.”
"I've heard." Dani’s been talking about it for days. "Big deal, huh?"
"Biggest night of the summer." He looks at me, and the sunlight highlights his face, and I have to remind my lungs how to breathe. "Come out on my boat with me. For the fireworks. Just us.”
I should say no. I have a stack of samples to log and an early morning and a very good reason, several very good reasons, to keep this man at exactly the professional distance I’ve been struggling to maintain for three weeks.
"Okay," I hear myself say.
The words just for the summer rise up in my throat, the way they always do.
For the first time in eight years, I don't say it.
I don't know what that means, but I’m trying not to think too much about it.
Forrest smiles, drops the motor back into gear, and runs us home across a lake gone soft and golden and impossibly, dangerously like somewhere a person could stay.