Chapter 6
Levi
Something is wrong.
I text her at eight. We made plans. “Tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow,” I said. She kissed me in my truck and I drove home and didn’t sleep because I could still feel her on my hands.
She texts back. But it’s different.
Marissa: Hey. Can we talk? I’ll come to you.
Not “what time.” Not a joke about the itinerary. Not the warm, fast energy she’s had since Day 1. My stomach drops.
Me: I’m at Outfitters.
She arrives twenty minutes later. Drives herself. No friends, no van full of women with opinions. She’s in shorts and a t-shirt and her hair is pulled back and she looks like she slept about as well as I did.
She gets out of the car. Walks toward me. She’s not smiling.
“The girls are doing a hike this morning,” she says. Like she needs me to know she’s not ditching them. “Jules told me to come talk to you.”
Jules told her. Which means the friends know something I don’t. My chest tightens.
“Okay,” I say. “Come in.”
The office. One desk. One chair. She doesn’t sit. She stands with her arms crossed and I lean against the filing cabinet and the room feels smaller than it’s ever been.
“I need to show you something,” she says. She pulls out her phone. Hands it to me.
My personal Instagram. My face. My life in a grid. The raft, the river, sunsets I posted because the light was good. And in between: me with clients. Groups. Women.
Me with my arm around a blonde at the put-in. Me at The Burning Tree with two women, beers raised. Comments I never thought about: fire emojis, winking faces, “come take me on the river again.”
I scroll. I see what she sees. Three years of a man who kept everything light and easy and fun. Three years of the smile aimed at everyone. Three years of letting people think whatever they wanted to think.
I put her phone on the desk. The screen faces up. My face stares back from a photo taken two summers ago. I’m smiling in it. The same smile I used to aim at everyone because it was simple and no one got close.
“Is this what you do?” she asks. Steady. Not angry. Worse. Careful. “Every summer. New group. New woman. The smile, the nickname, the spot by the waterfall.”
“No.” The word comes out fast. “The waterfall is mine. I’ve never taken anyone there. Ever.”
“But the rest of it.”
I look at the floor. The desk. The wall. Anywhere but her face.
“Yeah,” I say. “The rest of it.”
She waits. She doesn’t fill the silence. She lets me sit in it. Marissa, who fills every silence she’s ever encountered, gives me this one.
“I wasn’t lying to anyone. I didn’t make promises I didn’t keep. But I didn’t correct assumptions either. If someone thought it meant more than it did, I let them think it. I let the smile do the work and kept it fun and nobody got close.” I stop. “That was the whole point. Nobody getting close.”
“Why?”
One word. Quiet. Not accusing. Asking.
I’m standing in this office with the sign outside that used to say two names and dents in the floor where a second desk used to sit.
The woman I took to my waterfall yesterday is asking me why I spent three years keeping everyone at arm’s length.
The answer is in this room. It’s been in this room since she walked in on Day 2 and noticed the gaps.
“Danny,” I say.
She doesn’t move. She heard the name from Reggie at the bar. She’s been waiting.
“Danny Cole.” I look toward the window. I can see the edge of the sign from here. “He’s the other name.”
She nods. Like she already knew.
“We met freshman year. Roommates. He was the one with the vision. I was just the guy who liked the water.” I lean back against the cabinet.
My hands are on the edge of it, gripping.
I need something solid. “He looked at this stretch of river and saw a business. I just saw a place I wanted to be. But Danny could see things. Could look at something rough and see what it could become.”
“That’s the second time you’ve said that,” she says.
She nods again. She’s been filing every word I’ve said about this for three days, waiting for the pieces to connect. I shouldn’t be surprised. She’s been doing that since she stepped into my raft.
“We built this together. Twenty-three. No money. The business plan was a napkin sketch and sheer stupidity.” I almost smile at the memory.
Danny at a picnic table at the put-in, drawing diagrams on a Budweiser napkin with a pen that kept dying.
“He handled the logistics, the permits, the vision. I handled the river. Two desks. Two names on the sign. We ran it for four years. Best four years of my life.”
“What happened?” Quiet. Not pushing. Present.
“Three years ago.” I’m looking at the wall now. “High water season. I was guiding a trip. Danny was in the raft, assisting. Big group. We hit a rapid I’d run a hundred times, but the water was higher than I’d read it. The raft flipped.”
The office is very quiet. I can hear the river outside. I can always hear the river from here.
“Everyone went in. I got the clients out first because that’s the protocol. You always get the clients out first. Danny would’ve told me the same thing.” I stop. My hands are tight on the cabinet edge. “When I got to Danny he was against the rocks. He’d hit wrong. His back.”
“How bad?” she asks. Direct. Not flinching from the details.
“Spinal injury. Nerve damage in his legs. He was in the hospital for three weeks. Rehab for a year after that.” I take a breath.
“He walks now. With a brace some days. He’s functional.
But he’ll never run a rapid again. He’ll never be on the water the way he was.
The thing we built together, the thing he DREAMED, he can’t do it anymore. ”
“Where is he now?”
“Denver. He works with a rehab clinic. Helps people recover from injuries like his. He’s good at it.” I pause. “He found a way to make the worst thing that happened to him useful. Because that’s who Danny is.”
“Does he blame you?”
“No.” The word barely makes it out. The smallest sound I’ve ever made.
“He’s never blamed me. Not once. He told me in the hospital it was the river, not me.
High water. A bad break. A rapid that shifted overnight.
He forgave me before I even asked. He forgave me before I even finished saying I was sorry. ”
“But you haven’t forgiven yourself.”
Not a question.
“He looked at me and saw someone to build with. A partner. He trusted me with his dream and I put him in the water and the water broke him.” I finally look at her.
“So I painted over his name. Moved the desk to storage. Ran it alone. And I made sure nobody ever got close enough that when things went wrong, and things always go wrong, they’d get hurt because of me. ”
“Three years,” she says. “Three years of keeping everyone out.”
“Three years of keeping everyone safe.”
“Levi.” She takes a step toward me. “Those aren’t the same thing.”
I don’t say anything. I can’t. Because she’s right and I’ve known she’s right and I’ve known it since she showed up with a clipboard and made the walls feel thin.
She puts her hand on my chest. Over my heart. Just holds it there. Doesn’t say it’s okay. Doesn’t say it’s not my fault. Doesn’t try to fix it. She just puts her hand on me and lets me feel the weight of someone choosing to stand inside the wreckage.
“Danny forgave you, even though it wasn’t even your fault,” she says. “And you’ve been making sure no one else ever has to. That’s not protecting people. That’s hiding.”
I put my hand over hers. Her fingers are warm against my shirt. My heart is loud underneath them and she can feel it.
“The Instagram,” she says. “All those photos. All those women. That’s what hiding looks like from the outside.”
“Yeah.”
“You were never going to let any of them in.”
“No.”
She’s quiet for a beat. Processing. I can see her doing it. Every piece she’s collected since Day 1 clicking into place.
“So what changed?” she asks.
“You.” One word. Everything I have. “You showed up with a clipboard and told me my website was terrible and laughed through a rapid and I forgot how to keep it light. You’re the first person in three years who made me want to build something again.”
She looks at me for a long time. Her hand on my chest. My hand on hers. The office small around us, the sign outside with its painted-over name, and three years of distance shrinking to the space between her palm and my heartbeat.
“The waterfall,” she says. “You’ve never taken anyone else there.”
“Never.”
“And ‘trouble.’ You don’t call everyone that.”
“I’ve never called anyone that.”
She studies my face. Whatever she finds, it’s enough.
“Show me where you live,” she says.
~~~
My place is five minutes from Outfitters. A cabin I built over two winters when I needed something to do with my hands when the river was frozen and timber jobs were scarce. One bedroom. Small kitchen. A porch facing the mountain. Not much. But every board is mine.
She walks through the front door. Looks around. Sees the bookshelf, heavy on adventure novels and river ecology. The kitchen, clean and sparse. The bedroom through the open door.
“You built this,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“You build things.”
“I’m starting to remember that.”
She turns to me. The guard is gone. Not just hers. Both of ours. Every defense I’ve carried for three years and every plan she’s held like armor. Gone. I can see it in her face, the moment she decides. The planner letting go of the plan.
She crosses the room. Puts both hands on my chest. Looks up at me.
“I’m going to kiss you now,” I say. “And I’m not going to stop.”
“That’s a good plan.”
I kiss her. Not like the deck where it was brave and new. Not like the waterfall where it was desperate and sun-drunk. This is the kiss that happens when two people just handed each other the worst and best parts of themselves and they both choose to stay.