Chapter 4
River
Sixty feet up, the world makes sense.
The wind pulls at my sleeves and the harness bites into my thighs and the crossarm under my boots is solid Douglas fir, bolted to a pole that's been standing since before I was born.
Up here, the rules are simple: respect the voltage, trust your gear, keep your hands where they belong.
No ambiguity. No history. Just physics and twelve thousand volts running through the wire six inches from my gloves.
Clear. Binary. The circuit is safe or it kills you. My father appreciated that kind of honesty. So do I.
Main Street stretches below in a grid of rooftops and scaffolding and the anthill rhythm of a construction site finding its stride.
Dump trucks. Bobcats. A grading crew shaping the lot where the old laundromat used to be.
And Macy, in her hard hat and canvas jacket, walking the site with a clipboard, crews stepping aside without being asked.
She's been here ten days. Ten days of revised timelines and routing meetings and standing close enough to catch the smell of her shampoo while we argue about transformer load calculations.
Ten days of pretending the space between us is professional when every nerve in my body has filed a formal complaint.
The crossarm I'm replacing is cracked along the grain—lightning strike, probably, that nobody flagged on the last inspection.
Standard repair. Unbolt the old one, muscle the new arm up on the gin pole, set the hardware, retie the conductors.
Done this a thousand times. My hands know the sequence the way they know the callus map of my own grip—by heart, without looking.
The scar she traced across the counter at Kincaid's. The one she mapped with her fingertip that Thursday night in my bedroom, after, when the lamp made everything golden and her breathing was still uneven against my chest.
Focus. Sixty feet up. Twelve thousand volts. The crossarm doesn't care about the past. Neither does gravity.
A gust catches the conductor I just retied. The wire jumps. The arc comes out of nowhere—a blue-white crack that splits the air six inches from my glove, close enough that the heat prickles through the rubber and the ozone hits my nose like a chemical slap.
My body reacts before my brain does. Weight back. Hands clear. Feet solid on the pegs. The wire settles. The arc dies. The hum returns to normal.
Standard procedure. The body knows. Training takes over and the hands move and you don't die.
My father’s hands didn’t move fast enough.
February, years ago. Same kind of repair—crossarm, cracked grain, standard job he'd done ten thousand times.
The arc that killed him was bigger than this one.
Hotter. The report said the contact lasted less than a second.
A second is enough. A second is everything.
I was eighteen. Six months into my apprenticeship.
They called me on the radio and I drove to the site and his truck was there but he wasn't. For one stupid second I thought he'd climbed down, was fine, was about to step around the pole with that steady half-smile and say something about the weather.
He didn't step around the pole.
"River!"
Macy's voice carries with a clarity that cuts through sixty feet of air and a decade of silence. The sound of my name in her mouth—panicked, raw, stripped of every professional syllable she's been building like a seawall for ten days.
She knows. She knows how my father died.
She knows what an arc flash means on a power line.
She held that knowledge across the counter at Kincaid's the summer she was eighteen, when I told her the real version—not the county paper version, not the co-op memorial version, the version where I drove to the site and his truck was there and he wasn't.
She's standing at the base of the pole. Hard hat tilted back, body rigid, clipboard forgotten at her side.
The crew has gone still—the arc was loud enough to freeze everyone within earshot.
But Macy isn't looking at the crew. She's looking up at me with an expression that has cracked through every layer of distance she's maintained since she walked into that construction trailer.
Fear. The kind that comes from a place you thought you'd sealed off.
She's not just seeing me up here. She's seeing my father. She's doing the math I did my first year on the poles—the truck, the pole, the silence where a person should be.
"I'm good," I call down. Voice steady, because steady is what the job requires.
What the Dawson men do. Stand still. Sound sure.
Even when the voltage is still singing in the wire and the ozone is sharp in my throat and the memory of my father's empty truck is sitting in my chest like a stone. "Conductor jumped. It happens."
She doesn't move. Her hands hang at her sides, clenched into fists, and even from sixty feet up I can see the effort it takes her to unlock her jaw.
I take my time climbing down. Check the hardware. Log the arc event on my radio. Give dispatch the readings. Every step deliberate, because up here is where the rules are clear and down there is where Macy Sinclair is standing with years' worth of something she's trying very hard not to show.
My boots hit dirt. She's three feet away.
"You good?" Her voice is level. Controlled. The mask is back, but it's on crooked—like a picture frame knocked sideways by a door slamming.
"Happens all the time."
"That's not what I asked."
The crew is watching. Eddie leans against the auto shop door across the street, arms crossed, expression carefully neutral. Hank has developed a sudden, consuming interest in a fire hydrant. Two guys from the grading crew are studying their bootlaces like they contain the secrets of the universe.
Her eyes are bright. Not tears—Macy doesn't cry in public, or at least she never used to.
But the brightness is close. And her hands are still in fists, and her breathing is controlled in a way that means she's counting, and the distance between us is three feet of gravel and a decade of silence and the ghost of Jack Dawson, dead doing exactly what I just survived.
My hand moves. Not a decision—instinct. The kind that bypasses the brain and goes straight from the chest to the fingertips. Reaching for her the way I reached for her that night in the field, in the dark, when I said the words and she said "I will" and my whole body believed her.
I stop. Fingers curling back. Fist closing around air.
The last time I reached for Macy Sinclair, she vanished before dawn.
"I'm good, Macy."
Her name. Not "Sinclair." Not "the architect." Just the two syllables I said in the dark with everything I had, the name she took with her when she drove away without saying goodbye.
Something shifts behind her eyes. A flinch—quick, controlled, gone. She nods once. Steps back. Turns toward the trailer with her clipboard pressed against her chest, and the line of her shoulders is too straight, too rigid. The posture of a woman holding herself together through force of will.
Behind me, Eddie makes a sound. Not a cough. Eddie doesn't cough. Eddie waits until a thing is worth saying, then says it once.
Kincaid's after work. Marlene slides cherry pie in front of me without asking, the same order she's been running since I was fourteen.
"You look like you've been arguing with the sky," she says.
"Just a crossarm replacement."
"Mmhm." The rag moves across the counter.
She doesn't push. Marlene has been watching this town long enough to know that sometimes a man needs pie more than conversation.
She refills my coffee, moves on, and the silence she leaves behind is the comfortable kind—the kind that doesn't demand anything.
The pie is excellent, because Marlene's pie is always excellent.
The coffee is hot. The counter is the same counter where Macy's fingertip found my palm at five-forty-five in the morning twelve summers ago, and I am sitting in the exact same spot, and the muscle memory of her touch along that line is so vivid I can feel it under the skin like a current that never fully discharged.
She was scared for me today. Not the clipboard kind. The kind she earned on a bench that last night, sitting with a boy who told her what an arc flash leaves behind.
The pie goes down. The coffee cools. The diner empties out around me and I sit in Macy's booth—the one Marlene mentioned, six-thirty every morning, black coffee, thirty percent tip—and try to reconcile the woman who screamed my name from sixty feet below with the girl who said "I will" and left before dawn.
Same person. Same fear. Same voice.
Different ending? Or the same one with a longer runway?
The house is dark when I get home. Hitch meets me at the door with his full-body greeting—the one that says you left and the timeline for your return was unacceptable.
I feed him. Stand on the porch. The stars are coming out the way they do, slow and inevitable, like they've been waiting for the sun to stop making a scene.
Sheriff Callahan's cruiser crunches gravel in the driveway at eight-thirty. Tom is early fifties, graying at the temples, moving slow, a man who's been making other people's decisions long enough to be tired of his own. He takes his badge off when he visits. That's how you know it's personal.
"Got a beer?" he asks, settling into the second porch chair.
"Fridge."
He returns with two bottles. Hands me one. For ten minutes we sit in the kind of silence that only works between men who've known each other long enough that words feel like interruptions. Hitch lies between our chairs like a furry cease-fire.
"Heard about the arc flash," Tom says. "Eddie told me. Said you handled it."
"Eddie talks too much."
"Eddie said four words. That's a speech for Eddie." Tom turns the bottle in his hands. "Also said the architect was pretty shook up."