"I'm scared," I said.
"I know."
"I don't want to be my father."
"Your father would never sit here admitting he was scared." Ethan grabbed his laptop bag from the floor. Stood up. "Your father would double down and convince himself he was right."
He looked down at me.
"You're sitting here telling me you were wrong. That's the difference. The only one that matters."
He slung the bag over his shoulder. Then paused.
"Alex."
"Yeah?"
"I'm glad he stopped you. I'm glad someone cared enough about you to do what needed to be done. Even when you couldn't do it yourself."
My throat closed.
"Don't waste that. Talk to him. Before the race. Before you think yourself out of it."
He walked out. The door chimed behind him. Cold air swept through for a second before the warmth closed back in.
Chapter 20: Liam
The river was black.
Not dark—black. The kind of pre-dawn black where the water and the sky were the same color. The soft lap of current against the dock pilings. The hiss of my blade entering the surface.
I pushed off alone. The single rocked beneath me—lighter than the double, more responsive, less forgiving. But someone missing.
Just me and the water.
The first few strokes were rough. Cold hands. Stiff back. My body protesting the 4 AM alarm and the fact that I'd barely slept. But by the tenth stroke my muscles remembered. They always remembered. Legs compressing on the slide. The coil of power in my hamstrings. The explosive drive—legs, back, arms—and then the release, the blade lifting clean, the boat surging forward on its own momentum.
The run between strokes. That's what Jerry called it. The glide. The moment when you've done everything right and the boat rewards you by moving without effort. Like the hull is breathing.
Jerry standing on the dock at Brackett Lake. Summer before eighth grade. A borrowed single that was too long for me, the oar handles too wide for my hands. "Don't muscle it, kid. Let the water do the work."
I'd been terrible and couldn't keep the boat level. Caught crabs every third stroke—the oar snagging underwater, the handle slamming into my ribs hard enough to leave bruises my mom would ask about at dinner.
But Jerry kept putting me in. Every morning before my shift. Thirty minutes on the water while the lake was still glass and the summer rich were still asleep in their massive houses on the north shore.
"You feel that?" Jerry said, the morning I finally held a clean stroke for ten in a row. "That's the run. That's what you're chasing. Every stroke for the rest of your life, you're chasing that feeling."
He was right. Fourteen years old, blistered hands, a borrowed boat on a lake where I'd never belong to the right side—and the water gave me something nobody could take. Not my father, who'd already left. Not the summer families, who looked through me like furniture. Not the bills on the kitchen table or the second job my mom picked up in September or any of it.
On the water, I was free.
The memory dissolved. The river materialized around me—narrower than the lake, colder, the current stronger. Mist hanging low over the surface. The boathouses on both banks barely visible. Just shapes in the dark.
I settled into steady state. Twenty strokes a minute. Long and clean. The rhythm taking over—that meditative place where thought stopped and the body just moved.
And then the other memory came. The one I hadn't invited.
Alex behind me in the double. First time. The boat alive beneath us in a way I'd never felt with anyone else. His bladematching mine—not following, matching. Like his nervous system was wired into mine. The hull lifting. The speed building without effort. Both of us breathing in sync and neither of us deciding to.
