“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, nothurrying, 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.
3
ANNALEISE
