River’s End

water.
    “I’m going upstream to catch dinner.” As she spoke she took a retractable rod out of her pack.
    “Very cool.”
    “If I get lucky, we eat like bears tonight. If I don’t, we have some dehydrated food packs.”
    “Get lucky, Liv.”
    “Can you set up the tent while I’m fishing?”
    “Sure, you go hunt up food, I’ll make the nest. I have no problem with role reversal whatsoever.”
    “Ha. If you want to wander, just stay in sight of the river, check your compass. If you get lost—”
    “I won’t. I’m not a moron.”
    “If you get lost,” she repeated. “Sit down and wait for me to find you.” He looked so insulted, she patted his cheek. “You’ve done just fine so far, city boy.”
    He watched her go and promised himself he would do a whole lot better.

Twenty-six
    The tent didn’t come with instructions, which Noah thought was a definite flaw in the system. By his calculation, setting up camp took him about triple the amount of time and energy it would have taken Olivia. But he decided he’d keep that little bit of information to himself.
    She’d been gone more than an hour by the time he was reasonably sure the tent would stay in an upright position. Assuming she wasn’t having the same luck the bear had had with fishing, he explored their other menu choices. Dry packs of fruit, dehydrated soup and powdered eggs assured him that while they might not eat like kings, they wouldn’t starve.
    With nothing left on his chore list and no desire to explore after a full day of hiking, he settled down to write in longhand.
    It was Olivia he concentrated on, what she had done with her life, the goals she’d focused on, what, in his mind, she’d accomplished and the ways he calculated she’d limited herself. The roots of her childhood had caused her to grow in certain directions, even while stunting her in others.
    Would she have been more open, more sociably inclined if her mother had lived?
    Would she have been less driven to stand on her own if she’d grown up the pampered, indulged child of a Hollywood star?
    How many men would have walked in and out of her life? Did she ever wonder?
    Would all that energy and intelligence have been channeled into the entertainment field, or would she still have gone back to her mother’s roots and chosen the isolation?
    Considering it, considering her, he let his notebook rest on his knee and just looked. The stream gurgled by. The trees towered, their topmost branches spearing through sky and dancing to the wind. The stillness was broken by the music of the water, the call of birds that nested and fed in the forest around him. He saw a lone elk, its rack crown-regal, slip out of the trees and pause to drink downstream. He wished he had the skill to draw, but contented himself with etching the memory on his mind as the elk strode without hurry into the deepening shadows of the great firs.
    She would have come back, Noah decided. Perhaps her life wouldn’t have been centered here, but she would have been pulled back to this, time and again. As her mother had been.
    Sense memory, he thought, or the roots that dig themselves into the heart before we’re old enough to know it. She would have needed this place, the smells and the sounds of it. She needed it now, not only for her work and her peace of mind. It was here she could find her mother.
    The cry of an eagle had him looking up, watching the flight. She spread her wings here, too, Noah decided. But did she realize that for every time she soared, she offset it by running back to the closet and closing herself into the dark?
    He wrote down his thoughts, his impressions, listened to the life ebb and swell around him. When his mind drifted, he stretched out on the bank and slipped into dreams.
    She had three fine trout. She’d caught the first two within an hour, but knowing his appetite, she’d taken the time to wait for the third to take the hook. She’d found a nice bramble of huckleberries. Her hat was full of them, and their sweet taste sat nicely on her tongue as she wandered back to camp.
    The time alone had quieted her mind, and soothed away the edge of nerves being too close and too long in Noah’s company seemed to produce. Her problem, she reminded herself. She just wasn’t used to being with a man on the level Noah Brady insisted on. She was no more ready for him now than she’d been at eighteen. Sexually it should have been simple enough. But he kept tangling intimacy and