Page 129 of Final Drive

“You’ve been staring at my arm since the trailers. Close them.”

Five seats up, Bo goes still for a moment before he does it.

“Everybody,” Reese says. “Half pressure, quarter slide, eyes shut. Listen to the boat instead of looking at each other. Ready. Row.”

I don’t want to.

Watching is how I understand things. It’s how I know Jackson’s shoulders went wrong at the trailer line and Zane hasn’t made a joke in ninety minutes. Take away my eyes and I lose most of what I use to make sense of a boat.

I close them anyway.

The first ten strokes are awful, and hearing it without seeing it makes it worse. Eight catches land across maybe a tenth of a second, and beneath them the hull makes a dragging sound that sets my teeth on edge.

Then Tyler’s blade goes in clean.

His hands have always known what to do before the rest of him catches up. I find his catch three seats ahead through sound alone and put mine with it, and Cameron finds me a stroke later. Whatever the three of us are doing starts moving through the boat, and by the fifteenth stroke the dragging is gone.

Reese takes us to half slide, then three-quarter, then full, still light. Somewhere in there the shell starts running beneath us again, and I feel the difference through the seat before I hear it.

“There it is,” she says. “That’s the boat. Remember it.”

“Eyes?” Beckett asks.

“Open them. Don’t look at me.”

We paddle toward the start with a few minutes in hand.

Six lanes. We’re in four. Hampton Hills is in three.

I saw the heat sheet at ten past six this morning, outside the hotel breakfast room with a cup of coffee I never drank. I’ve known for more than two hours that Jackson would spend this race rowing beside the crew he left, and I haven’t mentioned it, because there isn’t a sentence I can give him that makes it easier.

He’s known since last night anyway. I can tell from his back. Three years of looking at that back has taught me more about him than most of our conversations.

Cameron reaches past me and locks our bow into the block while the official comes down the line with the megaphone, checking each lane.

“Sable Ridge.”

He pauses.

It’s barely two seconds, but I see his eyes move from Reese’s arm to Jackson’s face before he looks back at his clipboard and carries on to lane five.

I add him to the count without meaning to. Two volunteers, one deputy, one reporter, and now an official who looked twice and decided not to have seen anything.

The cox box clicks.

“Two minutes,” Reese says. “Short version. There’s a man in a car somewhere on the county road. There’s a video on a reporter’s phone. Jackson has a bruise on his face and I have five fingerprints on my arm. None of those things are in this boat.”

Gray’s shoulders come down.

“Everything you want to do about it, you can’t. Not today and not with your hands. You can do it here. This is the only place today where being furious is useful, and it’s only useful if you’re long.”

“Long,” Bo says.

“Long. If you shorten up, I will bring the rate down in a final and you will hate me.” She gives us half a beat. “Bow pair, half a stroke to port.”

Cameron and I take one light stroke and put her point where she wants it.

“Sable Ridge, are you ready?” the starter calls.