“Being your photographer is good. I like the work a lot.”
“Are you seeing someone?”
She watched a great blue heron fly the length of the river until it was nothing but a speck.
“There was someone,” she said. “Before I moved here. Two, nearly three years ago now. It wasn’t good. I ran away by coming here. All it took was talking to Kira to remind me. Which is a long way of saying a cup of coffee, sure. A movie, maybe. But not dinner. Not for a long time. Not with you, not with anyone.”
“A person’s got to move on.”
“Remind me of that after your divorce is final.”
He drew in a breath of sharp, cold air.
“Out of bounds,” she said. “That was awful of me. I’m so sorry. That’s just it, you see? I don’t even know myself.”
“When you get to know you,” he said, “you’ll find you like you a lot.” He added, “I do.”
“Some wounds heal from the outside in and some from the inside out.”
“Who said that?” Walt asked.
“I just did.”
A fly fisherman came around the corner of the river in his waders. He worked the far, snow-covered bank, his casts a thing of beauty.
“Freaks,” Walt said.
“Aren’t we all?” she asked.
“Yeah, I suppose so.”
They talked for a while about the confiscation of her photographs and computer, and how she still had the images from the glider on an SD card in her camera. They weighed the rights of the individual versus the rights of a democracy and argued semantics for a while.
It was the arguing that made Walt feel better. There was comfort in disagreement.
“So none of this ever happened,” she said, after a long bout of silence.
“That’s what I hear.” He added, “Only I didn’t hear it from you.”
She smiled. He warmed up a little.
The fisherman caught something. They heard his cheer well up the ridge where they sat. The fisherman extracted the catch from his net and turned it loose back into the river.
“Catch and release,” Walt said. “I guess now I understand it a little bit better than I did before.”
“Before what?” she asked. Then she gave him a look.
“Exactly,” he said.
Note: The government’s INL experimental nuclear facility has existed in central Idaho under a variety of names for the past fifty years. The atomic submarine engine was developed there, as was the world’s first nuclear-generated electricity. There is a cold fusion experimental lab active today at the facility. Over two dozen reactors have been opened and closed over the years. No civilians know exactly how many reactors remain operational or how the decommissioned reactors rate in terms of safety requirements.
