If I didn’t know Aiden it would be easy to pick him apart. But as is, he’s my ex-boyfriend’s former better-half teammate, and he’s sitting quietly behind me. It’s weird having someone sitting behind you in complete silence. I bet there aren’t a lot of first dates happening at River Depot—this seating arrangement would be a nightmare. As we continue down the river, the silence is killing me—all I can think about is what my butt must look like in these atrocious shorts. Or that at any moment he’s going to ask me how it’s possible to not know your own mother won the lottery. And that’s a lot to unpack right now, because I’m still having a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that my mother won the lottery. I know lotteries are just luck, not merit, but seriously, luck couldn’t have picked one of those moms you see in viral stories who donates her own kidney to her kid while going through chemo and working three jobs? Come on, Luck.

“Are you and Ellis close?” He doesn’t answer right away, and I wonder if it’s weird that I asked. “I noticed the last name—he said you’re cousins.”

“Yeah. We are, actually. We’re nine days apart, so we’ve pretty much been best friends since birth.”

“Cousin-twins,” I say before thinking, because they do sort of look alike, though Ellis doesn’t have the athletic build Aiden does, and Aiden doesn’t share Ellis’s fabulous hair.

He laughs. “Sort of, yeah.”

Around us the trees have turned from oaks to pines. It’s the first time I’ve been down the river—or at least the first time I remember. It’s gorgeous. I pause my paddling to look down into the water, so clear it’s hard to even tell how deep it is. There are patches of weeds here and there, waving along with the current, but for the most part it’s covered in pebbles. Tiny little translucent fish swim in pulsing groups.

In the distance I can make out the faint hum of cars—they must be just on the other side of the trees, on the road that runs along the river.

“You’re going to need to focus for a minute.” Aiden’s voice is teasing and I pull my eyes away from the water to see a concrete structure stretched across the width of the river in front of us. A small opening in the center has a gate overhead that hangs like the blade of a guillotine. “Paddle gently, just make sure we don’t clip it.”

I dip my paddle back into the water as we slowly ascend. “What is it?”

“No one knows. It just showed up one day.”

“Really?”

“No. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that.” He laughs. “I’m nervous.”