Page 135 of Final Drive

Nobody in the boat except me and Bo knows anything happened.

The crosswind hits at fifteen hundred exactly when she said it would, and she has somewhere to go since she left herself that beat. “Up one, in two. One. Two.”

Thirty-five.

Northridge answers, but they can’t hold it. We take their seat back at seventeen hundred and go through them at eighteen-fifty. Reese keeps us there and brings us across the line second by a canvas behind a crew that’s been favored all season.

Second is a lane in the final.

“Way enough.”

Eight blades come off the water, and the boat runs on beneath us while the men behind me start making noise. Zane is telling anyone who’ll listen that she called the crosswind to the meter, Beckett is laughing at nothing, and Jackson has his head tipped back with his eyes closed.

Reese sits in the stern with one hand still on the rudder line and looks at me. She knows exactly what I saw, but I don’t say a word about it on the water. Neither does Bo.

The medical tent is two hundred meters from the dock, and I know she isn’t going to it. Two months ago, I would’ve told her she was. Today, I don’t even suggest it.

Instead, I stay beside her at the trailer while Tyler and Eli take the riggers down. We work for about five minutes before she asks quietly, “Fourteen seconds?”

“Eight strokes.”

“Did anybody see?”

“Bo felt it. Nobody saw except me.”

She nods, looking down at the hull. “Northridge’s coxswain is going to file a lane complaint.”

“Let him. We got the point back.”

“Gray.”

“I know.”

She turns toward me. “You held thirty-four.”

“There wasn’t anything else to hold.”

For a few seconds, all I hear is metal against metal from the other end of the trailer and somebody laughing two crews down.

“You could’ve stopped the boat,” she says. “You’d have been within your rights as captain. Bennett would’ve backed you, and nobody in the sport would’ve blinked.”

“I know that too.”

“Why didn’t you?”

I put my palm against the hull. The shell is still warm from the sun. “Because you’d have come back in a stopped boat, and you’d have known that the second something went wrong, I took it away from you.”

She doesn’t answer, and I don’t let the silence turn my decision into something noble.

“It was a bad call, Reese. If you’d been gone another eight strokes, I’d have put us into lane three at full pressure and somebody would be in an ambulance right now.”

“But I wasn’t.”

“No.”

“And we didn’t.”

“No.”