The Destined Path of Water Chapter 13: Chapter 13: The Necklace

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Sae & Rika | Age 17 Sae I had been thinking about meeting her again in the way you think about something you are not admitting to yourself you are thinking about. It was not constant. I had school and the dam research and Arjun and the ordinary business of being alive. But she would arrive in the middle of other things her sign straighter than mine, the way she had said I know what you mean without explaining how she knew, the particular quality of her listening, which was the kind that made you feel like what you were saying was actually landing somewhere rather than just dispersing into air. The hollow feeling had changed. This was the strangest part and the part I had spent the most time not examining. The feeling I had carried since I was ten, that low persistent pull with no direction and no name, had shifted slightly since the gathering. Not gone. Still there. But quieter, the way a sound becomes quieter when you move closer to its source rather than further away. Like I had been walking in a direction without knowing it and had moved, accidentally, one step closer to wherever I was supposed to be going. I did not know what to do with that. So I did what I usually did with things I did not know what to do with I went to the river. It was a Wednesday afternoon, school finished early, the light already going gold by four o'clock the way it did in this season. I took the path along the valley that followed the water, not the temple path, just the lower one that ran beside the river for a stretch before turning back up toward the village. I had walked it enough times to do it without thinking. I was not thinking about running into anyone. I came around the bend where the path widened near the flat stones at the water's edge and she was there. She was sitting on one of the flat stones with her shoes off and her feet not quite in the water, looking at the river, and she had not heard me come around the bend. For a moment I just saw her the stillness of her, the way she sat like someone who had been there long enough to stop performing sitting and had just become part of the bank. Then she looked up. Rika I had been thinking about meeting him again in the way you think about something you have decided is not worth thinking about and then think about anyway. The hollow feeling was different. That was the first thing I had noticed after the gathering, after the eggs and the argument about paying and the walking home with the necklace warm in a new way. The feeling that had lived in my chest since I was nine, that missing-piece ache with no name, had shifted. Still present. But oriented differently, the way a compass needle settles when it finds what it was looking for, not gone but stilled. I did not know what that meant and I did not want to guess wrong so I left it alone. But I thought about meeting him again. Not in a planned way. Just in the way that someone moves through your thoughts when something about them has snagged on something in you and you have not worked out yet what it snagged on. I went to the river on Wednesday because the river was where I went when I needed to think and I needed to think. The flat stones near the wide bend, the place I had been coming to for two years, sitting with my feet near the water and pressing my hand to it and feeling its altered rhythm. I took my shoes off and sat and looked at the water and let myself be quiet for a while. The necklace was warm. The specific new warmth, the one that had arrived after the gathering. I heard footsteps on the path and looked up. Sae "Oh," I said. It was not my best opening. But it was honest. She looked at me with the calm contained expression she seemed to default to and said, "Hello." "I was not " I gestured vaguely at the path behind me. "I just come here sometimes." "I know," she said. "You mentioned." "Right." I looked at the river. Then at the flat stones. "Can I" She moved slightly on her stone, not making room exactly, there was plenty of room,