Two years ago, Chris and his boyfriend left the city to settle in a small town at the US-Canada border. Eager to start a new life, Chris bought the Frontier Café, but a year later, his boyfriend dumped him, leaving Chris the only openly gay man in town. Nowadays he's resigned to a life of romantic solitude.<br><br>Hank spent the last years traveling through the country for his job as a water plant engineer. Deeply closeted, he's careful about the men he meets. Like the rivers he studies, he runs fast through the land.<br><br>In town only for a few weeks, Hank is intent on getting the job done and returning home out west to take care of his father. But Chris’s warm manner and decadent desserts are no match for Hank’s defense mechanisms. For the first time in his life, he finds himself wanting to go with the flow.

No River Wide Enough

I understood how she’d want to dump this problem on someone else’s lap. I could be that person, if only she trusted me. But she didn’t, so how could I help?


“Look, Chris,” she said, after a few seconds of silence, “I believe Donnie, all right? I believe you, too. I know you didn’t do those things Aleid says you did. But you should have come to us, the second Donnie started talking about running away or…having sex with—” she paused and glanced at her son, “—men.”


Donnie’s face turned crimson and I couldn’t accept the way his mother was speaking of him as if he wasn’t even in the room with us. He was going to be eighteen years old in a few months. We weren’t discussing a child’s private life anymore, but a young man’s. “Liliana,” I said carefully, “I couldn’t betray Donnie’s trust. He told me those things in confidence and no matter what you believe, I didn’t encourage him to run away at all.”


Chapter 56