5. Chapter 5
Chapter five
Savannah
Itell Texie I'm running an errand, which isn't a lie, exactly. I just don't say which one.
The flower stand outside the grocery store has buckets of everything — carnations, roses, a few sunflowers past their prime — and I stand there longer than I need to before I pick the white ones.
Mrs. Stapleton, Wyatt’s mother, always kept white flowers on her kitchen table. Never anything loud. She said loud flowers made a house feel like it was trying too hard.
I drive to the cemetery with the bouquet on the passenger seat and my hands too tight on the wheel for a five-minute drive, and somewhere around the second stoplight I let myself think about the guest room.
Yellow curtains. A quilt with a crooked seam down one side that Mrs. Stapleton always meant to fix and never did.
I lived under that quilt for two years, starting the winter I turned sixteen, after Dad's heart gave out one morning and left a coffee mug sitting untouched on the counter for three days because nobody could bring themselves to move it.
Mrs. Stapleton showed up that same afternoon with a casserole in one hand and a plan.
She didn't ask if I wanted to stay with them. She just said, “Pack a bag, honey. Bring your school things. We'll get whatever else you need tomorrow.”
I packed clothes and my toothbrush into an old suitcase while she waited downstairs. Then I followed her out to the car and moved into the Stapletons' spare bedroom like I was already theirs.
She never once made a plate for herself before she'd made one for me. Didn't matter how many people were at that table on a given night — there was always room for one more, and one more was always me, without asking, without it ever being a question.
There was never a seating chart at Mrs. Stapleton's table. Nobody had to decide where I belonged.
Mr. Stapleton taught me to drive on the gravel road behind their property. First time I killed the engine four times in a row, he just said, “Well, the truck's still here, that's a start,” and let me try again.
He taught me to check oil.
He taught me to throw a punch that wouldn't break my thumb.
Things my own father never got the chance to.
I find her plot without needing the map by the entrance.
I kneel in the grass and set the flowers down and don't say anything for a long minute, because now that I'm here, I don't know where to start.
CATHERINE ANNE STAPLETON. The dates underneath. A line about beloved wife and mother that doesn't come close to covering what she actually was to the people who knew her, let alone to the ones she took in without being asked.
“I should've come. I'm so sorry,” I say, hoping she can hear me from heaven.
The words come out rough, unrehearsed, nothing like the version I practiced on the drive over.
“You meant more to me than that stupid show in Los Angeles. I need you to know that.”
My voice cracks.
“It was the biggest show of my career. Buyers were flying in from three countries. My whole team had been working eighteen-hour days for months, and I told myself I couldn't let them down.”
I press my palm against the grass.
“But that's not even the whole truth. I could've come. I chose not to. My team could have handled the show on their own.”
I wipe at my face. “I told myself I was choosing responsibility, but I think I was scared. Scared to come home. Scared to sit in that church and watch them put you in the ground.”
The tears come harder.
“So I let you down instead. And Wyatt. And your husband. When all of you needed me, I wasn't here.”
I shake my head.
“You meant more to me than that show. All of you did. I just didn't act like it.”
I rest my hand against the headstone.
“I hope you can forgive me someday.”
I don't hear him walk up.
“Savannah.”
I startle at the sound of his voice and turn. He's a few feet back, his own bouquet in one hand—yellow ones, his mother's actual favorite, not the polite white ones I brought because I couldn't remember for certain.
“I'm so sorry.”
I'm on my feet fast, wiping under both eyes, mortified in a way that has nothing to do with crying in a cemetery and everything to do with getting caught doing it.
Here I am at his mother's grave, as if I have the right to grieve her when I couldn't be bothered to show up the one day it mattered.
“I didn't know you'd be — this is your time, I should go.”
“Savannah.” Softer this time. “Sit back down.”
“Wyatt—”
“Sit back down.” He says it the way he probably says things to scared kids on the side of the road, calm enough that arguing feels like more effort than it's worth.
I sit.
He lowers himself onto the grass a few feet away, close enough to talk, far enough to give me room, and sets his own flowers next to mine like they belong together.
“Mom understood why you couldn’t come,” he says.
I shake my head before he's even finished the sentence.
“I've had six years to forgive myself for it,” I say, “and I haven't managed it yet. I'm not asking you to make that easier for me, Wyatt. I just needed to come here and say it out loud. To tell her I'm sorry for not being there.”
He's quiet for a while, forearms on his knees.
“Your mom was always so good to me,” I say. “All of you were. She used to tell me I could do anything I wanted with my life if I set my mind to it.”
A small smile touches Wyatt's mouth. “Sounds like Mom.”
“I believed her. So when I had the opportunity to go to fashion school, I went.”
“What was it like?”
“Hard.” I smile. “I loved it, but I worked constantly.
I didn't have much of a social life. If I wasn't in class, I was in a studio or studying, and every summer I interned somewhere I could learn something new.
Design houses, smaller clothing companies, anywhere they'd take me. A couple of the designers I worked for kept telling me I had good instincts and that someday I should stop designing for other people and put my own name on something.”
“I bet you pretended not to believe them while secretly planning exactly what that company would become.”
I laugh. “You remember me pretty well.”
“Some things haven't changed.” He picks a blade of grass and rolls it between his fingers. “So when did you know they were right?”
“Not all at once. I think every internship gave me a little more confidence. I started realizing I didn't just want to design somebody else's ideas. I had my own.”
Wyatt nods. “What made you choose outdoor clothes? You could've designed anything.”
“Honestly? It was what I knew.” I gesture toward the hills beyond the cemetery. “I grew up here. Same as you. We spent our childhood outside. We hiked. We camped. We got rained on. I knew what I wanted to wear because I knew what I hated wearing.”
He laughs. “Dad will be thrilled to know dragging us up mountains in the rain helped launch Blake Co.”
“Don't tell him. He'll take credit for the whole thing,” I say jokingly.
“Oh, he's absolutely taking credit.”
“He probably deserves it.”
“I kept finding outdoor clothes that performed well but weren't stylish, or stylish clothes that weren't much use once you actually got outside. I wanted both.”
“Something a woman could actually hike in and still feel good wearing.”
“Exactly.” I turn toward him. “See? You get it.”
“I've had fifteen years to figure out what you sell.”
That quiets me for a second.
“It took a while to figure out how to make it work. A good design didn't matter if the fabric couldn't perform, and the best technical fabric in the world didn't matter if nobody wanted to wear it.”
“So you had to learn the fabric side too.”
“Everything. Fabrics, manufacturing, sourcing, pricing. Designing was the part I knew. Building a company around the designs was something else entirely.”
“That sounds more like the Savannah I remember. You wouldn't have been satisfied just drawing pretty jackets.”
“They were very good jackets.”
“I'm sure they were.”
By graduation, I had a small collection, four thousand dollars to my name, and a friend named Liv who was convinced we could turn both into a company.
“Our first design market was in SoHo. Folding table, six pieces, and business cards we could barely afford to print.” I almost laugh, remembering it.
“The first trade show we ever did, our banner fell down twice in one afternoon because we bought the cheapest stand we could find.
Liv duct-taped it to a folding chair and told buyers it was 'intentional, very industrial. '“
Wyatt laughs. “I already like Liv.”
“You would.”
“Did anybody actually buy that?”
“One of them did. She placed an order.”
“No kidding.”
“It wasn't exactly that easy. It took us a few years to really get going. Better designs. Better fabrics. A lot of things that didn't work before we figured out what did.”
“How close did you come to giving up?”
I think about it. “Closer than anybody knows.”
“But you didn't.”
“No. Then people started noticing.”
“That first show helped. We sold out of everything we brought. Four styles, maybe thirty pieces total, and by three in the afternoon we had nothing left on the table but the duct-taped banner.” I shake my head at the memory.
“I remember standing there wondering how we were going to make enough inventory for the next one.”
“I'm guessing you figured it out.”
“Barely.” I smile. “Then we did it again. Blake Co. grew out of that folding table one order at a time. Better fabrics, better manufacturers, a few stores willing to take a chance on us. It took years before it stopped feeling like it could disappear overnight.”
“Hard to imagine that now.”
“Sometimes it is.” I pull my knees up and wrap my arms around them.
“Now it's real. Employees, headquarters, a fall line shooting next month.
But I haven't had much of a life outside it, if I'm honest. Ten years of eighteen-hour days, telling myself the personal stuff could wait until the company was stable.
It's never quite stable. There's always the next launch.”
“Sounds lonely.”
“I never let myself call it that.” I pause. “But yeah. Sometimes it was.”
He picks a blade of grass, turns it over in his fingers, keeping his attention on it when he says the next part.
“Mom was proud of you.”
I go still. “What?”
“She kept the article and picture of every magazine you were in.”
He finally meets my eyes.
“Every one. Whole wall in the sewing room—Mode, Outside, that business magazine that did the story about how you started Blake Co.
She'd clip the write-ups even when you were only mentioned in passing.
Dad used to tease her, said she was running a shrine, and she'd tell him to hush and go back to reading.”
My throat tightens.
“I didn't know she kept any of that.”
“She didn't need to say it to you. She said it to everybody else.” He almost smiles. “Dad still has the shelf. Hasn't touched it since she passed. I think it'd just about kill him if anybody moved one magazine out of order.”
“She wasn't disappointed in me.” It comes out half question, half something I'm working out for myself.
“Not once. Not for missing the funeral. Not for leaving town. Not for any of it.” He says it plain, the way Wyatt says things he means. “She was proud of you the whole way through.”
I turn back to the headstone.
Six years I've carried this.
Maybe I don't have to carry all of it anymore.
We sit there a while longer, not talking, the cemetery quiet except for wind moving through the trees. It's quiet in a way I'm not used to anymore. Nobody needs anything from me.
“Thank you,” I say eventually. “For telling me that.”
“She'd have wanted you to know.”
Wyatt gets to his feet and brushes the grass from his knees. I stand and gather the empty flower wrappers.
“I should get back,” I say. “Texie thinks I'm running an errand.”
“Were you not?”
“I was. Just not the kind she was expecting.”
We leave the bouquets beside the headstone and start toward the parking lot.
“I'm really glad I ran into you here,” I say.
“Me too.”
“I wouldn't have known any of that if you hadn't been here.”
“You should've known it a long time ago.”
“I wish I did.”
At my car, I open the door, then pause.
“I'm glad she kept the magazines.”
His smile comes easy. “Dad's never letting you touch that shelf.”
I laugh. “I wouldn't dare.”
“Drive safe, Savannah.”
“I will.”
I get into the car, and Wyatt heads toward his truck.
The flowers stay behind, white and yellow beside the stone.
I came here to tell Mrs. Stapleton I was sorry.
I leave knowing she was proud of me anyway.