7. Chapter 7
Chapter seven
Savannah
My phone starts buzzing before I've even opened my eyes.
Six missed calls from Liv already, all logged between five and seven this morning, which means she's been up half the night doing my job for me.
I call her back from Texie's guest bed, quilt still tangled around my legs.
“Okay,” Liv says, no hello. “Don't panic.”
“That's usually how you start when I should panic.”
“A blogger got hold of the seating chart. Table twenty-two. She's connected some dots.”
I sit up. “Which dots?”
“The kind where 'bride flees venue in the dress' turns into a whole narrative about Mrs. Harrington running the show. There's a screenshot of the chart floating around. Savannah, people are rooting for you.”
I should feel something sharper than I do. Instead I just reach for the glass of water on the nightstand and drink half of it while Liv reads me three different headlines, each one worse than the last, each one making me want to laugh instead of cry.
“The Nordstrom buyer called,” Liv says. “Not emailed. Called.”
“That's never good.”
“It's good. She wanted to tell you 'Way to go.' Her exact words.”
I laugh before I mean to.
“A couple of smaller accounts are nervous,” Liv continues. “Nothing serious. I'm handling it. Statement's already out.”
“Anything you actually need me to do?”
“Not yet.” Her voice softens. “How are you? Actually.”
“I'm fine.”
“You said that yesterday too.”
“It's still true today.”
“Savannah.” She waits me out. It's a skill she's had since business school, the kind of silence that makes you fill it just to make it stop.
“I'm better than fine,” I say finally. “Which I know sounds insane.”
“It doesn't sound insane. It sounds like information.” I hear her chair creak — she's leaning back, which means she's decided to let it go for now. “Okay. Business, then, since you clearly don't want to talk about the other thing.”
“Business.”
“The fall line proofs came back. The photographer wants to reshoot the campaign backdrop — says the studio set reads too polished next to the outdoor pieces. He's pushing for something with real texture. Wood, wear, actual weather in it.”
“He's not wrong.”
I think of Iron Ridge Farm—the barn, the honey house, worn wood, sunlight catching in a jar of wildflower honey.
Nothing staged. Nothing polished into pretending to be something else.
“Tell him I might have thoughts on that.”
“Got it. I’ll let him know. Also, the west coast showroom wants an answer on the spring order by Friday, and my meeting with the fabric rep got pushed to next week because he's stuck in customs. Nothing urgent. Everything's holding.”
“Everything's holding,” I repeat, relieved. I built a good company with good people. They don't need me hovering over every decision for it to keep running.
“One more thing,” Liv says, and her voice changes just slightly, quieter.
“And you can tell me to drop it.”
“Go ahead.”
“I heard from someone who heard from someone that Preston shut his mother down. Publicly. Told her to stop giving statements on his behalf.”
A pause.
“He hasn't said a single word to the press himself. Not one. Everyone else is talking and he's just—not.”
That sounds like Preston.
It doesn't change anything between us, but I'm glad he's staying quiet.
“Is he okay?” I ask, and I'm surprised by how much I mean it.
“I don't know. I think he's embarrassed. I think maybe he's relieved too and doesn't know what to do with that any more than you do.”
Liv's quiet for a second.
“For what it's worth, nobody I've talked to thinks he's the villain here. They all know exactly whose show that was.”
“He let it be her show,” I say. “For ten months.”
“I know.”
She doesn't argue the point.
“Doesn't mean he's a bad man. Just means he was the wrong one.”
I don't say anything to that, so Liv keeps going, quieter now, like she's been saving this up.
“Can I say something I never said while you were engaged?”
“You're going to say it either way.”
“Probably.” A small laugh, gone fast.
“He used to call the office sometimes when you were in fittings or on set. Nothing urgent. He'd just ask if you were still on schedule. Never how it was going. Just—schedule.”
I think of the tie. Silver or blue, decided in four seconds, then straight to the timeline for the day.
“I told myself that was how he cared,” I say.
“Logistics as a love language.”
“Maybe it was.” Liv pauses. “But I used to wish he'd ask you something and actually wait for the answer.”
“I noticed.”
“I know you did.”
“I just got very good at ignoring it.”
“Also something you're very good at.”
“Thank you.”
“Not a compliment.” There's a smile in her voice. Then she softens. “You sound good, Savannah.”
“I am good.”
“You sound better than good.”
I don't say anything.
“Interesting,” she says.
“Don't start.”
“I didn't say anything.”
“You were about to.”
“Probably.”
Downstairs, Texie's already got coffee going and her laptop open on the kitchen table, which is never a good sign this early.
“You've seen it,” I say.
“I've seen four versions of it.” She turns the screen around. Some entertainment site has the seating chart screenshot next to a photo of me running down the street in my wedding dress. “This one's my favorite. They interviewed a source close to the couple.”
“Who?”
“Seemingly someone close enough to know everything about your relationship but not close enough to use their name.”
“Helpful.”
Texie clicks out of the article. “The seating chart's getting almost as much attention as the runaway-bride pictures.”
“I'm not a runaway bride. I called off the wedding.”
“I know that. You know that. The woman who filmed you running down a busy Manhattan street apparently missed that detail.”
I take the coffee Texie slides across the table. “Please tell me there's at least one angle where I don't look completely unhinged.”
“There is not.”
“Good.”
“But your shoes are getting a lot of compliments.”
“That's nice. They cost me two weeks' pay.”
“I'm trying to find something positive.”
“Also, I looked up Harrington. There's a whole gallery of her at other people's weddings, always front row, always in white-adjacent. She's done this before, Savannah. You're not the first.”
That should make me angrier. Instead, I'm almost relieved. Maybe it was never really about me. This is just what Mrs. Harrington does when she gets the chance to take over.
“Good riddance,” Texie says, like she's reading my mind, and clinks her mug against mine hard enough that coffee sloshes over the side.
“Texie.”
“I'm serious. Good riddance to the seating chart. Good riddance to table twenty-two. Good riddance to a man who let his mother handle the vows.”
She counts them off on her fingers.
“Good riddance to the safari, honestly, because who wants to get up at five in the morning to drive on dusty roads in a jeep.”
“You're supposed to be comforting me.”
“I am comforting you. This is what comforting you should feel like.”
She pushes a muffin toward me. “Eat something. Clearly you haven't slept, which, considering, is understandable. But I need you energetic. We have a lot to catch up on.”
“Energetic?”
“Yes. You disappear to New York for fifteen years, you don't get to come back and sleep through my plans.”
I break off a piece of the muffin. “I'm almost afraid to ask.”
“You should be.” Texie reaches for her own muffin. “I've got fifteen years of Stonebridge to catch you up on, and I'm not doing it from this kitchen.”
“That sounds threatening.”
“It's supposed to.”
I laugh, and she smiles like that's what she's been trying to get out of me all morning.
“Eat,” she says again. “Then get dressed. We're going out.”
“Where?”
“Stonebridge.”
My eyes drift toward the window at the town I haven't called home in a very long time.
“I thought I was already in Stonebridge.”
Texie grins. “Oh, honey. You haven't seen anything yet.”
“Savannah!” Texie calls from downstairs. “You have thirty seconds before I come up there.”
“You said I had forty minutes.”
“You did. Forty-one minutes ago.”
I check the time.
She's right.
I grab my purse and head for the stairs.
Maybe the heartbreak will come later.
By the time we leave the house, Texie has decided I need a proper introduction to the Stonebridge I missed while I was gone.
Fifteen years requires a schedule.
She drives us downtown and parks near the square, where half the storefronts are familiar and the other half make me wonder if we took a wrong turn somewhere.
The hardware store is still there. So is the pharmacy with the old striped awning.
But the empty storefront beside it is now a café with white tables out front and a chalkboard sign advertising avocado toast.
I stop on the sidewalk.
“Stonebridge has avocado toast?”
Texie acts offended. “We've progressed.”
“Clearly.”
“Wait until you see the bookstore.”
“There's a bookstore?”
“See? This is why you needed me.”
She hooks her arm through mine and pulls me toward the café.
Inside, exposed brick covers one wall, plants hang in the windows, and there's a glass case filled with pastries that definitely didn't exist in the Stonebridge of my childhood.
Texie points me toward a table while she orders.
A few minutes later, she sets a plate of avocado toast in front of me.
I stare at it. “Avocado toast? In Stonebridge?”
“Don't sound so shocked. We're sophisticated now.”
“New York moved on from avocado toast three years ago.”
Texie sits across from me. “Well, we only got avocados last year.”
“Really.”
“Before that we had to spread green beans on toast.”
I laugh and pick up a piece. “You ordered this just to prove Stonebridge is sophisticated.”
“I ordered it because it's good.”
I take a bite.
Unfortunately, she's right.
Texie is entirely too pleased with herself.
“Don't.”
“You like it.”
“It's adequate.”
“You're eating it.”
“I haven't eaten since the muffin you forced on me.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
I take another bite.
Outside the window, people move along the square. A woman pushes a stroller past the café. Two men stand talking outside the hardware store. A group of teenagers comes around the corner laughing, and for a second I can almost see us doing the same thing.
Everything feels known without being exactly the same.
I like that more than I expected.
After lunch, Texie leads me two doors down to a storefront with wide windows and stacks of books arranged around an old wooden bicycle.
I stop again.
“Okay. This is cute.”
“I know.”
She opens the door. “Try not to sound so surprised.”
A little bell rings overhead when we walk inside.
The store is bigger than it looked from the street, with shelves running almost to the ceiling and mismatched chairs tucked into corners. There's a children's section in the back with a painted tree on the wall and a row of tiny chairs beneath it.
I wander toward a display table.
“When did this open?”
“About three years ago.”
“And it survived?”
Texie’s eyebrows go up.
“Sorry. That sounded terrible.”
“It did.”
“I meant a bookstore in a small town.”
“People in Stonebridge read, Savannah.”
“I know people in Stonebridge read.”
“You thought we were sitting around eating green beans on toast.”
I laugh and pick up a book.
Texie wanders toward the back while I make my way along the shelves.
This is the kind of place I would've loved when I was younger.
I spent half my teenage years at the library. Sometimes because I truly needed to study.
Sometimes because home was too distracting.
And sometimes because Wyatt would show up eventually.
I put the book back.
I haven't thought about that in years.
“Well, if that isn't Savannah Blake.”
I turn.
A man is standing at the end of the aisle with a book tucked under one arm and a little girl holding his hand.
It takes me a second.
Then I see it.
“Nate?”
He grins.
“Was beginning to think New York erased the rest of us from your memory.”
I laugh and step around the display.
Nate Walker has aged, obviously. Broader through the shoulders, a little gray already showing near his temples, but the grin is exactly the same one that got him out of trouble with every teacher we ever had.
He gives me a quick hug.
“When did you get back?”
“A few days ago.”
“I heard you were in town.”
“Of course you did.”
“This is Stonebridge.”
The little girl beside him tugs on his hand.
“Sorry. Savannah, this is my daughter, Molly. Molly, this is Savannah. We went to high school together.”
Molly gives me a shy wave.
“Hi, Molly.”
Texie appears from the next aisle carrying two books.
We stand there for a few minutes catching up. Nate married a woman from Nashville. They have two kids. He works with his dad now and coaches youth baseball in the spring.
It's strange hearing an entire adult life summarized in a few sentences when the last version of him I remember was eighteen and trying to convince us all that he'd eventually play professional baseball.
“So have you seen Wyatt yet?”
“I've seen him.”
His grin widens. “You two were ridiculous back then.”
“We were not.”
“Savannah, he used to leave football practice early on Thursdays because you worked at the library.”
I stare at him. “He did not.”
“Every Thursday.”
Texie’s smiling.
“You knew?”
“Everybody knew.”
A memory comes back. The library doors opening after dark. Wyatt's old truck waiting beneath the streetlight, the heat already running on cold nights.
I always thought he just happened to be nearby.
Nate's daughter tugs on his hand, pulling him toward the children's section.
“Good seeing you, Savannah.”
“You too.”
He follows her down the aisle.
I turn to Texie. “Every Thursday?”
She nods. “Every Thursday.”
I had no idea.