Chapter 1
Josie
The apple trees didn't care what the bank said.
That was the first thing I noticed most mornings — before the coffee, before the ledger I'd been avoiding since Sunday, before any of it — walking the west row while the light was still gray and soft over the lake, watching the blossoms open like they'd never once considered the mortgage on the land underneath them.
Three weeks from full bloom. Right on schedule, same as every April since my grandmother planted this row, back when Lark Bay was still mostly farmland and nobody called it a "destination" in the marketing copy.
I picked a browning leaf off the nearest branch out of habit, the same automatic gesture I'd been making since I was six years old trailing behind Grandma Eleanor with a bucket too big for me.
Habit didn't care about the books either.
Nothing out here seemed to have gotten the memo that we were seventeen thousand dollars short of where we needed to be by June.
"You're going to wear a path in that row," Del said, coming up the gravel drive with two coffees and her clipboard already out, hair still damp from a shower she clearly hadn't had time to dry properly.
Del Ortiz had been running event logistics for me since the second season, back when we were both figuring it out with a laminated seating chart and sheer nerve, and she had a gift for reading my mood off the back of my neck before I'd said a word.
"I like the path."
"You like torturing yourself before eight a.m., there's a difference." She handed me a cup, black, exactly right. "Ledger again?"
"Ledger always."
"How bad?"
I didn't answer right away. Behind us, up the slope, the barn sat pale and handsome against the morning — freshly painted two summers ago, the year business was good enough to justify it, before the storm that took the Preston wedding down with it and every insurance premium after.
The barn didn't know it was expensive to keep looking that good.
Nothing out here seemed to know anything about money except me.
"We need every wedding this season to go right," I said. "Not mostly right"
Del winced, the particular wince of someone who'd been doing this job long enough to know what right actually cost in labor and luck. "Define right."
"No storms. No vendor no-shows. No — " I gestured vaguely at the barn, at the tent pad still bare from winter, at the whole shining, expensive, precarious operation my grandmother had built out of an orchard and a stubborn refusal to sell. "No repeats."
She didn't need me to finish the sentence.
Nobody who worked here needed the Preston wedding spelled out anymore; it lived in the walls now, the way certain disasters do, referenced in half sentences and never in full.
Del just nodded and made a note on her clipboard, the kind of note that meant she was already three steps ahead of me, already thinking through contingency plans for weather we didn't have yet.
"Eleanor up?" I asked.
"Kitchen. Making the coffee I just handed you obsolete, probably." Del's mouth twitched. "She's got the recipe book out again."
That made me smile despite myself. My grandmother had strong opinions about a great many things — string light spacing, the correct amount of lavender in a signature cocktail, the exact moment a bride needed someone other than her mother to tell her the dress was right — and none of those opinions had softened one bit in the two years since her hip started making the stairs a project instead of a habit.
If anything, she'd gotten more particular, as if slowing down physically had sharpened everything else about her out of spite.
I found her at the kitchen table in the old farmhouse, glasses pushed up into her white hair, a recipe card in one hand and her cane hooked over the back of the chair like she resented needing it enough to keep it just out of easy reach.
"There she is," Eleanor said, not looking up. "Tell me honestly. Rosemary in the lemonade for the Ashworth reception, or does that read like I'm trying too hard?"
"Depends how hard you're trying."
"I'm always trying that hard. The question is whether it should show." She finally looked up at me over her glasses, and whatever she saw in my face made her set the card down. "You were out at the trees again."
"They're blooming early."
"They're blooming on time. You're just anxious early." She said it without malice, the way she said most true things — matter-of-fact, decades of practice behind it. "Sit. Eat something that isn't coffee."
"I have the insurance renewal to deal with before the Ashworth walkthrough."
"The insurance renewal will still be there in nine minutes." She nudged the chair across from her out with her foot, an old trick, the kind of small command dressed up as an offer that I'd never once successfully refused her. "Sit."
I sat.
The truth was, I'd been putting off the insurance renewal for exactly the reason she probably already knew — the premium had gone up again this year, the third increase since the storm, and the number sitting in that envelope on my desk was going to make the seventeen-thousand-dollar gap into something closer to twenty-two.
I hadn't told Eleanor the exact figure. I told myself it was to spare her the worry, though if I was being honest with myself in the way she always managed to be honest with me, it was at least half so I didn't have to watch her face do the thing it did whenever the numbers came up — that flicker of guilt she had no business feeling, like the storm had been her fault instead of just bad luck and a tent company that cut corners we should have caught.
"How's the season looking?" she asked, sliding a plate of toast toward me I hadn't asked for and wasn't going to refuse.
"Booked solid, actually." I said it and heard, for the first time, how strange it was to say out loud — how it should have felt like relief and mostly felt like pressure with better lighting. "Seven weddings. Every weekend from April through October."
"That's good news."
"It's good news if every single one of them goes perfectly.
" I turned my coffee cup a quarter turn on the table, a habit of my mother's that I'd apparently inherited along with the venue.
"One bad review right now, one bad storm right now, and we're not looking at a slow year. We're looking at the last year."
Eleanor was quiet for a moment, the kind of quiet that meant she was choosing her next words with the same care she chose rosemary quantities. "Marcus Lang called the office again yesterday."
The toast turned to cardboard in my mouth. "What did he want?"
"What he always wants. A meeting. A number.
A very polite reminder that his offer stands until it doesn't." She said it lightly, but I caught the tightness underneath, the thing she wouldn't quite let herself say directly — that a number was starting to sound less unreasonable every time the insurance bill arrived.
"I told him you'd call when you were ready. "
"I'm never going to be ready."
"I know." She reached over and covered my hand with hers, papery and warm, rings loose enough now that they turned when she moved.
"I'm not telling you to call him. I'm telling you he's not going anywhere, and neither is that envelope on your desk, and you can't out-walk either one in the orchard before breakfast." A small, dry smile.
"Believe me. I tried that method for forty years. It works right up until it doesn't."
I didn't have an answer for that, so I ate the toast instead, and let the kitchen do what it always did best — the smell of coffee and lemon and my grandmother's particular brand of stubbornness, holding the whole precarious thing together one morning at a time, the same as it had since before I was born.
My phone buzzed against the table. Del, from the barn, three words that managed to be both good news and a countdown all at once:
Ashworth walkthrough's here.
I looked at the crooked handwriting on the For Booking Inquiries sign visible through the kitchen window — I still hadn't gotten around to fixing it, hadn't had two hundred spare dollars to spare on a sign in eighteen months — and thought, not for the first time, that this season was going to have to be the one where nothing at all went wrong.
I finished my coffee. I did not call Marcus Lang.
I went out to meet the first wedding of the season instead, because whatever the ledger said, whatever the envelope on my desk was waiting to tell me, the trees were blooming on schedule, and so, for now, was I.