Chapter 2
Sawyer
The drive into Lark Bay took four hours from Chicago, and every year Sawyer forgot that the last twenty minutes were the ones that actually mattered — the stretch after the highway gave up and the road narrowed down into two lanes of cracked asphalt running along the water, past the boat launch, past the diner that had changed names four times since he was a kid and never once changed the menu, until the trees closed in overhead and the light went that particular green-gold color that didn't exist anywhere else he'd ever shot a wedding.
He'd built a whole career on being somewhere else.
Two hundred weddings a year, give or take, scattered across three states, a client list that had grown mostly by word of mouth and one very good year on a wedding blog that still sent him inquiries he didn't have calendar space for.
He could have based himself anywhere. He'd told himself for two years that Lark Bay was just efficient — his parents' house sat empty most of the year since his mother passed and his father took up permanent residence at the marina office instead, and a free place to crash during the region's busiest season was just good math.
That wasn't the whole truth. It was never the whole truth when it came to this town.
He pulled into the driveway a little past four, gravel popping under the tires of a car that had seen better upholstery, and sat there for a second with the engine off, looking at the house.
His mother's wind chimes were still hanging by the porch, tangled and silent, because nobody had gotten around to either fixing them or taking them down.
Some jobs you just left half-finished forever because finishing them meant admitting something.
He knew something about that.
Inside, the house smelled like a place that only got aired out twice a year.
He dropped his bags in the hallway, propped the porch door open to let the lake air cut through the staleness, and went straight for the guest room he'd converted into a workspace three seasons back — gear cases stacked against the wall, two monitors he only used from May through October, a corkboard still pinned with test prints from a wedding he'd shot the previous fall.
He didn't unpack much else. There was a rhythm to this that his hands knew even when the rest of him wasn't paying attention: camera bodies out, batteries on the charger, lenses checked one by one against the light from the window, the small ritual that had gotten him through every season since he was twenty-four and terrified he'd talked his way into a career he couldn't actually do.
His phone buzzed on the desk. Milo.
You in town yet? Ashworth's tomorrow, 2pm ceremony. I confirmed with the coordinator this morning — some woman named Del. Very organized. Slightly terrifying.
Sawyer huffed something close to a laugh and typed back: Just got in. What venue?
The three dots appeared and disappeared twice before Milo's answer came through, and Sawyer already half knew, the way you know a storm's coming before the sky actually changes — some old animal instinct for the specific quality of bad luck that liked to find him in this town.
Marlowe Orchard. You good?
He looked at the message for longer than it deserved.
Two years, and he still hadn't come up with an actual answer to that question, just a rotating set of things he told himself instead — it's a job, it's the biggest venue in the county, half my bookings run through there whether I like it or not, this isn't about her.
All true. None of them the reason his stomach had gone tight and cold the second he read the name.
Fine, he typed back. Just a venue.
Milo, who had worked for him for three years and had an irritating gift for reading the gap between what Sawyer said and what Sawyer meant, sent back a single question mark, and then, when Sawyer didn't answer that either: Ok. See you at 1 for setup.
Sawyer set the phone face-down and went back to the lenses, because that was easier than sitting with the particular shape of guilt that had been living somewhere under his ribs since the fall two years ago when he'd opened the regional directory's autumn issue and seen his own careful paragraph run under a headline he never wrote and wouldn't have approved — A Cautionary Tale for Brides Considering Marlowe Orchard — his measured sentence about a venue not yet ready for its own ambition dressed up in a font built for outrage, shared four hundred times before he'd even finished reading it himself.
He'd called the editor. He remembered that much clearly — standing in this exact kitchen, phone against his ear, asking her to pull it down or at least change the framing, and being told, not unkindly, that it was already out, already doing exactly what a headline like that was built to do, and that his name was on the byline whether he liked the packaging or not.
He'd meant to drive out there. Apologize in person, or at least try to explain that the words on the page and the words at the top of the page weren't the same thing, not that it would have made much difference to a business bleeding bookings either way.
He'd gotten as far as the end of her driveway once, that first winter, engine idling, and then a car had pulled in behind him — a vendor delivery, someone with an actual reason to be there — and he'd used it as an excuse to leave without getting out.
Two years was a long time to mean to say something and never say it. He was aware, in the dry, unsparing way he was aware of most of his own failures that at some point meaning to stopped being a real intention and became just a story he told himself to feel less like a coward.
He finished checking the last lens as the light outside went orange, then gold, then that deep blue that meant the lake was about to disappear into the dark.
He made himself eat something standing at the counter.
He did not, though he told himself twice that he should, look up the Ashworth wedding timeline again — he already had it memorized, ceremony at two, cocktail hour on the east lawn, reception under the new tent Del Ortiz's email had specifically and pointedly described as fully reinforced, weather-rated, professionally installed this time, in a way that told him exactly what she assumed he was thinking about, because it was exactly what he was thinking about.
He wondered, standing there in his mother's kitchen with the wind chimes silent outside the window, whether Josie Marlowe had read his name on tomorrow's vendor list yet.
Whether she'd had the same four hours of low-grade dread he'd had, driving toward this, or whether two years and a business to save had given her better things to spend her dread on than him.
He suspected, without much satisfaction, that it was probably the second one. She'd never struck him as someone with room in her schedule for grudges she couldn't also put to productive use.
He didn't sleep well. He hadn't expected to.
By one o'clock the next afternoon he was standing at the edge of the orchard's east lawn with two camera bodies slung across him and a folding stepladder tucked under one arm, watching the Ashworth wedding party's rented chairs go up in careful, even rows under a sky that was, for once, exactly as blue as the forecast had promised.
The barn stood freshly painted against the tree line.
The tent — new, he registered, definitely new, the stakes driven deep and the guylines taut — didn't so much as ripple in the light breeze coming off the lake.
It looked, if he was honest, like a venue that had learned something the hard way and put every dollar it didn't have into not learning it twice.
"Reyes." Milo appeared at his elbow with a light meter and the specific brightness he got before a wedding, like a dog that knew a walk was imminent. "Coordinator's headed this way. The terrifying one."
Sawyer turned, and there she was — coming across the grass with a clipboard against her chest and a walkie-talkie crackling at her hip, dark hair pulled back, moving fast in the particular controlled way of someone who'd decided a long time ago that running looked worse than just walking faster than everyone else.
Not Del.
Josie stopped a few feet away, and for one full second neither of them said anything at all, the two years between them sitting there in the bright April light like something they'd both have to step over eventually, one way or another.