Chapter 5
Josie
The morning after a wedding always felt like the inside of a held breath finally let out — the orchard quiet in a different way than usual, folding chairs stacked in uneven towers by the barn door, one lost bobby pin glinting in the grass where I found it every single time without fail, like the land kept a small souvenir from every ceremony it hosted.
I walked the grounds before anyone else was up, coffee in hand, doing the thing I always did the morning after: counting what had gone right instead of what could have.
It was a discipline Eleanor had taught me without ever saying it was a discipline, just modeling it season after season until it became mine — you don't run a business by grieving the near-misses, you run it by banking the wins.
One near-miss with a cake stand. Zero storms. A bride who'd hugged me so hard at the end of the night she'd nearly knocked the walkie-talkie off my hip, saying, into my shoulder, this was everything, this was exactly everything.
I let myself have that for about six minutes before my brain, with its usual impeccable timing, pivoted straight to the calendar.
Del found me in the office an hour later, hunched over the season spreadsheet with a highlighter I'd been chewing on absently for longer than I wanted to admit.
"You look like a woman doing math she doesn't like the answer to," Del said, dropping into the chair across from my desk and pulling her own coffee out of the crook of her arm like a magic trick.
"I'm cross-referencing vendor lists."
"For fun?"
"For — " I stopped, because saying it out loud made it real in a way I hadn't fully let it be yet, sitting alone with the spreadsheet at six-thirty this morning.
I turned the laptop so she could see the screen, seven rows, seven wedding dates, and one name that appeared in the photographer column of every single one. "For this."
Del leaned in, scanned it, and let out a low whistle. "Huh. Small world."
"It's not a small world, it's a popular photographer, which is a different and much more inconvenient problem." I dropped back in my chair. "Every couple booked him separately. Different planners, different referral sources, and no overlap I can find. He wasn't lying about that part, at least."
"You checked whether he was lying."
"I cross-referenced it. That's different from checking whether he was lying."
"Sure it is." Del's mouth did the thing it did when she was about to say something I wasn't going to enjoy hearing, and had decided to say it anyway because that was, functionally, her entire job description.
"You spent forty-five minutes this morning building a spreadsheet to prove a man you're mad at didn't personally engineer being at your venue every weekend for six months.
That's not investigative work, Josie. That's a symptom. "
"Its due diligence."
"It's a symptom with a highlighter."
I didn't have a comeback for that one, mostly because she wasn't wrong, and we'd known each other long enough that pretending otherwise would have wasted both our time. I capped the highlighter and set it down with more precision than the moment required.
"Yesterday went well," I said instead, redirecting toward safer ground. "Objectively. You should be proud of the tent crew."
"I am. I already sent them a thank-you email with entirely too many exclamation points." Del studied me for a second, the way she did when she was deciding whether to push on something. "How was it? Working with him again. Actually."
"Professional."
"That's the word you're going with?"
"That's the word I'm going with." I pulled the laptop back toward myself, mostly for something to do with my hands.
"He apologized. In person, finally, two years late, which — I don't know what to do with that yet.
It doesn't fix the four bookings we lost the spring after that article ran.
It doesn't fix what almost happened to this place. "
"But?"
"There's no but."
"Josie." Del said my name the way she'd said it a hundred times over eight years of friendship, gentle and completely unwilling to let me off the hook. "I watched him hand you a photo of your own hand on a cake stand like it was a marriage proposal. There's a but somewhere in there."
Heat climbed up the back of my neck, entirely unhelpful and entirely uninvited. "He was being funny. Photographers are always trying to be funny. It's a coping mechanism for spending twelve hours a day watching other people be happy."
"That is a weirdly specific defense for someone who claims this is purely professional."
"I read an article about it once."
"Uh-huh." Del was smiling now, the particular smile she got when she'd landed exactly where she meant to and was gracious enough not to gloat about it out loud.
She let it go, though, because that was the other thing about eight years of friendship — she knew when to push and when to leave a door cracked instead of kicking it open.
"Well. For what it's worth, professionally speaking, his assistant seems nice. "
"Milo?"
"Milo." She said the name like she was testing the shape of it in her mouth, which was, for Del — who dated the way she ran events, with a color-coded system and very little patience for chaos — unusually revealing.
"He helped me reset three centerpieces during the cake incident without being asked, and then apologized for touching my clipboard without permission, which, frankly, is the most attractive thing a man has done in this county in eleven months. "
"Low bar."
"Extremely low bar. Doesn't change the facts." She stood, stretching, clearly satisfied she'd deposited enough chaos into my morning to call it a productive visit. "Speaking of facts — Caldwell wedding's in three weeks. Forecast's already looking iffy for that Saturday."
The word iffy landed in my stomach with more weight than it should have, a full season away from the last time weather had been the word that started everything falling apart. "How iffy?"
"Thirty percent chance of storms as of this morning.
It'll change six more times before then, you know how the lake does its own thing.
" She said it lightly, but she was watching me carefully while she said it, the way you watch someone standing near a ledge they used to fall off of.
"We'll have the backup plan ready either way.
New tent's rated for worse than thirty percent. "
"I know."
"I'm just saying it out loud so you don't spend the next three weeks doing the math thing with a different highlighter."
"Noted."
She left me with that, and I sat for a minute in the quiet of the office, looking at the seven rows on the spreadsheet, one name in six of them staring back at me like a variable I hadn't accounted for when I built this season's plan.
Booked solid, I'd told Eleanor at breakfast three days ago, and I'd meant it as the good news it technically was — a full calendar, a fighting chance at the number we needed by fall.
I hadn't accounted for what it would feel like, walking that calendar forward, to know that every single remaining Saturday this season had Sawyer Reyes written into it whether I was ready for that or not.
I closed the laptop before I could start highlighting anything else, and went to find Eleanor, because the insurance envelope on my desk wasn't going to open itself, and some math I actually did have the stomach for this morning.
I did not, on my way to the farmhouse, let myself think too hard about the fact that some small, unhelpful part of me wasn't dreading the Caldwell wedding nearly as much as I probably should have been.