Chapter 6
Sawyer
His father's marina office smelled the same way it had smelled Sawyer's entire life — diesel and coffee and the particular mildew of a building that sat too close to the water to ever fully dry out — and Walt Reyes was exactly where Sawyer expected to find him at nine in the morning, hunched over a stack of invoices with his readers pushed down his nose and a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST FISHERMAN going cold at his elbow.
"There he is." Walt didn't look up right away, which was its own kind of greeting, forty years of a man who showed affection through continued attention to whatever task was already in front of him. "Season started yet, or you just driving around scaring brides for fun."
"Started Saturday. Ashworth wedding, out at the orchard."
That got Walt to look up.
"Marlowe place." He said it carefully, the way he'd been saying it carefully for two years now, ever since the article, ever since the one dinner where Sawyer had tried to explain what happened and his father had mostly just watched him with an expression Sawyer still hadn't fully decoded — not disapproval, exactly.
Something closer to worry. "How'd that go? "
"Fine. Good, actually. Tent held, ceremony was on time, Josie ran the whole thing like she'd been doing it twenty years instead of six.
" Sawyer dropped into the folding chair across from the desk, the same one that had been in this office since before he could remember, and its vinyl seat cracked and taped along one seam.
"I'm booked there five more times this season. "
Walt set his pen down slowly, which Sawyer recognized as a bad sign before his father said a single word.
"You should probably know something, then." Walt took his readers off, folded them, set them on the invoices with a precision that meant he was buying himself time. "Marcus Lang's been in here twice this month."
"Lang Development? What's he want with a marina?"
"Not the marina." Walt's jaw worked for a second.
"He's been asking around about the orchard land.
Whether it's viable for that lake-view resort concept he's been shopping since the county rezoned the shoreline corridor two years back.
He knows I do the site work for half his projects.
He wanted my read on the terrain before he made a formal offer. "
The office suddenly felt smaller than it had ninety seconds ago. "You gave him a read."
"I gave him a professional assessment because that's what he was paying for, same as I'd give anybody.
" Something defensive crept into Walt's voice, the tone of a man who'd already had this argument with himself before Sawyer walked in.
"its good land, Sawyer. Elevated, lake-facing, orchard soil that'd hold a foundation fine.
I told him that because it's true, not because I've got some agenda against a woman I've met exactly twice in my life. "
"Did you know he'd already offered? That he's been offering her for a year?"
"I didn't know the specifics. I do site assessments, not negotiations.
" Walt rubbed a hand over his jaw, and for a second he looked older than Sawyer usually let himself notice, the two years since Sawyer's mother passed sitting heavier on him some mornings than others.
"I'm not trying to take anything from anybody.
I'm trying to keep a small business open in a town that doesn't have a lot of work for a guy my age who does what I do.
Lang pays on time and pays well. That matters more to me some months than it probably should. "
Sawyer sat with that for a moment, because he understood it — understood it in the specific, uncomfortable way you understand your own choices reflected back at you in someone else's.
He'd told Josie, more or less, the same version of this same excuse two years ago.
I have a job. I have obligations that don't leave room for sentiment about one venue's feelings.
It had sounded reasonable at the time. It sounded different now, sitting across from his father in an office that smelled like diesel, hearing the same shape of logic used to justify circling the same woman's livelihood from a different angle.
"He's going to keep pushing," Sawyer said. "Isn't he."
"Man like Lang doesn't stop pushing till somebody either sells or builds a wall he can't get past." Walt picked his pen back up, a small physical retreat from a conversation he clearly hadn't wanted to have this directly.
"I'm not telling you this to put you in the middle of something.
I'm telling you because you're going to hear it from somebody eventually, and I'd rather it be me, straight, than you hearing half of it secondhand and deciding I'm the villain in whatever's going on between you two. "
"There's nothing going on between us."
Walt gave him a look that had absolutely no patience for that sentence.
"Son. You drove four hours yesterday to shoot a wedding at a venue you've been actively avoiding for two years, and you're sitting in my office at nine in the morning asking follow-up questions about a land deal instead of unpacking your gear.
I raised you. I know what you look like when something's nothing. "
Sawyer didn't have a response to that, mostly because it was accurate, and he'd never been especially good at lying to his father even when the truth was inconvenient.
"I told her I was sorry," he said instead. "For the article. Finally."
"Two years." Walt let out a short breath that wasn't quite a laugh. "That's a long time to carry something."
"I know."
"She take it well?"
"She said she heard me. Said she wasn't ready to do anything with it yet.
" Sawyer looked down at his hands, at the calluses across two fingers that came from years of camera straps, and thought about the cake stand, the four minutes the officiant ran long that nobody noticed but her, the near-laugh he'd startled out of her before she reeled it back in.
"That's fair, though. I earned exactly that much patience and not an ounce more. "
"Sounds like a decent answer, for what it's worth.
" Walt studied him for a second, and something in his expression softened, old grief and older love both sitting close to the surface the way they had more often since Sawyer's mother passed.
"You want my advice, which you didn't ask for, so feel free to ignore it same as always — don't let a land deal I've got nothing to do with the outcome of become the reason you talk yourself out of fixing something you clearly want fixed.
I'll take Lang's site work or I won't. I'll figure out the marina's books one way or another, same as I always have.
That's not your weight to carry on top of your own. "
"You don't sound like a man who's going to say no to him."
"I haven't decided anything yet." Walt's voice had an edge to it now, tired more than sharp.
"It's easy money in a town that doesn't hand out a lot of easy money to a sixty-one-year-old contractor with a bad knee.
I'm not going to pretend that doesn't matter to me.
But I'm also not going to sit here and tell you I'd feel good about it if it meant helping a man like Lang push a woman off land her grandmother built with her own two hands.
I've got some sense left, even if my bank account argues otherwise some months. "
Sawyer nodded slowly, and let the conversation settle into the kind of quiet the two of them had gotten good at over the years — not uncomfortable, just full, the way most real conversations with his father tended to get once they'd said the parts that were hardest to say.
"I've got the Caldwell wedding out there in three weeks," he said eventually. "Then five more after that."
"Then I guess you'll be seeing a lot of her."
"I guess I will."
Walt picked his readers back up, signaling the conversation's natural end the way he always did, sliding back toward the invoices with the particular relief of a man who'd said the hard thing and was glad to be done saying it. "Do me a favor, then."
"What's that?"
"Don't let me be the reason you two end up on opposite sides of something you're already halfway out of on your own." He didn't look up this time. "I raised you to be smarter than your old man about some things. This is probably one of them."
Milo was already at the studio when Sawyer got there, hunched over the previous day's memory cards with the specific focus he brought to sorting a shoot, three monitors glowing in the dim converted garage that served as Sawyer's off-season workspace.
"You look like you had a morning," Milo said, not looking up from the screen.
"You have no idea." Sawyer dropped into the chair beside him, rubbing a hand over his face. "How's the Ashworth sort coming?"
"Good. Better than good, actually — I want to show you something.
" Milo pulled up a folder, scrolled through a run of candid frames from yesterday's reception, and stopped on one Sawyer didn't remember consciously taking.
Josie, mid-laugh, caught off guard at something just out of frame, the string lights soft and gold behind her, her whole face open in a way she probably had no idea he'd captured.
"This one's good. Really good. Might be one of the best candids in the whole set, and it's not even of the couple. "
Sawyer looked at it for a beat too long.
"Pull it from the album," he said finally. "Client shots only."
"You sure? It's genuinely one of the best frames from the whole day."
"I'm sure." He wasn't, not entirely, but he also wasn't ready to sit with what it meant that his hands had found that shot without his brain signing off on it first. "Also — how'd it go with Del yesterday? You two seemed friendly during the cake thing."
Milo's ears went faintly pink, which was answer enough on its own. "She's very organized."
"That's the whole review?"
"That's the whole review I'm giving right now." Milo clicked back to the working folder, deliberately busying himself with metadata tags. "You want to talk about your morning, or are we both just going to sit here not talking about things?"
"Let's just sort the photos, Milo."
"Copy that, boss."
They worked in silence for a while after that, the quiet, easy kind, both of them apparently equally content to leave their respective unspoken things exactly where they were for now — filed away, unlabeled, waiting for a season that had a lot more weddings left in it than either of them had fully reckoned with yet.