Chapter 7
Josie
Eleanor stumbled on the porch steps on a Tuesday morning, and though it lasted less than two seconds — a missed step, a grab for the railing, her cane clattering down two stairs ahead of her while I dropped a tray of seedlings and crossed the yard faster than I'd moved since the cake stand — those two seconds rearranged something in my chest that hadn't settled back into place by dinner.
"I'm fine," she said, for the fourth time, sitting at the kitchen table with an ice pack against her wrist and an expression that dared me to disagree with her. "I missed a step. People miss steps."
"People who aren't eighty-one don't usually end up on the ground because of it."
"I didn't end up on the ground. I ended up on the railing, which is what railings are for.
" She said it crisply, the particular tone she used when she wanted a subject closed, and under normal circumstances I'd have let her have it, because arguing with Eleanor Marlowe about her own competence was a battle I'd lost more times than I'd won.
But her hand was shaking slightly around the ice pack, small enough that she probably thought I hadn't noticed, and I had.
"I'm calling Dr. Okonkwo in the morning."
"You are not."
"I am, and you're going to let me, because if you fall down those stairs during the Caldwell wedding in front of a hundred guests, that's a headline I genuinely cannot survive this season.
" I said it more sharply than I meant to, adrenaline still working its way out of my system, and immediately regretted the word headline the second it left my mouth — watched it land on her, watched the guilt flicker across her face that had nothing to do with her wrist and everything to do with an article two years old that she still, quietly, blamed herself for in ways she'd never said out loud and I'd never made her say.
"I'm sorry," I said. "That wasn't fair."
"It's alright." She set the ice pack down, flexed her fingers experimentally, and winced. "You're not wrong to worry. I don't love that you're not wrong."
I made the doctor's appointment that night while she was in the bath, because some fights were worth having after the fact instead of during, and sat afterward at the kitchen table with the insurance envelope still unopened beside my laptop, feeling the particular exhaustion of someone holding up more than one structure at a time and increasingly unsure how many hands she actually had.
Marcus Lang came to the orchard himself two days later, which I hadn't expected.
His calls I'd learned to screen. His emails I'd learned to leave unread for exactly the two days it took to remind him this wasn't a business that operated on his timeline.
But there was no screening a man who simply drove up the gravel path in a car that cost more than my truck and my tractor combined, and got out smiling like he'd been invited.
"Ms. Marlowe." He had the kind of handshake that lasted a beat too long, firm in a way that felt more like a demonstration than a greeting. "I hope I'm not catching you at a bad time."
"I'm working, Mr. Lang, which I generally am."
"Of course. I won't take much of it." He glanced around the property with the specific, appraising sweep I'd seen him do twice before, the sweep of a man mentally clearing land that hadn't been cleared yet, picturing something that wasn't there.
"The orchard's looking beautiful this season. Bloom's early, isn't it?"
"On schedule, actually."
"Right. Of course." A small smile, like he'd expected that correction and found it charming rather than pointed. "I'll get to it, since I know your time's valuable. We've revised our offer."
He said the number like it was a gift, the way people who dealt in numbers that size always did, and it was — I made myself acknowledge this honestly, standing there in the April sun with a man in an expensive jacket telling me what my grandmother's forty years were worth — a genuinely significant amount of money.
More than the last offer. Enough to clear every debt this place carried twice over and walk away with something left besides.
"That's a generous number," I said, because it was true, and because Eleanor had taught me that the first rule of negotiating with someone like Marcus Lang was never letting him see you flinch.
"It's a fair number for a property with real limitations, Ms. Marlowe, and I think you know that better than most. Aging structures.
A storm two seasons back that I understand cost you a fair number of future bookings.
" He said it lightly, almost sympathetically, and I felt something in my spine go rigid at the casual way he handled that particular wound, like he'd done his homework and knew exactly which nerve to press.
"I'm not trying to be unkind. I'm trying to offer you an exit from a business that's clearly costing you more than it's giving back some seasons.
There's no shame in that. Plenty of family operations reach a point where the kindest thing is to let them go gracefully instead of watching them slowly fail. "
"This one isn't failing."
"Not yet." He smiled again, and it didn't reach his eyes even slightly. "I've got a proposal that keeps the orchard rows intact, incidentally — works them into the resort's landscaping as a feature, actually. A little nod to the property's history. Guests love that kind of authenticity."
The idea of my grandmother's orchard rows repurposed as a resort's authenticity feature sat in my stomach like a stone.
"I'm not selling, Mr. Lang."
"Not today." He said it easily, unbothered, a man who'd clearly heard no before and had never once let it be the end of a conversation.
"I understand there's sentiment tied up in land like this.
I respect that, genuinely. But sentiment doesn't cover a roof repair or an insurance premium, and I suspect you know that math better than anyone, given the season you're walking into.
" He glanced toward the barn, toward the tent pad, the appraising sweep again.
"Seven weddings, is it? That's an ambitious calendar for a venue your size.
I hope it goes smoothly for you. I really do. "
"It will."
"I hope so." He reached into his jacket, produced a card he'd clearly had ready before he ever got out of the car, and held it out with the same practiced patience.
"The offer's good through the end of the season.
No pressure before then. But if even one of those seven weddings goes sideways, Ms. Marlowe — and I've seen this business long enough to know that weddings do, sometimes, no matter how careful anyone is — I'd hate for you to find yourself negotiating from a worse position than the one you're in today. "
I took the card because refusing it would have felt like giving him something, some visible crack he could point to later, and I was not going to hand Marcus Lang a single crack he hadn't already found on his own.
"Have a good afternoon," I said, and turned back toward the barn before he'd finished the polite reply, before I had to stand there one second longer watching a man calculate my grandmother's life's work down to a number and a landscaping feature.
I didn't go back to the office. I walked the orchard instead, the same west row I'd walked the morning of the Ashworth wedding, blossoms fuller now, three weeks closer to full bloom, and let myself feel, for exactly as long as it took to reach the end of the row and turn back, the full weight of what I'd just refused.
It would have solved everything. That was the part I hated most, standing there — not that the offer existed, but that some small, exhausted, entirely reasonable part of me had done the math right alongside Marcus Lang while he said the number, had pictured Eleanor's wrist, the insurance envelope, the seven weddings that all had to go perfectly or the whole thing could still collapse anyway, offer or no offer.
I thought about telling Eleanor. I decided, walking back toward the house with the card still folded in my palm that I wouldn’t— not yet, not until I had to, not while she was still icing a wrist and pretending it didn't hurt as much as it clearly did.
She'd spent forty years protecting me from every version of this exact worry when I was small enough not to carry it.
I could give her a few more weeks of not carrying this one.
I put Marcus Lang's card in the bottom drawer of my desk, underneath the insurance envelope I still hadn't opened, and told myself, with more conviction than I entirely felt, that the Caldwell wedding was three weeks away, and if it went as well as Ashworth had, that was one more piece of proof — to Lang, to the bank, to the small frightened part of myself I never let anyone see — that this place didn't need saving from anyone but weather and bad luck, and I intended to outlast both.