Chapter 8
Sawyer
The Caldwell walkthrough was supposed to take forty-five minutes.
It took two hours, and Sawyer spent most of the drive back to the marina trying to figure out exactly when the shift had happened — the point where a professional site visit had turned into something that felt, uncomfortably, like the best two hours of his week.
He'd arrived a few minutes early, the way he always did, and found Josie already down by the lakeside lawn where the Caldwell ceremony would go up in three weeks — no clipboard this time, just a battered field notebook and a mechanical pencil she chewed on the cap of when she was thinking, standing at the exact spot where the arch would eventually go, turning in a slow circle like she was reading the light itself.
"You're early," she said, without turning around, which meant she'd clocked his truck on the gravel before he'd even parked.
"Occupational habit. Bad light ruins more weddings than bad weather." He came to stand a few feet from her, following her sightline out toward the water. "This is a different setup than the barn ceremonies."
"First lakeside wedding of the season. Caldwells wanted the water in every shot instead of the orchard." She made a note in the field book, pencil scratching fast. "Ceremony faces east, which means you'll want your guests seated with the sun mostly behind them by four, not in their eyes."
"I was going to suggest exactly that."
"I know. I read your Ashworth timeline notes." She glanced at him sideways, something almost mischievous in it. "You annotate your shot list like it's a legal document. Very thorough. Slightly alarming."
"It's efficient."
"It's alarming and efficient. Both things can be true.
" She turned fully now, tucking the pencil behind her ear, and for a second Sawyer had the strange, specific sensation of being properly looked at by her for the first time since he'd arrived in town — not measured, not braced against, just looked at, the way you look at someone you've decided, provisionally, to stop keeping at arm's length.
"Del says you flagged the forecast three separate times this week. "
"Thirty percent's not nothing, on a lake, in a valley that funnels weather in off the water. I like to know the contingency before I need it, not while I'm standing in it."
Something flickered across her face — quick, gone before he could fully read it, but he recognized the shape of it anyway, because he'd been carrying a version of the same flicker himself since the Ashworth ceremony ran long and his stomach had dropped before his brain caught up.
Two years, and a storm still meant something specific to both of them that had nothing to do with meteorology.
"Backup's under the pavilion, forty yards up the slope," she said, businesslike again, already walking, and he fell into step beside her without either of them commenting on it.
"Covered, good sightlines toward the water even from up there, generator wired in case we lose power.
We didn't have that option two years ago.
" She said it plainly, no weight on it, the way you'd mention a fact about inventory, but Sawyer heard the whole two years underneath it anyway.
"You've thought about every version of this."
"I've thought about every version of this three times over, and then I hired an engineer to look at the tent specs, and then I made Del walk the drainage with me in the rain last October just to watch where the water actually pooled instead of where I assumed it would.
" She stopped at the base of the pavilion, looked back down the slope toward the lake, toward the exact spot where the arch would stand.
"I don't get to have an iffy forecast anymore, Sawyer.
I get storms I've already planned four responses to, or I don't book the date at all. "
"That sounds exhausting."
"It's cheaper than the alternative."
He didn't have a response to that right away, mostly because there wasn't a version of a response that wouldn't have circled straight back to the article, to the thing he'd apologized for once and didn't want to keep apologizing for on a loop every time it surfaced between them.
So instead he did the thing he was actually good at — pulled his camera up, framed the pavilion against the lake with the afternoon light cutting gold across the water, and said, "Come here a second. "
"What?"
"Just — here. Stand where the officiant's going to stand." He gestured to a spot near the pavilion's edge. "I want to check the backdrop before I commit to a lens for this."
She gave him a skeptical look but complied, moving to the spot, arms crossed, clearly braced for whatever ridiculous photographer instruction was coming next.
"Relax your shoulders," he said. "You look like you're facing a firing squad."
"I'm facing a camera. Same energy, some days."
"That's a very specific level of trust in me for someone who spent the first two years of knowing me being professionally furious."
"I wasn't professionally furious. I was personally and professionally furious.
There's a distinction." But she was fighting a smile now, he could see it, the corner of her mouth doing the thing it had done at the cake table three weeks ago, right before she'd caught herself and reeled it back in.
This time she didn't fully reel it back. "Get your shot, Reyes."
He got the shot — not of her, technically, though she was standing dead center in the frame, arms uncrossed now, actual sunlight catching the loose pieces of hair that had come free from her braid, the lake gold and moving behind her — and lowered the camera to find her still watching him, curious in a way that had none of the wariness from three weeks ago left in it.
"Good backdrop," he said, which was true, and also entirely beside the point of what he was actually thinking.
"Good," she echoed, and there was a beat where neither of them moved, the whole afternoon suddenly very quiet except for the small lap of water against the shore below and somewhere behind them, faint, a bird he couldn't identify going through its whole repertoire in the trees along the property line.
"I should get the shot list finalized," he said eventually, because someone had to say something, and it was easier to say something practical than to examine what exactly had just passed between them in a two-second silence over a light meter.
"Right. Yeah." She cleared her throat, reached for the field notebook like it was a life raft. "I'll email you the vendor timeline tonight. Florist's coming in at eleven, caterer's doing a tasting run at one, so if you want to scope any of the reception details before the actual day —”
"I'll take the eleven o'clock. Florist setups are usually good for detail shots."
"Noted." She wrote it down, and he watched her do it, watched the particular focus she brought to something as small as a scheduling note, the same focus he'd watched her bring to a wobbling cake stand and a four-minute-long officiant and, three weeks ago, to the specific work of standing in front of him and saying I heard you, I'm not ready to do anything with it yet — a woman who took every single thing seriously, including, he was starting to suspect, whatever this was turning into.
They finished the walkthrough without incident — checked the drainage, confirmed the generator specs, argued pleasantly for ten minutes about whether the reception tables should run parallel or perpendicular to the water, an argument Sawyer lost on genuinely sound photographic grounds he was annoyed to have not thought of first — and by the time he got back to his truck the sun had dropped low enough to turn the whole lake the particular burnished color he usually only got to see through a viewfinder, on someone else's wedding day, never just standing in it for its own sake.
He sat in the driver's seat for a minute before he started the engine, turning something over that he didn't have a comfortable name for yet — not quite the guilt he'd been carrying for two years, not quite the wariness he'd walked into Ashworth with three weeks ago, something else entirely, something that felt, if he let himself sit with it long enough to name it, dangerously close to looking forward to the next wedding on the calendar for reasons that had very little to do with the light.
His phone buzzed. Milo, checking in on the walkthrough.
How'd it go? Storm plan solid?
Sawyer looked back out at the pavilion, empty now, the spot where she'd stood with her shoulders finally unclenched still visible in his mind exactly as clearly as it would be on his memory card.
Solid, he typed back. We're covered.
He wasn't entirely sure, driving home through the gold-going-blue evening, whether he meant the wedding or something else. He suspected, uncomfortably, that it might have been both.