Chapter 11
Josie
I woke up the morning after the Caldwell wedding still thinking about his hand over mine on that rope, which was, on reflection, an unacceptable amount of real estate for one four-second moment to be occupying in my head twelve hours later.
I lay there a while longer than I should have, staring at the ceiling of my apartment above the old carriage house, doing the thing I did whenever I was avoiding a feeling — cataloging it instead of having it.
Adrenaline, I decided, same verdict as three weeks ago at Ashworth.
Storm, stress, relief, all of it landing on the nearest available person.
It was a tidy explanation. It had the added benefit of being at least partially true.
It did not explain why I'd looked at the vow shot he showed me and felt something closer to being seen than I'd felt from a photograph in years — not the venue, not the business, just me, crouched by a child's shoe, caught in a moment I hadn't performed for anyone.
I got up before I could keep interrogating it, made coffee, and went to check on Eleanor, whose wrist brace was finally coming off that afternoon and who greeted the news with the specific satisfaction of a woman who'd spent two weeks being managed and fully intended to stop being managed the second medically possible.
"You look tired," she said, studying me over her glasses while I refilled her water glass.
"Long wedding."
"I heard. Storm test, apparently, and you passed with flying colors." She said it with unmistakable pride, the kind she rarely let show that plainly. "Del told me about the light lines. Said you and the photographer had them secured in under five minutes."
"He's efficient."
"Mm." Eleanor's expression did something complicated and entirely unhelpful. "Is that all he is?"
"Grandma."
"I'm asking a simple question." She set her coffee down with the particular deliberateness she used when she wanted a subject to know it wasn't going anywhere. "You've mentioned him three separate times this week without me asking a single follow-up question. That's new."
"I've mentioned him because he's shooting five more weddings this season. It's logistics."
"Its logistics the way I discussed your grandfather's fishing schedule for six months before I admitted I was tracking it for reasons that had nothing to do with fish.
" She reached over, patted my hand, entirely too pleased with herself.
"I'm not telling you what to feel about it.
I'm telling you I recognize the pattern, and you're allowed to have complicated feelings about a man who wronged you and then showed up two years later trying to fix it.
Both things can sit in the same chest at once.
I promise you it doesn't make you inconsistent. "
I didn't have a response for that, mostly because she wasn't wrong and I hadn't yet found the version of this conversation I was ready to have out loud, even with her.
Del cornered me at the office an hour later with the specific energy of someone who'd been waiting all morning for an opening.
"So," she said, dropping into her usual chair, "the rope thing."
"There is no rope thing."
"There was absolutely a rope thing. I watched it happen from the pavilion steps, Josie, along with, I would estimate, forty guests who were also watching it happen, several of whom I heard commenting on it during dinner.
" She raised an eyebrow. "'Is the photographer with her?
' Direct quote. From the mother of the groom. "
Heat crawled up my neck. "It was a light line. It was thirty seconds of tying a knot in the rain."
"It was thirty seconds of tying a knot in the rain that you have apparently been thinking about since, given the way you just turned the color of the barn.
" Del leaned forward, and her teasing dropped, just slightly, into something gentler.
"I'm not trying to make this a thing if it's not a thing.
I know what he did. I know what it cost this place, and I know you're allowed to still be angry about it no matter how good he was with a light line during a storm.
I just — I watched you laugh yesterday. Really laugh, not the polite vendor version.
I haven't seen that in a while, and I wanted to say something before you talked yourself out of noticing it. "
I looked down at the spreadsheet in front of me, seven rows, one name in six of them, and felt the whole complicated weight of it settle over me at once — the article, the apology, the storm, the hand on the rope, the six candid photos I hadn't seen but suspected existed because I'd caught him lowering the camera twice yesterday with an expression I couldn't quite name.
"I don't know what to do with it," I admitted. "The wanting to trust him and the knowing what happened last time I let my guard down around someone connected to this place's survival — they're not canceling each other out. They're just both there. All the time now."
"That sounds exhausting."
"It is." I rubbed my eyes. "And there's a version of this where I'm an idiot for even entertaining it. He wrote the thing that almost cost us everything. I don't get to just — forget that because he's good with a rope and generous with compliments."
"Nobody's saying forget it." Del's voice was steady, the voice she used when she actually meant something instead of teasing.
"I'm saying you're allowed to let someone earn something back slowly, on your terms, without it meaning you're forgetting what it cost you the first time.
Those aren't the same thing, even if your brain's been trained to treat them like they are. "
I didn't have an answer for that either, so I let it sit, the way I let most things Del said that were smarter than I wanted them to be in the moment.
"How's it going with Milo," I said instead, mostly to move the conversation off myself, and watched with some satisfaction as it was her turn to go faintly pink.
"We're not talking about that."
"You just spent five minutes analyzing a rope."
"That's different. That's your rope. Mine is private.
" But she was smiling despite herself, and I let her have the deflection, because eight years of friendship had taught me exactly when to push and when to let someone keep something small and new to themselves a little longer before the world got a vote on it.
I thought about Sawyer more than I wanted to admit for the rest of that week — not constantly, not in any way that interfered with the actual work of running a venue with two more weddings' worth of logistics stacked up in front of me, but in the small unguarded moments, walking the orchard in the morning, lying awake at night doing math that had nothing to do with the ledger.
I thought about the fact that trust, once broken, didn't come back all at once.
It came back the way the light did after a storm — slow, uneven, one clear patch at a time, and you didn't get to demand the whole sky be blue again just because you wanted it to be.
You waited. You watched. You let each clear patch be exactly what it was, without promising it meant the storm was over for good.
I wasn't ready to say that out loud to anyone, not to Del, not to Eleanor, and certainly not to Sawyer himself, standing at the edge of some future wedding with his camera and his careful, earnest apologies and his infuriating habit of being right about the weather.
But I stopped, that week, actively arguing myself out of the small clear patches when they showed up.
That, I suspected, was its own kind of progress, even if it didn't feel like it yet.