Chapter 12
Sawyer
The email arrived on a Thursday, from an address Sawyer didn't recognize at first glance — a marketing firm, apparently, working on behalf of Lang Development, requesting a "brief informational call" about his experience shooting weddings at several regional venues, including, specifically, Marlowe Orchard.
He read it twice before the shape of it fully landed.
We'd love your candid perspective as a vendor on the property's operational strengths and limitations. Compensation available for your time.
He sat with his laptop open on the kitchen counter for a long minute, the wind chimes on the porch doing their quiet, tuneless thing outside the window, and felt something cold and familiar settle into his stomach — the same feeling he'd had two years ago reading his own name under a headline he hadn't written, except this time nobody had published anything yet. This time he still had a choice.
He called his father instead of answering the email.
"You get one of these too?" Sawyer asked, no preamble, the second Walt picked up.
"One of what?"
"An email. Marketing firm, working for Lang, asking for my candid vendor perspective on Marlowe Orchard's operational limitations.
" He read the phrase back exactly as it was written, and heard his father go quiet on the other end of the line in a way that told him this wasn't news, or wasn't entirely news. "Dad."
"I didn't send anyone your contact information, if that's what you're asking."
"Did you tell Lang I shoot there? That I'm booked there most of the season?"
A pause, longer than Sawyer liked. "It might've come up. In conversation. He asked who was on the vendor roster for properties he's interested in, and your names not exactly a secret in this town, Sawyer — you've shot half the weddings on the lakeside corridor the last three years."
"That's not the same as him building a file on me to get information out of me about her."
"I know that." Walt's voice had an edge now, defensive and tired in equal measure. "I didn't tell him to email you. I'm not responsible for what a man does with a name once it's out there."
"You're the reason the name was out there at all."
The silence that followed lasted long enough that Sawyer wondered if the call had dropped. It hadn't.
"You're right," Walt said finally, quieter. "I should've thought that through better. I'm sorry."
Sawyer exhaled, some of the heat going out of him at the plain, unguarded apology, because his father didn't hand those out often and never insincerely. "I'm not doing the call."
"I wouldn't expect you to."
"I mean it. Whatever he's offering, whatever angle he's working — I'm not giving him a single word he can use against her business.
Not one." Sawyer said it more forcefully than the conversation strictly required, and heard, underneath it, exactly how much of that force was aimed at himself, at a version of himself two years younger who'd handed a stranger's headline exactly the ammunition it needed without ever meaning to.
"I already did that once. I'm not doing it twice. "
"I understand." A pause, and then, carefully: "You want my honest read on something?"
"Go ahead."
"I don't think this is really about the marina work anymore.
For you." Walt's voice had gone gentler, the tone he used rarely, the one that meant he was setting aside the practical version of a conversation for the truer one underneath it.
"I think you'd be just as angry about that email if you'd never shot a single wedding for that woman.
I think you're angry because you like her, and you're scared of being the reason something bad happens to her twice. "
Sawyer didn't answer right away, mostly because there wasn't a version of denying it that would have held up under even the mildest scrutiny.
"Doesn't matter why I'm angry," he said instead.
"Answer's the same either way. I'm not talking to Lang's people, and if he sends someone else sniffing around your work looking for a way to leverage your relationship with me into information about her, I need you to tell me.
Straight. Even if it costs you the contract. "
"That's a lot to ask a man with a bad knee and a slow month."
"I know it is." Sawyer meant it, meant the weight of asking his father to potentially turn down easy money in a town that didn't hand it out generously to men his age. "I'll help however I can if it comes to that. I've got savings. I can cover a slow month if the marina work dries up over this."
There was a long pause on the line, and when Walt spoke again, something in his voice had shifted — pride, maybe, or something adjacent to it, the specific quiet pride of a father watching his kid make a choice he approved of even when it cost something.
"You've grown up some, since that article," Walt said. "I didn't say much about it at the time. Should have, probably. But I'm saying it now — that's a decent thing you're doing, turning that email down. Doesn't undo anything. But it's decent."
"It's the minimum, Dad. It's not decent, it's just not actively making things worse."
"Most days, son, that's the same thing." A dry huff of something like a laugh. "I'll let you know if Lang's people come around asking about you specifically. And I'll think hard before I take any more of his work, though I'm not making promises I don't know I can keep on a bad month."
"That's all I'm asking."
He hung up and sat with the laptop still open, the unanswered email sitting there in his inbox like a small, patient trap, and typed a reply that took him four attempts to get right — polite, brief, unambiguous, declining the call, declining any future correspondence on the subject, no explanation offered because none was owed.
He hit send before he could talk himself into softening it.
Then, because the guilt hadn't actually gone anywhere just because he'd made the right call this time, he opened a new message and stared at the blank field for a long time before he started typing.
Josie — wanted you to hear this from me directly rather than secondhand.
I got contacted this week by a marketing firm working for Lang Development, asking for my "vendor perspective" on the orchard.
I declined and I'm not engaging with any follow-up.
I don't know what he's building toward, but I wanted you to know it's happening, and that it's not going to include anything from me.
He read it three times, deleted the last line, added it back, deleted the whole thing once and started over with less explanation and more plain fact, because he suspected — correctly, he thought — that after everything, what she needed from him wasn't a performance of loyalty.
It was just information, given straight, the way he should have given it two years ago before a headline did the talking for him.
He sent the shorter version. Then he closed the laptop, and sat for a while in his mother's kitchen with the wind chimes going outside, thinking about the particular shape of the promise he'd just made — not to Josie, not even really to his father, but to himself, the quiet, private kind that didn't need anyone else to witness it to count.
He wasn't going to be the reason it happened again. Whatever it turned out to mean, by the end of this season.