Chapter 14
Sawyer
The Nguyens' string lights turned out exactly as promised — two hundred feet of warm white bulbs strung tight through the orchard canopy, the whole walking path glowing gold by the time the sun dropped behind the ridge, guests audibly gasping the first time they rounded the corner from the barn and saw the full length of it lit up at once.
Sawyer had been right about the spacing.
He allowed himself thirty seconds of professional satisfaction about it before the reception swallowed the evening whole, the way receptions always did, no room left for anything but the work.
He was mid-shot of the toasts — the best man three sentences into a story that was clearly headed somewhere emotional, the whole tent gone quiet and soft-focused around him — when the first scream went up from the back row.
It wasn't the kind of scream that meant real trouble. Sawyer had shot enough weddings to know the difference in half a second, the pitch of it more delight than alarm, and he turned toward it already lowering his camera, already half-smiling before he even had a target.
The target, when he found it, was a goat.
Not a small one, either — a broad-shouldered brown-and-white thing with an air of complete, unbothered entitlement, standing directly in the aisle between the reception tables like it had been personally invited, chewing thoughtfully on what appeared to be a centerpiece.
"Is that — “Milo, beside him, had frozen mid-adjustment on his light meter. "Sawyer. Is that a goat?"
"That is definitely a goat."
"Where did it —”
A second goat answered the question for them, trotting out from behind the dessert table with the specific confident gait of an animal that had located the cake and had absolutely no intention of being talked out of its plans.
The tent dissolved into chaos with the particular speed only livestock could produce — half the guests laughing, phones instantly out, a table of bridesmaids shrieking and climbing up onto their chairs as a third goat, smaller and considerably more anxious than the first two, bolted between the tables in a panic that only made everyone else laugh harder.
The best man abandoned his toast mid-sentence to point directly at the nearest goat and shout, with real conviction, "This is a sign, Kevin, I don't know of what, but it's a sign. "
Sawyer got the shot before he fully processed what he was shooting — the bride, hand over her mouth, laughing so hard she'd doubled over in her chair, one goat now standing directly beside her chair inspecting her bouquet with grave professional interest. It was, without question, going to be one of the best candid frames of his entire career.
Josie arrived at a dead run.
"Del found the fence," she said, breathless, already moving toward the largest goat with the particular controlled speed she used for everything, a length of rope in one hand that she'd clearly grabbed off the equipment table on her way past. "Nichols' place next door — their pasture fence gave out sometime this afternoon. Six of them got out. Three came here."
"You have a plan for this?"
"I have a general theory. Grab the small one, it's the panicky one, it'll follow the others if we get the big one contained first." She was already crouching, hand extended, murmuring something low and steady to the goat inspecting the bouquet, and Sawyer set his camera down on the nearest dry surface and went to help without a single moment of hesitation, because apparently that was just what he did now, at this venue, whenever something needed two more hands than she had.
The goat had other plans. It allowed Josie to get within three feet before bolting sideways with startling speed, knocking directly into the dessert table on its way past, and Sawyer watched, in the same slow-motion clarity he remembered from the Preston storm two years ago, as the cake — three tiers, buttercream, the top layer already leaning at a concerning angle from a goat's earlier investigation — began, inevitably, to go.
He didn't think. He lunged, got both hands under the listing top tier just as it separated fully from the one below it, and held it aloft like some absurd offering while cake frosting worked its way steadily into both his sleeves.
"I have the cake," he announced, to no one in particular, to the entire tent, which had gone from laughing to actively cheering at the sight of him standing there holding a wedding cake tier like a trophy while a goat trotted triumphantly away with a fistful of stolen centerpiece flowers in its mouth.
"You have the cake," Josie repeated, arriving at his side slightly out of breath, staring at him holding it with an expression somewhere between disbelief and something that looked dangerously close to delight. "You just — caught it. Mid-fall."
"Reflexes. You mentioned yours at Ashworth. Apparently I have them too."
"I did not mean catch a collapsing wedding cake with your bare hands, I meant a cake stand didn't fully tip over — " She was laughing now, real laughter, the kind that had nothing professional left in it at all, and Sawyer, standing there with frosting up both forearms and a goat somewhere behind him being loudly wrangled by Del and a groomsman who'd apparently grown up on a farm and taken immediate, decisive charge of the whole operation, found he didn't particularly care what happened to the cake anymore.
"Little help," he said, because his arms were starting to shake from holding an entire tier of buttercream cake at an awkward angle, and Josie stepped in close to take the weight of the other side, both of them now holding a wedding cake together in the middle of a tent full of cheering strangers and one increasingly smug goat, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her laughing breath, close enough that when she looked up at him, cake between them and frosting on both their hands, something in the air went suddenly, entirely still.
"This is," she said, "genuinely one of the strangest moments of my professional life."
"High bar. You run wedding venues for a living."
"Even so."
Neither of them moved to set the cake down.
Neither of them, Sawyer registered somewhere underneath the part of his brain still trying to keep three hundred dollars of buttercream from sliding onto the grass, seemed especially motivated to close the two feet of space still left between them, and for one long, suspended second, with the string lights glowing overhead and a goat bleating triumphantly somewhere in the middle distance, he thought — with a clarity that startled him — this is the moment.
He didn't get to find out whether he was right.
"CAKE TABLE, PLEASE, WE HAVE A CAKE TABLE READY," Del bellowed, arriving at a full sprint with two catering staff and an actual clean table in tow, breaking whatever had been building between them clean in half with the sheer force of her arrival.
"Move, move, I need that surface, we are saving this cake, people are watching, this is going in someone's wedding album —”
"Copy that," Sawyer said, snapping back into motion, and he and Josie transferred the tier to the fresh table with the careful coordination of two people who'd apparently developed an unspoken system for crisis management over exactly six weeks of knowing each other, and just like that the moment folded itself back into the ordinary chaos of the evening, gone as quickly as it had arrived.
The goats were fully corralled within another ten minutes — the groomsman-turned-farmhand leading them back toward the Nichols' property with a bucket of feed and a rope, guests still buzzing with the particular electric joy of a wedding that had turned, against every odd, into the best story anyone there would tell for years — and Sawyer spent the rest of the reception with frosting dried stiff along one forearm and a memory card he already knew, without needing to check, held some of the best work of the entire season.
He caught Josie's eye once more before the night ended, across the tent, both of them laughing at some retelling of the goat incident that had already, in the space of two hours, grown to include at least one entirely fictional detail about a fourth goat that had never actually existed.
She didn't look away first this time either. Neither did him.
Milo found him during breakdown, loading gear into the truck with the specific efficient silence of a man who had clearly been saving something up all evening.
"So," Milo said. "Cake."
"Don't."
"I'm not saying anything. I'm just saying — cake, held aloft, dramatic rescue, prolonged eye contact over frosting. That's not a filing error either, boss."
"We got interrupted."
"By Del. Who I happen to know did not actually need that table moved for another four minutes, because I checked, and the catering staff were already handling it.
" Milo's grin was entirely unrepentant. "She just has excellent timing for chaos and terrible timing for everything else. Runs in the family, I'm learning."
Sawyer didn't have a response to that, mostly because he was too busy replaying, against his better judgment, the exact two feet of space that had sat between himself and Josie Marlowe for one long, suspended second before the whole tent came roaring back in around them.
He suspected, driving home under a sky finally gone fully dark, that it wasn't going to be the last time that particular gap tried to close itself. He wasn't entirely sure, anymore, that he wanted it to stay open.