Chapter 15
Josie
I woke up the morning after the Nguyen wedding with dried buttercream still faintly visible under two of my fingernails and the distinct, embarrassing awareness that I'd fallen asleep replaying two feet of empty space instead of counting the night's revenue like a responsible business owner.
Eleanor found me like that, phone in hand, and smile on my face I hadn't managed to school into something more neutral before she rounded the corner.
"That's not the face of a woman looking at an insurance renewal," she said, settling into her usual chair with the particular ease that told me her wrist really had healed as well as the doctor promised. "What's got you smiling into your phone at eight in the morning?"
"A goat ate the Nguyens' centerpieces."
"I heard. Del called me last night, practically giddy about it. Apparently there was cake involved. Dramatically."
"Sawyer caught the whole top tier bare-handed before it hit the ground.
" I said it and heard, immediately, exactly how much warmth had crept into my voice saying his name, and watched Eleanor hear it too, her expression sharpening into the specific, delighted attention she brought to any conversation she suspected was about to become more interesting than it appeared on the surface.
"Did he, now?"."
"It's not — “I stopped myself before I finished a sentence I didn't actually believe anymore. “It’s a good story. That's all."
"Mm." She took a slow sip of her coffee, entirely unhurried, the woman who'd raised me having exactly zero interest in letting me off a hook that easily. "You've said his name eleven times this month. I've been counting, since you clearly haven't been."
"You count how many times I say a vendor's name?"
"I count how many times my granddaughter says any man's name more than once in the same week, because it happens roughly never, and when it does, I pay attention.
" She set her cup down, and something in her expression softened out of teasing into the older, steadier thing underneath it, the thing that had gotten us both through every hard season this place had thrown at us.
"I'm not asking you to explain anything you're not ready to explain, Josie.
I'm asking you to consider something instead. "
"Go ahead."
"You've spent two years building a wall around exactly one subject, and you built it well — you built it out of genuinely good reasons, and I'm not going to sit here and pretend that article didn't cost us real money and real heartache, because it did.
I felt every bit of it right alongside you.
" She reached over, the same gesture from the wrist-brace morning, warm and papery over my hand.
"But a wall doesn't know the difference between the thing that hurt you and the things that come after it, once it's up.
It just keeps everything out equally. That's the trouble with walls. They're not smart. They're just thick."
I turned my coffee cup a quarter turn, my mother's old habit, and didn't say anything for a moment, because I didn't have a version of a response ready that wasn't going to give away more than I'd admitted to myself yet.
"He apologized," I said finally. "Weeks ago. In person, finally, after two years of nothing."
"I know. You told me. Sort of. In the careful, edited version you tell me things you're not ready to fully feel yet." Eleanor's mouth curved, gentle, entirely without judgment. "What did the apology feel like, actually? Not the professional summary. The real answer."
I thought about it honestly, for the first time, instead of filing it away under unresolved the way I'd been doing since Ashworth.
"It felt like someone finally settling down something heavy they'd been carrying the whole time too.
Not just me. Both of us." I looked up at her.
"I didn't expect that. I expected an apology to feel like a transaction — he says sorry, I decide whether to accept it, we move on or we don't. It didn't feel like that at all.
It felt like watching someone actually sit with what they did instead of just performing regret and hoping I'd absolve him faster. "
"That's a meaningful difference."
"I know it is. That's the problem." I pushed the coffee cup away, half-full, appetite for it gone.
"If he'd just apologized and expected it to fix everything, I could have kept the wall up easily.
I know how to be angry at someone who wants an easy forgiveness.
I don't know what to do with someone who's actually trying to earn it slowly, on my terms, without ever pushing for more than I'm ready to give. "
"Sounds like exactly the kind of man worth letting try."
"Grandma."
"I'm eighty-one, Josie. I've buried a husband and watched this place nearly fall apart twice, once from weather and once from a magazine article, and I've earned the right to say the obvious thing out loud when the person I love most is standing in her own kitchen clearly talking herself in circles about it.
" She said it without heat, just plain, unhurried fact, the way she said most things that mattered.
"I'm not telling you to forget what happened.
I'd never tell you that. I'm telling you that letting someone earn back trust isn't the same as pretending the hurt never existed.
You get to hold both. I've held both about a great many people in my life, your grandfather included, and I promise you it's possible to do. "
I thought about the two feet of space between us over the cake table, the way neither of us had moved to close it and neither of us had wanted to, the particular stillness of that moment before Del came barreling through with a table and a bucket of urgency.
I thought about the way he'd told me about the marketing firm's email before I could have found out any other way, the small, deliberate choice of a man clearly trying to be different this time on purpose, not by accident.
"I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it," I admitted. "The wedding season's not over. He's shooting three more weddings here. I can't exactly — figure this out in the middle of running a business that still needs to survive the summer."
"You don't have to figure out the whole thing today.
" Eleanor squeezed my hand once, then let go, sliding her recipe book back toward herself, the conversation reaching its natural close the way her conversations always did, offered generously and then set down without pressure.
"You just have to stop pretending you haven't already started figuring it out.
That part's already happened, whether you've admitted it to yourself yet or not. "
She went back to her lemonade recipe after that, humming something under her breath, and I sat with my cooling coffee and the goat photo still open on my phone, and let myself, for the first time in two years, actually consider the shape of the thing I'd been avoiding instead of just cataloging it and filing it away.
It didn't feel like relief, exactly. It felt like something more honest than relief — the particular, unsteady lightness of finally admitting a wall had a door in it after all, even if I wasn't ready yet to walk all the way through.
Three more weddings this season. Three more chances for two feet of space to close, or not, on its own time.
I found, sitting there in my grandmother's kitchen with the morning light coming warm through the window, that I wasn't dreading finding out anymore.