Chapter 16
Sawyer
The studio at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday night had a particular quality of quiet Sawyer had never fully gotten used to — three monitors glowing in the dark, the low hum of the external drives, Milo two feet away scrolling through the Nguyen gallery with the specific focus of a man who took genuine pride in getting a color grade exactly right, and underneath all of it, Sawyer's own attention drifting somewhere it had no business drifting at eleven o'clock on a work night.
"You've culled the same folder three times," Milo said, without looking up. "You keep going back into the ceremony set and then backing out again. What's wrong with it?"
"Nothing's wrong with it."
"Then why do you keep opening it and closing it like it's going to bite you?"
Sawyer didn't answer right away, because the honest answer involved admitting he wasn't actually looking at the ceremony set at all — he was looking, again, at the cake-rescue sequence, the frame right before Del's arrival, the two feet of space between himself and Josie with the string lights doing something soft and gold to both their faces, and he'd looked at it enough times over the past week that he'd stopped being able to pretend it was professional review.
"I'm thinking about pulling this one from the delivery gallery," he said instead, which was at least half true.
Milo actually turned his chair at that. "The cake shot? That's the best candid from the whole reception. It's going to be the couple's favorite photo, probably. It's got the whole story in one frame — the goat, the catch, the chaos. You cannot pull that shot."
"There's a version of it without me and Josie in the background."
"There's a version of it that's a static shot of a cake on a table.
This one has an actual story in it." Milo studied him for a second longer than the conversation strictly required, and Sawyer felt the particular discomfort of being read accurately by someone who'd worked for him long enough to stop being polite about it.
"You're not worried about the shot. You're worried about what's in it. "
"Drop it, Milo."
"I've dropped it for six weeks. I'm allowed one more try.
" Milo swiveled fully around now, editing forgotten, and there was something unusually direct in his expression, less teasing than it had been at the other weddings.
"Look — I'm not trying to push where I'm not wanted.
But I've worked for you three years, and I've watched you shoot two hundred weddings without once looking at anybody the way you keep looking at her, and I think you know that, and I think it's eating you alive that you know it. "
Sawyer was quiet for a long moment, the cursor blinking over a photograph he still hadn't decided the fate of, and then, because it was late and the studio was dark and there was something about the particular hour that made honesty easier than it had any right to be, he said the thing he hadn't said out loud in two years.
"I was engaged. Before I started working here full time."
Milo went very still. "You've never mentioned that."
"There's not much reason to mention an engagement that ended.
" Sawyer leaned back in his chair, the confession already loosening something in his chest he hadn't realized was clenched.
"Camille. We were together almost four years.
She was a wedding planner, actually — that's how we met, working the same events, both of us building our businesses at the same time, both of us understanding exactly what the other one's schedule looked like without having to explain it.
It made sense on paper. For a while it made sense in every other way too. "
"What happened?"
"Nothing dramatic. That's the part that used to bother me most — no affair, no fight, nothing I could point to and say that's where it broke.
" He turned the chair slightly away from the monitor, away from the cake photograph, like he needed the distance to say the next part cleanly.
"She sat me down about six months before we were supposed to get married and told me she didn't think I actually wanted this.
Not her, specifically — the whole thing.
The wedding, the marriage, the life. She said I spent every single weekend documenting the happiest day of two hundred other people's lives, and I was better at capturing it than living anywhere near it myself, and she didn't think that was going to change just because the ring on her finger said it should. "
"That's a heavy thing to hear."
"It was worse because she wasn't wrong." Sawyer said it plainly, the old shame still fully intact underneath two years of not looking at it directly.
"I'd already started pulling back by the time she said it.
I just hadn't let myself notice. Every wedding I shot, I got better at reading a couple's whole story in a single afternoon — what made them work, what they'd survived to get there, the exact moment they stopped performing for the camera and just were two people who loved each other.
And every single time, I'd pack up my gear and drive home and feel further away from my own version of that than I had the weekend before.
Like I was spending my whole life standing at the edge of something I was never actually going to get to walk into myself. "
Milo didn't say anything right away, which Sawyer appreciated more than he could easily have explained — no immediate reassurance, no rush to fix it, just the quiet, steady presence of someone actually listening.
"She wasn't cruel about it," Sawyer went on.
"That's the thing I still think about. She wasn't trying to hurt me.
She just saw it clearer than I did, and she was right to leave before we both wasted years on a version of a life I wasn't actually building toward.
I've had two years to sit with that, and I still haven't fully figured out if she was describing something true about me, or something true about who I was back then that I've actually changed since. "
"Which do you think it is?"
Sawyer was quiet for a moment, looking at the dark window instead of the monitor, the lake somewhere out there beyond the marina lights.
"I don't know," he admitted. "I know that six weeks ago, at Ashworth, I stood in that orchard and thought I'd earned exactly one clean fact about myself — that I was good at my job and bad at showing up for the people it should have made room for.
And I know that somewhere in the last month, watching Josie run that place, catching a cake with her, standing in an orchard arguing about string lights — I've started wanting something I told myself two years ago I wasn't built for.
And I don't know if that's real, or if it's just me repeating the same mistake with better light. "
"For what it's worth," Milo said, carefully, "I think there's a difference between a guy who's bad at showing up and a guy who's scared to.
You've shown up for her every single wedding this season.
The tent, the storm lights, the cake, the email about Lang.
That's not a guy avoiding the work. That's a guy doing the work and still not trusting that it counts. "
Sawyer looked at him for a long moment, something in Milo's plain, unpolished honesty landing harder than he expected.
"When did you get smart about this?"
"I've been watching you not be smart about it for six weeks.
Some of it rubs off eventually, out of self-defense.
" Milo's mouth curved, gentle instead of teasing.
"You don't have to have it figured out tonight.
But I'd stop deleting the evidence, if I were you.
Camille might've been right about the guy you were four years ago.
Doesn't mean she gets the last word on the guy you are now. "
Sawyer didn't answer that, mostly because his throat had gone tight in a way he wasn't prepared to examine in front of an audience, even one as forgiving as Milo.
He turned back to the monitor instead, pulled the cake photograph back up, looked at it for a long moment — Josie mid-laugh, frosting on both their hands, two feet of space that hadn't closed yet but hadn't felt impossible either.
"Keep it in the gallery," he said finally.
"Good call."
"Don't make this a thing."
"It's already a thing, boss. Been a thing since the Nguyen goats, minimum." Milo turned back to his own screen, mercifully letting the conversation close on its own terms. "I'm just glad you finally said it out loud instead of just staring at the same folder for the ninth time this week."
Sawyer didn't argue with that either, because there wasn't much left to argue.
He sat with the photograph open a while longer after Milo went back to his own work, turning Camille's old words over one more time in the quiet studio — better at capturing it than living anywhere near it — and found, for the first time since she'd said them, that they didn't feel like a verdict anymore.
They felt, instead, like a warning he'd finally decided he was allowed to stop obeying.