Chapter 19
Josie
Del found the pattern before I did, which in hindsight should have been the first clue I was too close to it to see clearly.
"You're up two bookings this week," she said, sliding into my office with her tablet and the specific brightness of someone who'd been saving good news for the right moment.
"Whitfield confirmed the full package, plus add-ons.
And I got two new inquiries this morning, both mentioning they found us through a photographer's page. "
"Sawyer's?"
"Sawyer's. He posted the Nguyen gallery Thursday night.
Goat included. It's got over thirty shares.
" She turned the tablet around so I could see it — the string lights, the full length of orchard glowing gold, his caption underneath it longer and more deliberate than the usual professional copy he ran on his other posts.
"That's not nothing, Josie. That's real traffic. "
I read the caption twice. One of the best venues I've had the privilege of working with. Simple. Unadorned. The kind of sentence a man wrote when he meant it and didn't feel the need to decorate it further.
"There's more," Del said, and something in her tone made me look up.
"I was reconciling invoices this morning.
The Okafor engagement shoot — the add-on they couldn't afford, remember, back in April?
It's on the books as complimentary. And the Whitfield contract's got a discount line I don't remember negotiating, tied to an early booking incentive that I'm fairly sure Sawyer invented on the spot, because I checked and it doesn't exist for any of his other clients. "
I sat back in my chair, something warm and unsteady moving through my chest that I recognized, with some reluctance, as more than professional gratitude. "He didn't say anything."
"That seems to be the point." Del studied me for a moment, her usual teasing softened into something gentler.
"I don't think this is a man angling for credit, Josie.
I think this is a man quietly rearranging his own business to prop yours up, and hoping you'd never have to notice enough to feel like you owed him for it. "
I thought about the marketing firm's email he'd forwarded me weeks ago, the plain, unadorned honesty of it, no performance in the telling.
I thought about the two feet of space over a cake table that had never quite closed.
I thought about a man who'd apparently decided, somewhere in the last two months, that the way to make up for a headline he hadn't written was to spend a whole season doing the quiet, uncredited work of building the thing back up instead.
I didn't call him about it. Some gestures, I was starting to understand, weren't meant to be thanked out loud. They were meant to just be noticed, quietly, and carried.
The Whitfield walkthrough landed on the calendar for a Thursday in early June, and it was, from the moment I opened the couple's file, going to require more than the usual afternoon site visit.
"They want sunrise shots on the far point," Del explained, spreading the property map across my desk, the peninsula at the northern edge of the orchard land circled in her handwriting.
"The old dock, past the tree line. Nobody's used that part of the property for a ceremony in years — access is rough, no real path, and it's a solid forty-minute walk from the barn in daylight, let alone before dawn. "
"They specifically want it."
"They specifically want it. Apparently the groom proposed out there, some old family cabin his grandfather used to keep, long gone now, but the view's still there.
They want the ceremony at sunrise, right on the point, guests ferried out by golf cart along a path we'd have to clear and mark first." Del tapped the map.
"Which means somebody needs to scout that whole route in actual dawn light before we commit to the logistics, because what looks passable at two in the afternoon might be a genuine hazard at five-thirty in the morning with a hundred guests behind flashlights. "
"So we need an overnight."
"We need an overnight, unless you want to drive out here at four a.m. from town, which — given the whole point is judging what the light and the path actually look like an hour before sunrise — kind of defeats the purpose of the scout.
" Del's expression had gone carefully neutral in a way I recognized as deliberate.
"I already asked Sawyer if he could make it.
Photographer needs to see the light out there too, obviously, before he commits to a shot list for a location he's never worked. He said Thursday works."
"You could have asked me first."
"I'm asking you now. Consider it retroactive.
" She was fighting a smile, not particularly hard.
"The guest house is available. Two rooms, separate, obviously, I'm not running some kind of matchmaking operation out of the venue's spare bedrooms. It's just logistics, Josie.
Somebody's got to be on-site before dawn, and the guest house is closer to the far point than town is. "
I looked at the map for a long moment, the peninsula circled in Del's careful handwriting, and felt something in my chest tighten and loosen at the same time — the particular vertigo of watching a plan assemble itself around a reason that was entirely professional and also, unmistakably, going to put me in the same building overnight as a man I'd spent two months very deliberately not naming what I felt about, even to myself.
"Fine," I said. "Thursday. Guest house."
"Great. I'll confirm with Sawyer." Del gathered the map, already moving toward the door, and paused there, looking back at me with an expression that had dropped all its teasing entirely.
"For what its worth — and I say this as your friend, not your event coordinator — I don't think this is a bad thing that's happening to you.
I know it feels complicated. I know the timing's terrible, with Lang and the Hendersons and everything else stacking up this season.
But you've spent six weeks lighting up every time his truck comes up the drive, and I think you're allowed to let that be a good thing instead of one more variable you have to manage. "
She left before I could answer, which was probably for the best, because I didn't have an answer ready — just the map still sitting in my mind's eye, the peninsula circled, the guest house's two rooms, and three days between now and Thursday to figure out what I actually wanted to happen when the light came up over that far point and there was no wedding, no crisis, no cake table between us to explain away whatever was left standing there once the excuse ran out.
I checked the forecast on Wednesday night out of old habit more than real concern — Thursday was supposed to be clear, dry, unremarkable, a straightforward scout with nothing more dramatic than mosquitoes and an early alarm to worry about.
The forecast, as forecasts on this lake had taught me all season not to entirely trust, was already starting to lie by the time I went to bed.
I didn't know that yet, lying awake in the dark with the window cracked to the orchard air, running through everything I might say to him if the far point's empty dawn light left no cake table, no goat, no crisis to hide behind — no ready-made excuse for whatever had been building, unspoken, since a hand closed over mine on a length of storm-wet rope in April.
I fell asleep without an answer. I woke up Thursday morning to a sky that had already, quietly, begun to change its mind.