Chapter 20
Josie
We reached the point forty minutes before sunrise, headlamps off by unspoken agreement the last quarter mile, letting our eyes adjust to the particular gray-blue dark that came right before a lake sky started deciding what color it wanted to be that day.
The path had been rougher than Del's map suggested — root-tangled, narrow in two places where the tree line crowded right down to the water — and I'd spent most of the walk mentally cataloging where a hundred guests on golf carts were going to need real work done before this ceremony could safely happen.
I could hear Sawyer behind me, quiet in the particular unhurried way people got before dawn, like talking too loudly might scare the day off before it arrived.
"There," I said, when the trees finally opened onto the point itself, and stopped so abruptly he nearly walked into me.
I heard him take it in behind me — the peninsula dropping away in a long grassy shelf toward the water, an old collapsed dock still visible as dark posts jutting from the shallows, and beyond it the whole lake spread out flat and silver in the last of the dark, wide enough that you couldn't see the far shore, close enough to town that you could just make out the marina's lights still burning small and orange in the distance.
"This is why they wanted it," Sawyer said quietly.
"This is why they wanted it." I sat down on a fallen log at the edge of the grass, and after a moment he sat beside me, close but not too close, both of us just watching the sky do its slow work over the water.
It came up gold first, then pink at the edges, then a color I didn't have an accurate word for, the kind that only ever showed up for about ninety seconds and never photographed the way it actually felt to stand inside it.
He raised the camera once, out of habit, took exactly three frames, and then lowered it and just watched instead, and I found myself watching him watch it, something in his stillness catching me more than the sunrise did.
"I proposed to someone at a place kind of like this," he said, before I think he'd fully decided to say it out loud.
I turned to look at him, surprised into stillness. "You've never mentioned that."
"There's not a lot of good places to bring it up between vow renewals and cake tables.
" He kept his eyes on the water, and I understood, watching him do it, that it was easier for him to say the rest of it that way.
"Her name was Camille. We were together almost four years.
She was a wedding planner — we met working the same circuit, and it made sense for a long time, right up until it didn't."
"What happened?"
"She left me. Kindly, honestly, with better reasons than I wanted to admit at the time.
" He picked at a loose thread on his sleeve, and I recognized it, somewhere in the back of my mind, as a version of my own habit with a coffee cup — the small, unconscious things people did with their hands when their chest had gotten too full to sit still with.
"She said I was better at documenting other people's happiness than building any of my own.
That I'd shoot two hundred weddings a year and go home every single time feeling further away from wanting one of my own instead of closer to it.
She wasn't wrong. That's the part that still gets me, two years later — she wasn't cruel about it, and she wasn't wrong. "
The lake had gone from pink to pale gold now, the marina lights winking out one by one as the real light took over. I stayed quiet beside him, the kind of quiet I hoped he could feel as listening instead of absence.
"I think that's part of why the article happened the way it did," he said, the words coming easier now that he'd started.
"Not an excuse. Just — context I've never given you.
I was already someone who'd learned to stand at the edge of things and describe them instead of stepping into them.
It was easier to write one careful, distant paragraph about your venue than to actually drive out and have a real conversation with you about what I'd seen go wrong that day.
I chose the version that let me stay at the edge.
I've had two years to understand that's what I did, and it doesn't make the outcome any less mine to own, but I wanted you to know the whole shape of it. Not just the sorry."
I sat with that for a long moment, looking out at the water instead of at him, feeling something in my own chest finally come loose enough to say out loud.
"I used to think the storm was the worst part of that day," I said.
"The Preston wedding. But it wasn't, actually.
The worst part was standing in the wreckage afterward, watching everyone I'd hired look to me for what came next, and realizing I didn't actually know if I was capable of running this place the way my grandmother had.
Not because of the storm. Because some small, ugly part of me had known, going in, that the tent company was a risk I was taking to save money I didn't have, and I did it anyway, and then I spent two years being angry at you for saying out loud the thing I already knew was true about that day.
" I glanced at him, and felt something raw and unguarded settle onto my own face that I hadn't let anyone see all season, not even during the storm, not even over the cake table.
"It was easier to be angry at your paragraph than to sit with my own part in it. "
"You were twenty-five, running a business alone for the first time, after a storm nobody could have forecast that far out. That's not the same as being reckless."
"I know that now. I didn't know it then.
" I let out a breath, something loosening in my posture that I hadn't realized I'd been holding since the season began.
"I've spent two years building this place back up like every decision had to be perfect, because I was terrified one more mistake would prove the article right instead of unlucky.
I didn't realize how much weight I was carrying until this season, watching you catch a falling cake and thinking, for one second, he'd probably forgive me if something went wrong today.
That was new. I didn't know how much I needed someone to think that about me until I noticed I was thinking it about you first."
The sun cleared the tree line on the far shore fully now, the whole lake gone bright and ordinary in the particular unglamorous way daylight always arrived after the good part was over, and I caught him watching me instead of the view, the way the light caught the loose pieces of hair at my temple, and something in his expression made my whole chest go still.
"Josie."
"Yeah?"
"I've spent two months finding reasons to be useful to you instead of just telling you I think about you when I'm not here.
" He said it plainly, no performance in it, and I could feel exactly how much it cost him to say it that way, without hiding behind a favor or a fixed light line.
"I don't know what the right amount of time is, after everything, before that's allowed to matter.
But I didn't want to keep letting the quiet favors do the talking instead of just saying it myself. "
I didn't answer right away, and for one long, suspended moment I could see him bracing, like he thought he'd misjudged the morning entirely, mistaken two months of careful rebuilding for something further along than it actually was.
Then I reached over and closed my hand around his on the log between us — deliberate this time, nothing about weather or crisis or an excuse to explain it away — and said, quietly, "It matters.
It's mattered for weeks. I just didn't know how to say it without sounding like I'd forgotten everything that happened before. "
"You haven't forgotten it."
"No. But I've stopped needing it to be the only true thing about you.
" I was looking at him now, fully, no wariness left in it at all.
"I don't know what this is supposed to look like.
I've got a business to save and you've got a season to finish and there's a whole complicated mess of a summer still ahead of us.
But I'm tired of standing two feet away from something and pretending I don't notice it's there. "
I don't remember deciding to close the distance between us.
I just did, slow enough that he could have stopped me at any point and didn't, and when he kissed me it wasn't the kind of kiss that happened by accident in the middle of chaos — no goat, no cake, no storm to blame it on.
Just the two of us on a fallen log at the edge of the water, sunrise gone fully into ordinary morning light around us, both of us finally choosing something instead of just surviving our way toward it.
I kissed him back like I meant it, one hand coming up to rest against his jaw, and when we finally broke apart, I could feel my own face doing something I hadn't let it do all season — unguarded, a little stunned, entirely present.
"Well," I said. "That's not on the shot list."
He laughed, real and surprised, forehead dropping briefly against mine. "No. It is not."
We sat there a while longer after that, not talking much, his hand still loosely around mine, the lake going about its ordinary morning business in front of us, and it was another twenty minutes before either of us noticed the wind had shifted, cool and sudden, carrying the particular mineral smell of rain that hadn't fallen yet.
We looked west together to find a sky that had, once again, without any warning at all, decided to lie about what the day was going to be.