Chapter 23
Sawyer
He picked the restaurant carefully — not the diner, not anywhere in Lark Bay proper where half the tables would know both their names by the time the check arrived, but a quiet place forty minutes up the coast road with a deck over the water and a menu that didn't have a single item either of them could rush through eating.
He wanted the time. He'd been carrying the rest of this conversation for two months now, and he'd decided, somewhere around the third week of quietly waiving invoices instead of just saying what he actually meant, that he owed her the whole thing, not the edited version.
"You've got your serious face on," Josie said, halfway through her second glass of wine, studying him across the small table. "The one you get right before you tell me something about weather."
"No weather tonight." He turned his glass a quarter turn, an old nervous habit he'd apparently caught from watching her do it all season. "I want to tell you the rest of what happened. With the article. Not the summary I gave you at Ashworth. The actual thing."
Something in her posture shifted, careful but not closed off, the particular openness she'd learned to offer him since the guest house. "Okay."
"I told you I wrote one paragraph and the magazine ran a headline I didn't choose.
That's true. It's just not the whole truth, because the whole truth is I had a chance to stop it, and I didn't take it in time.
" He made himself hold her gaze instead of the easier option of the water beyond the deck railing.
"I called the editor the morning it went live.
Priti's predecessor — a guy named Everett.
I told him the headline mischaracterized what I'd written, that the piece read like an indictment when I'd meant it as one honest paragraph in a longer, more balanced roundup of the region's venues.
I asked him to pull it or at least soften the framing. "
"What did he say?"
"He said it was already the highest-traffic piece the directory had run all quarter.
Four hundred shares in six hours, climbing.
He said, and I remember this almost word for word because I've replayed it more times than I'd like to admit — readers respond to honesty, Sawyer, that's a good thing for your byline, don't let it rattle you.
" Sawyer's jaw tightened at the memory, old anger at himself still fresh enough to sting.
"I pushed back. Told him it wasn't honesty if the packaging changed what the words actually said.
He told me I could request a correction be added, buried at the bottom, three lines, no retraction.
I said yes to that, because it felt like doing something, and then I hung up and told myself I'd done what I could. "
"Did the correction help?"
"No." The word came out flatter than he meant it to.
"It ran three days later, at the very bottom of an article that had already been shared eleven hundred times by then.
I checked. I checked obsessively, for weeks, watching the share count climb past anything reasonable while a three-line correction sat underneath it that maybe four people ever scrolled far enough to read.
" He exhaled, the old shame surfacing easier now than it used to, worn smoother by having said versions of this out loud to his father, to Milo, to her already.
"I thought about driving out to the orchard that whole first month.
I told you that part already. What I didn't tell you is that I actually drafted an email to you three separate times that fall.
Full explanation, full apology, offer to shoot something for you free to try to counteract some of the damage. I never sent any of them."
"Why not?"
"Because every time I finished writing one, I convinced myself it would make things worse instead of better.
That showing up with an apology while your bookings were actively cratering would look like I was trying to manage my own guilt instead of actually helping you, and that the kindest thing I could do was just stay out of your way and let the story die down on its own.
" He shook his head slightly, the old logic sounding as hollow now as it had felt then, underneath the surface, even at the time.
"That was a lie I told myself so I wouldn't have to have the hard conversation.
I know that now. I think I knew it then too, if I'm honest, and I let myself believe it anyway because it was easier. "
Josie was quiet for a long moment, turning her wine glass slowly, and when she spoke, her voice had none of the old wariness in it — just something steadier, more considering.
"I actually looked into pursuing a correction myself, that fall," she said.
"Did you know that? I called a lawyer friend of Del's cousin, asked about defamation, whether there was any legal path to getting it taken down.
She told me there wasn't, not really — you'd written something factually accurate, and the headline, however unfair, was the magazine's editorial choice, not yours legally.
I remember being furious that there wasn't anyone I could actually hold accountable for how much it cost us.
I didn't know you'd tried to fix it from your end too.
I spent two years thinking you'd written it and walked away without a second thought. "
"I've thought about it every single day since.
That's not an exaggeration for effect. I mean it literally — there hasn't been a day in two years I haven't thought about that article at least once.
" He reached across the small table, covered her hand with his, the same gesture from the fallen log at the far point, deliberate this time instead of impulsive.
"I'm not telling you any of this to make you feel sorry for me, or to shift the weight of what happened off myself and onto Everett and the magazine.
I made the choice to write it the way I wrote it, knowing full well how a directory like that tends to package things.
That's on me. I just wanted you to have the whole shape of it, not just the parts that were easiest to say out loud at Ashworth. "
"Thank you," she said quietly, "for telling me the harder parts too."
"I should've told you months ago."
"You told me when you were ready to. That's not nothing.
" She turned her hand over under his, laced their fingers together, and something in the small, deliberate gesture settled a weight in his chest that had been sitting there, in some form, for two years.
"I spent a long time being angry at a version of you I built entirely out of one headline and a magazine I never trusted again after that.
I'm glad I got to actually meet the real one instead. "
"Even with everything you now know about him?"
"Especially with everything I now know about him.
" She smiled, small and real, the particular smile that had stopped being rare sometime in the last two months.
"A man who calls an editor the same morning, who drafts three apologies he's too scared to send, who spends two years carrying it instead of just moving on and forgetting it ever happened — that's not the man the headline described.
I think I've known that for a while now.
I just needed to hear the rest of it to actually believe it all the way through. "
They stayed at the restaurant long after their plates had been cleared, the conversation drifting into easier territory — his mother's recipe for the one dish he still couldn't get right no matter how many times he tried it, her grandfather's habit of naming individual apple trees after historical figures for reasons nobody in the family had ever fully understood — and it was well past dark by the time they made the forty-minute drive back down the coast road, her hand resting easy on his knee the whole way, the radio low, neither of them in any particular hurry to end the night.
He pulled into the orchard's drive a little before eleven, gravel popping familiar under the tires now in a way it hadn't been six weeks ago, and sat there for a moment with the engine off, looking at the dark shape of the barn against the stars.
"Thank you for tonight," Josie said, unbuckling her seatbelt but not yet reaching for the door. "All of it. Not just the confession portion, though that too."
"Thank you for still being here to hear it."
She leaned over and kissed him, unhurried, easy, the kind of kiss that had nothing left to prove and everything to simply enjoy, and when she finally pulled back and reached for the door handle, she paused with one hand on it, looking back at him with an expression he was starting to recognize as her most honest one — no performance in it at all.
"Four more weddings," she said. "Then we find out what this season actually adds up to."
"Whatever it adds up to," He said, "I'm not going anywhere before we find out."
She smiled at that, small and certain, and got out into the warm June night, and Sawyer sat in the driveway a moment longer after she'd disappeared into the farmhouse, watching the porch light click on behind her, and thought that for the first time in two years, the weight he'd been carrying around this exact stretch of gravel had finally, mostly, set itself down.