Chapter 26
Josie
I noticed it first on Wednesday, the small ways he'd started pulling back — not dramatic, nothing I could have pointed to and named outright, just a half-second delay before he answered a question, a tendency to angle the conversation toward logistics whenever it started drifting somewhere more personal, the particular quality of a man who was present in the room but had quietly relocated some essential part of himself somewhere just out of reach.
"You've been distracted this week," I said, catching him at the barn on Thursday morning, going over the Okafor timeline for the third time even though nothing about it had changed since Monday. "Everything okay?"
"Fine. Just want to make sure Saturday's tight." He didn't look up from the clipboard, and something in the deliberate focus told me it was less about the timeline and more about not looking at me directly.
"Sawyer."
"It's a big wedding. A hundred and sixty guests, outdoor ceremony, tight golden hour window. I want to be thorough." He finally glanced up, and the smile he offered didn't quite reach the rest of his face the way his smiles usually did. "That's all this is."
I let it go, mostly because pushing on something a man clearly wasn't ready to hand over rarely worked any better than pushing on myself had, back before the far point, and I'd learned enough this season to recognize when patience served better than pressure.
But I filed it away, the same careful cataloging instinct I'd been trying all summer to unlearn, and found myself, over the next two days, watching him a little more closely than usual — the extra hours in the studio Milo mentioned in passing, the two engagement sessions he'd apparently taken on that he didn't need the income from, the general sense of a man quietly working harder at everything except the one conversation that actually needed having.
Del found me in the office Friday afternoon, and one look at her face told me she'd brought her own weather with her.
"Milo and I had a fight," she said, dropping into the chair across from my desk with none of her usual composure.
"First real one. About the Okafor florals, of all things — he wanted me to move the ceremony arrangements to accommodate a better angle for a shot he had planned, and I told him the florals were locked, the couple approved them Tuesday, and I wasn't rearranging six hundred dollars of peonies for a photo op. "
"That doesn't sound like a fight. That sounds like a disagreement."
"It escalated." She rubbed her temples. "He said I was being rigid.
I said he was being precious about a shot instead of trusting the person actually running the wedding.
"He said—" She stopped, something flickering across her face that looked less like anger now and more like genuine hurt.
“He said I never let anyone else's judgment count for anything on this property, that I ran every single decision through my own approval like nobody else was capable of getting it right.
And the worst part is I don't think he's entirely wrong, and I don't know what to do with that. "
I sat back, surprised less by the fight itself than by how quickly Del — steady, unflappable Del, who'd talked me down off more ledges this season than I could count — had arrived at my office looking like she needed the same thing back.
"Have you talked to him since?"
"No. I left the meeting still mad, and now it's been four hours, and every text I've drafted sounds either too apologetic or not apologetic enough, and I keep deleting them instead of sending anything.
" She looked up at me, something almost embarrassed in her expression.
"This is humiliating, by the way. I've spent the whole season giving you relationship advice like I had any idea what I was talking about, and it turns out I'm exactly as bad at this as everyone else. "
"You're not bad at it. You're just new to it, same as the rest of us.
" I came around the desk, sat in the chair beside her instead of across from her, the desk between us feeling suddenly like the wrong configuration for the conversation we needed to have.
"For what it's worth, being right about the florals doesn't mean you weren't also, maybe, a little bit rigid about it. Those things can both be true."
"That's annoyingly fair."
"I've had a lot of practice this season learning that two true things can sit in the same chest at once.
" I squeezed her hand, the same gesture Eleanor had given me a dozen times this summer, passed down now to the person who'd been steadying me since the beginning.
"Talk to him before Saturday. You've got a wedding to shoot together in less than twenty-four hours, and I don't want either of you carrying this into a hundred-and-sixty-guest ceremony where it's going to show up in every frame whether you mean it to or not. "
Del nodded, already pulling her phone back out, and I watched her walk out toward the studio with the particular determined set to her shoulders that meant she was actually going to do it this time instead of deleting another draft, and felt something warm and complicated settle in my chest — gratitude, mostly, that whatever this season had cost all of us, it had also apparently taught the people I loved most how to actually show up for the hard conversations instead of managing around them.
I thought about Sawyer's careful, distracted week. I thought about the way he'd angled every conversation this week toward logistics, the way his smile hadn't quite reached all the way this time.
I didn't have a name yet for whatever he was carrying. But I recognized the shape of it, because I'd spent two years carrying a very similar weight myself, right up until a fallen log at sunrise had finally talked me into setting it down.
I resolved, watching Del disappear toward the studio with her phone already pressed to her ear, that I wasn't going to wait as long to ask him directly as I'd let him wait to ask me.
Saturday could have the timeline. Tonight, I decided, was going to belong to the actual conversation instead.