Chapter 28
Josie
Eleanor made him try the lemonade recipe first, before he'd even gotten his jacket off, which told me everything I needed to know about how thoroughly she'd already decided to like him.
"Rosemary," she said, handing him a glass with the particular ceremony she brought to anything she considered a real test. "Tell me honestly. Too much, or exactly right."
Sawyer took it seriously, the way I'd learned he took most things when he actually cared about the answer — a real sip, a pause, genuine consideration instead of the reflexive compliment most people would have offered a woman who was, unmistakably, someone's grandmother handing him a drink on their first proper dinner together.
"Exactly right. Any less and you'd lose it against the lemon.
Any more and it'd taste like you were trying too hard to prove a point. "
Eleanor's eyebrows went up, delighted. "That's precisely what I told Josie in April. Word for word." She glanced at me, entirely too pleased with herself. "I like him."
"You've liked him since the Whitfield wedding. You told me so directly."
"I liked him from a distance then. This is closer-range liking.
There's a difference." She waved us both toward the kitchen table, already moving on to the next course of the evening's interrogation, and I watched Sawyer navigate two hours of it with the same steady, unhurried attention he brought to everything — asking Eleanor real questions about the orchard's early years, laughing genuinely at her stories about my grandfather's stubbornness, letting her fuss over whether he'd had enough of the roast without once making it feel like performance.
By the time we left, close to nine, Eleanor walked us to the door and caught my arm for a moment while Sawyer went ahead to start the truck.
"Sunday dinner," she said. "Every week he's in town, from now until the season's over. I've decided."
"You've decided."
"I've decided, and I expect you not to argue with me about it, because I haven't enjoyed a dinner guest this much since your grandfather was alive to argue with me about lemonade himself." She kissed my cheek, quick and warm. "Go. Enjoy your evening. You've earned an easy one."
We ended up on the dock behind the guest house, the same one we'd walked past a hundred times this season without ever actually sitting on it, the night warm enough that neither of us needed a jacket, the lake gone that particular still black it only achieved on nights without wind.
"Your grandmother's terrifying," Sawyer said, feet dangling over the edge, close enough to mine that our shoulders touched. "In the best way. I mean that as the highest compliment I have."
"She adopted you tonight. You should know that's permanent. There's no undoing it once she's decided."
"I'm not trying to undo it." He was quiet for a moment, looking out at the water, and something in his stillness made me look at him properly.
"I keep thinking about something she said, actually.
During dinner, when I mentioned the marketing firm's email — the one from Lang, back in the spring.
She said, thank you for telling her instead of deciding for her what she needed to know.
I didn't think much of it at the time. It's stuck with me since. "
I felt something in my chest go tight, unexpectedly, at the phrase — deciding for her what she needed to know — old and familiar in a way I hadn't examined closely enough to name until just now.
"Can I tell you something I haven't said out loud before?" I asked.
"Always."
"I need that. What you did with the email.
Not just because it was good information — because of what it wasn't." I pulled my knees up, wrapped my arms around them, the words coming slower than I wanted but steadier than I expected.
"The year of the storm, everyone around me started making small decisions on my behalf without telling me — the insurance broker who quietly adjusted our coverage without walking me through what changed, my accountant who held back the worst of the numbers for two months because he didn't want to, quote, add to my stress during a hard season.
Even Eleanor, some weeks, softened things before she told me, because she thought she was protecting me.
" I looked over at him. "I understand why everyone did it.
I even understand it came from love, most of the time.
But it made me feel like something fragile that needed managing instead of a person who could actually handle the truth if someone just gave it to me straight.
It took me a long time to trust that you weren't going to do the same thing, quietly deciding what I could handle instead of just telling me. "
Sawyer was quiet for a long moment, and when he spoke, his voice had gone careful in a way that told me he understood exactly how much weight the moment was carrying.
"I need you to know I'm not always going to get that right," he said.
"I've spent a lot of my life believing the kind thing was staying quiet about hard information until I could hand someone a better version of it.
That's basically what happened with the article, if you think about it — I told myself silence was protective.
It wasn't. It was just easier for me." He took my hand, laced our fingers together, deliberate.
"So I'm telling you now, plainly, while it's easy to say and nothing's actually at stake yet — if something ever comes up that's hard, or complicated, or something I'm scared telling you might hurt you, I want you to hold me to always telling you straight anyway.
Even if I think I'm protecting you by staying quiet. Especially then."
"I'm holding you to that."
"Good. Hold me to it hard." He brought my hand up, pressed a kiss to my knuckles, easy and certain. "I mean it, Josie. Whatever comes, the rest of this season, after it — you get the whole truth from me, every time, even the versions that are harder to say."
I looked at him for a long moment, the lake dark and still around us, Eleanor's kitchen still warm in my memory, four more weddings standing between us and whatever number was waiting in October, and felt the thing I'd been circling for weeks finally arrive somewhere I couldn't talk myself out of anymore.
"I love you," I said, plain and unguarded, no performance in it at all, the words easier to say than I'd expected once I finally let them out. "I wasn't sure I was going to say that tonight. I think I've been sure of it for a while and just hadn't caught up to saying it out loud."
Something moved across his face — surprise, first, and then something deeper underneath it, unguarded in a way I'd only seen once before, against a tree at the edge of the Okafor ceremony.
"Josie." He said my name like it meant something new now, turning toward me fully, both hands coming up to hold my face the way I'd held his that afternoon in the orchard.
"I love you too. I think I've known it since the far point, honestly, maybe before, and I kept not saying it because some old, scared part of me thought saying it made it real enough to lose.
" He kissed me, slow and certain, nothing rushed about it.
"I'm not scared of it anymore. Or — I am, a little. But not enough to keep not saying it."
We sat on the dock a long while after that, not saying much else, his arm around me and the lake gone fully dark and quiet beneath us, and I thought, leaning into him, that whatever the season still had waiting for us — the Harper wedding, the Bennett wedding, whatever number the ledger finally settled on in October — I finally had someone beside me who'd promised to tell me the truth even when it was hard.
I believed him completely.
I didn't yet know how much that promise was going to cost either of us before the season let us keep it.