Chapter 31
Sawyer
He'd told himself, all week that he was handling it.
That was the phrase he kept reaching for, turning it over on the drive to the marina Thursday afternoon like it meant something more solid than it did — handling it, as though there were an actual plan underneath the frantic, half-formed thing he'd been building since his father's call, instead of just a man trying to fix something before it could hurt anyone, moving fast enough that he didn't have to look directly at what he was actually doing.
Walt had arranged the meeting. That detail alone should have given Sawyer more pause than it had — his father, calling in a favor with a man he'd been quietly wary of all season, setting up a sit-down at the marina office under the pretense of discussing the fall construction schedule, when what Sawyer had actually asked for was thirty minutes alone with Marcus Lang to see if there was any version of the October fifteenth deadline that didn't come stacked directly on top of Josie's most vulnerable week of the year.
"You sure about this?" Walt had asked, the morning of, watching Sawyer check his tie in the marina office's cracked bathroom mirror like a man walking into a job interview instead of a negotiation with no cards in his hand.
"I'm not sure about anything. I just can't sit here and watch the deadline land the way he designed it to land without at least trying."
"And if he says no? If pushing on this just puts you and me both on his bad side going into a winter I can't afford to lose work over?"
"Then I've lost nothing I wasn't already prepared to lose." Sawyer had said it with more confidence than he actually felt, and his father had studied him for a long moment before nodding, the particular resigned nod of a man who recognized his son's stubbornness because he'd raised it himself.
Lang arrived at two, exactly on time, dressed for a Thursday afternoon like it was a board meeting, and shook Sawyer's hand with the same practiced, beat-too-long grip Sawyer had heard Josie describe once, months ago, with an edge in her voice he understood better now, sitting across from the man himself.
"Mr. Reyes. Your father didn't mention you'd be joining us." Lang's smile didn't waver, but something behind it recalibrated fast, filing Sawyer's presence away as information. "I understood this was a construction schedule meeting."
"It is. There's also something else I wanted to raise, if you've got the time."
"I always have time for a productive conversation." Lang settled into the chair across the desk, unbothered, and Sawyer understood, watching him do it, that he was dealing with a man who'd had a hundred versions of this exact conversation and lost none of them. "What's on your mind?"
"The Marlowe Orchard offer. The October fifteenth deadline."
Something flickered behind Lang's eyes — not surprise, Sawyer registered, more like mild, almost pleasant recalibration, the expression of a man discovering a new variable in a puzzle he'd already mostly solved. "I wasn't aware you had a stake in that property, Mr. Reyes."
"I don't have a business stake in it. I have a personal one.
" Sawyer made himself hold the man's gaze, refusing to look away first. "I'd like to ask you to move the deadline.
Push it into November, at minimum. Give her room to close out the season and actually sit with the decision instead of making it under deadline pressure timed to land right after her busiest weekend. "
Lang was quiet for a moment, considering, and Sawyer let himself hope, for exactly that long, that this might actually work.
"That's an interesting request," Lang said finally, "coming from a man whose father I'm currently in the middle of contracting for a project directly adjacent to this one.
" He said it lightly, no threat in the tone at all, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd been openly menacing about it.
"I want to be direct with you, because I respect directness, and I think you've earned that much by driving out here yourself instead of sending a message through your father.
The deadline isn't arbitrary. I've got financing structured around a construction timeline that depends on knowing, by mid-October, whether that parcel's part of the corridor or not.
Moving it isn't a small favor. It's a real cost to my financing, and I don't extend real costs as personal favors to people I've just met. "
"What would make it worth extending?"
Lang's expression shifted, something almost approving in it now, the particular respect one negotiator sometimes offers another once real terms enter the conversation.
"Your father's exclusive commitment to the corridor's remaining sitework — Willowmere, the two parcels further north — locked in through next spring, at a rate I set, not one he negotiates project by project.
" He said it plainly, watching Sawyer's face for the reaction.
"That buys her six extra weeks. Not a guaranteed change of outcome, Mr. Reyes.
Six weeks. That's the actual trade on the table, if you're serious about making one. "
Sawyer sat with that, the full weight of it landing slowly and cold.
Six weeks, bought with his father's labor locked to a man neither of them fully trusted, at a rate Lang would set unilaterally, no room left for Walt to negotiate his own worth on his own terms — a trade that would solve nothing real, cost his father his independence for a season, and buy Josie six weeks of breathing room against a deadline that would still, eventually, arrive.
"I need to think about it," he said, echoing his father's exact words from the earlier call without meaning to.
"Of course." Lang stood, extending his hand again, unbothered, already moving toward the door like the conversation had cost him nothing at all, which, Sawyer understood, it hadn't.
"I'll say this, for what it's worth, since you drove out here to be direct with me — I admire what you're trying to do.
Genuinely. Most people in your position wouldn't bother.
But I'd encourage you to think carefully about whether this is actually your negotiation to have, or whether Ms. Marlowe might have her own read on trades made on her behalf without her knowledge.
" He paused at the door, something almost gentle in the observation, which made it land harder than anything else he'd said all afternoon.
"In my experience, people don't always thank you for the deals you make trying to protect them.
Sometimes they just want to have known about the deal in the first place. "
He left. Sawyer sat alone in his father's cracked-vinyl office chair for a long time afterward, Lang's last sentence sitting in his chest like a stone he recognized the shape of far too well.
He hadn't told her. Nine days now, since the call from his father, and he still hadn't told her, and here he was instead, sitting in a marina office trying to broker a deal on her behalf with a man circling her livelihood, exactly the kind of quiet, well-intentioned managing-from-a-distance he'd promised her, on a dock in June, he was finished doing.
He told himself, driving back toward the orchard for the Harper wedding that evening, that he'd tell her tonight. After the ceremony. Once the day's work was done and there was room for the conversation to actually land the way it deserved to.
He didn't yet know that Josie had already, three hours earlier, driven past the marina lot on an errand for the florist and seen his truck parked outside Lang Development's temporary site office two buildings down — closer to Lang's actual office than his father's, close enough that from the road, it looked exactly like what it wasn't quite, and exactly like what her worst fear had been building toward all season.