Chapter 33
Sawyer
He didn't sleep that night, not really — lay awake in his childhood bedroom with the wind chimes silent outside because there was no wind, replaying the exact moment her face had closed off at the edge of the tent, trying to find the version of the conversation where he'd said the right thing fast enough to stop it.
He called her at eight the next morning. She didn't pick up.
He texted instead, careful, measured, everything he wished he'd said the night before compressed into three sentences he must have rewritten a dozen times before sending: I know I broke something real last night, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
I'd like to explain the whole thing properly, whenever you're ready to hear it. I'm not going anywhere in the meantime.
She didn't respond that morning either.
He drove out to the orchard anyway, around noon, telling himself it wasn't pushing, it was just showing up, the way he'd shown up for six weddings this season — and found Del at the barn instead, arms crossed, her usual warmth toward him noticeably absent.
"She doesn't want to see you today," Del said, not unkindly, but firm. "I told her I'd let you know, so you're not driving out here for nothing."
"I need to explain what actually happened."
"I know you do. I don't doubt for a second you've got context that makes this look different than it looked from the road.
" Del's expression softened slightly, the friend underneath the loyalty visible for a moment.
"But Sawyer — she's spent this whole season learning to trust that you'd tell her things straight, even the hard ones.
And the first real test of that, you didn't. I'm not saying that to pile on.
I'm saying it because I think you already know it, and I think showing up here today, pushing for the conversation on your timeline instead of hers, is going to feel like one more version of deciding what she can handle instead of letting her decide it herself. "
He heard it land, the truth of it landing harder than he wanted it to, and stood there for a long moment with nothing to say that wouldn't have proven her point.
"Tell her I'm not going anywhere," he said finally. "Whenever she's ready. Not just for the season. After it too."
"I'll tell her." Del's expression eased, just slightly. "For what it's worth, I don't think this is unsalvageable. I think it's a real mistake that needs a real conversation, not a door slamming shut for good. But that conversation happens on her clock, not yours. You've got to let her have that?"
He drove back to the studio and tried to work, and couldn't, the Harper gallery sitting open on his monitor untouched for two full hours while he replayed nine days of decisions he wished he'd made differently.
Milo found him there that evening, still staring at the same unedited frame, and didn't bother with small talk.
"Del texted me," Milo said, dropping into the chair beside him. "Sounds bad."
"It's bad."
"Talk me through it. Not the surface version. The actual thing."
Sawyer told him — the deadline, the meeting with Lang, the trade Lang had offered and Sawyer had walked away from, the nine days of silence he'd told himself was strategic instead of exactly the mistake it actually was.
"So you didn't take the deal," Milo said, when he'd finished. "You went in trying to help her, found out the actual cost was too high, and you were going to tell her that night, and she found out from a parking lot instead of from you."
"That's the whole thing, yeah."
"That's a genuinely bad break in timing.
It's also, and I say this as your friend, not just bad timing.
" Milo's voice had gone careful, direct in the way he'd gotten more comfortable being since June.
"You had nine days, Sawyer. Nine days where you could have called her the same afternoon your dad told you about the deadline and said exactly what you just told me — this is happening, I'm scared about the timing, I want to try to help but I don't know if there's a way to do it that doesn't cost something.
That's not a hard conversation to have with someone who loves you.
It's actually a pretty easy one, compared to most things people have to tell each other.
You made it hard by turning it into a secret first."
"I know."
"I don't think you fully know yet, actually.
I think you know it happened. I don't think you've sat with why yet.
" Milo leaned forward. "You did the exact thing Camille said you did.
Not the version where you're distant or don't care — you clearly care, that's not in question.
The version where you manage a hard thing quietly instead of living inside the actual mess of telling someone something true and scary in real time.
You picked being useful over being honest. Both things came from love.
Only one of them was what she actually needed from you. "
Sawyer sat with that for a long time, the studio quiet around them, and felt something settle in his chest that was worse than anger, worse than fear — the plain, unavoidable recognition that Milo was right, that the version of himself he'd promised Josie he was done being had shown up anyway, dressed up in good intentions, the same way it always had.
"What do I do now?" he asked, and it came out smaller than he meant it to.
"You give her the room Del's asking you to give her.
You don't push, you don't show up uninvited, you don't try to fix this the same way you tried to fix the deadline — by managing it quietly until you've got a clean version to hand her.
" Milo's voice had gone gentle now, the teasing entirely absent.
"And when she's ready to actually talk, you tell her the whole truth, all of it, without trying to make yourself look better in the telling.
That's the only version of this that has a chance of actually working. "
Sawyer nodded slowly, and Milo left him there a while later, still sitting in front of the unedited Harper gallery, the cursor blinking over a photograph of Josie at the edge of the reception tent, taken hours before everything came apart, unguarded and laughing at something just out of frame.
He didn't touch the photo. He closed the laptop instead, and sat in the dark studio a long time, turning over nine days of choices he couldn't undo, and understood, with a clarity that didn't help nearly as much as he wished it did, exactly how close he'd come to proving, in the end, that he really was the man both women in his life had once been right to walk away from.
He wasn't ready, yet, to let that be the last chapter of the story.
He just didn't know, sitting there in the dark, whether Josie was going to give him the chance to write a different ending.