Chapter 38
Josie
I watched him from across the lawn most of the morning, careful and professional exactly the way we'd both promised each other we'd be, and found, somewhere around the second hour, that I wasn't dreading it the way I'd expected to.
He worked the way he always worked — quiet, thorough, present in every frame without ever making his presence the point — and I caught myself, more than once, watching him with something that had stopped feeling like grief a few days ago and started feeling like the specific, steady ache of missing someone you already know you're going to choose, just not yet, not until the right moment arrived to say so.
The Bennett wedding was, by every measure that mattered, a genuinely beautiful one — the last of the season, the couple easy and unhurried about every detail, no crisis, no storm, no goat, just a hundred guests under a sky finally cooling toward autumn, watching two people promise each other something plain and lasting.
I moved through the day the way I'd moved through every wedding this season, competent and present, Del at my side handling the logistics I'd handed over more and more of as the summer went on, and found, watching the ceremony unfold, that I was actually letting myself enjoy it instead of just surviving it.
I saw Sawyer catch my eye once, during the vows, the same way he had at Caldwell back in April, both of us looking at each other over the top of a camera instead of through it, and something passed between us that had nothing to do with the wedding at all — an acknowledgment, quiet and careful, that whatever was still unresolved between us hadn't gone anywhere in two weeks, and wasn't going anywhere in the next few hours either.
I didn't look away first this time. Neither did him.
Del found me during the reception's quiet stretch, the couple's first dance winding down, and the light going gold toward evening in the particular way that made every September wedding feel like a small, deliberate gift.
"You look steadier than you have in two weeks," she said, handing me a glass of the signature lemonade Eleanor had insisted on despite the season being long past officially requiring her opinion on it.
"I feel steadier." I took the glass, let myself actually taste it, rosemary exactly right the way it always was. "I think I've known what I wanted to say for a few days now. I was just waiting for the right moment instead of forcing it before I was ready."
"Is tonight the right moment?"
I looked across the tent, found him near the edge of the dance floor, camera lowered for once, watching the couple's parents dance with the specific quiet attention he brought to every unguarded moment nobody else thought to notice.
Six weddings' worth of watching him do exactly that, watching him catch the truth in a day instead of just its performance, and understanding, somewhere along the way, that I'd fallen in love with a man who saw people clearly even when he struggled to be fully seen himself.
"I think it might be," I said.
Del squeezed my arm once, and left me to it, and I made my way across the tent slowly, the reception still humming pleasantly around us, guests laughing and dancing in the last good light of the season, and found him at the edge of the floor a moment before he found me.
"Hey," he said, careful, the same careful he'd been holding for two weeks, giving her every bit of room she'd asked for even now.
"Hey." I held his gaze, steady. "Can we talk? Actually talk, not the version we had at the far point where we were both still figuring out how much to say."
"Yeah. Of course." Something flickered across his face — hope, careful and unguaranteed, and underneath it, the plain willingness to hear whatever came next, whatever it turned out to be. "Now? Here?"
"Not with a hundred guests still dancing twenty feet away." I glanced toward the edge of the property, the far point visible in the distance where the string lights hadn't yet been strung. "After breakdown. Same place we've had every real conversation this summer."
He nodded, and something in the simple, uncomplicated ease of the agreement — no pushing, no trying to move the timeline to suit his own urgency — told me, plainly, that whatever else had gone wrong nine days ago, the two weeks apart hadn't undone the deeper work he'd been doing all season to actually change.
We finished the wedding the way we'd finished every wedding since April — separately but in rhythm, moving around each other with the ease of two people who'd learned, over six months, how to work a crisis and a celebration with equal competence — and by the time the last guests had gone, taillights disappearing down the gravel drive into the dark, something in my chest had settled into a calm I hadn't expected to feel walking into this conversation.
I found him waiting by his truck as breakdown wound down, gear mostly loaded, and something else besides — a book, bound and careful, sitting on the passenger seat that he hadn't mentioned yet and that I hadn't asked about.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Ready," I said, and meant it in every sense the word could carry.
We walked toward the far point together in the dark, the season's last wedding finally, fully behind us, and I felt, walking beside him in the quiet after everything, that whatever waited for us at the water's edge, I was finally ready to say the whole truth of it out loud.