CHAPTER SIX Church Business
Thursday arrived gray and windless, the kind of stillness that felt less like calm and more like the whole district holding its breath.
Josie hadn't planned to go to the shop at all that evening, had told herself all week that whatever happened behind the clubhouse doors at six o'clock was Sawyer's to carry alone, hers only to hear about after the fact.
She found herself there anyway, sweeping a floor that didn't need sweeping, checking a paint schedule she already had memorized, because staying busy was the only thing keeping her from staring at the clock.
Sawyer had texted once, at four, three words and nothing more: *Still on schedule.* She'd read it a dozen times before she made herself put the phone face down on the counter.
By five thirty she gave up pretending the shop needed her and drove to Nadia's bar instead, unwilling to sit alone with the silence a second longer.
The place was half full with the early crowd, neon signage buzzing warm against the darkening street outside, and Nadia took one look at her face and slid a glass of something amber across the bar without being asked.
"You look like a woman waiting on a jury," Nadia said, leaning her elbows on the bar top.
"Something like that."
"You want to tell me what's actually going on, or you want to keep doing the thing where you let me guess and then refuse to confirm anything?
" Nadia's voice held its usual dry humor, but underneath it Josie caught real concern, the kind her friend rarely let show so plainly.
"Because Delia's version of events has you halfway back in love with a man who broke your heart, and I'd like to know if I need to start hating him again or if I'm allowed to stop. "
Josie turned the glass in a slow circle on the bar top, watching the light catch in it. "I don't know what I'd tell you to feel. I don't fully know what I feel."
"That's honest, at least." Nadia studied her a moment, then softened.
"For what it's worth, whatever's happening tonight, I hope it goes the way that gets you an actual answer.
You've spent three years living in a question mark, Jo.
I'd like to see you get to put a period on something, even if the sentence isn't the one you expected. "
The bar door opened on a gust of cold air a little after seven, and Josie's whole body turned toward it before her mind had caught up, an old, involuntary reflex she hadn't fully unlearned. It wasn't Sawyer. It was Cole, pale and wired, scanning the room until he found her.
"Have you heard from him?" Cole's voice carried none of his usual easy warmth, stripped down to something raw and young.
"Just a text before six. Nothing since." Josie was already sliding off her stool. "What happened?"
"I don't know. Nobody knows. Church went longer than anybody expected, and then Reeve came out and said it wasn't decided, that new information came up and they're postponing the final ruling, and everybody's talking and nobody's saying anything straight, and Sawyer just left.
Didn't say a word to me. Just walked out the side door and got in his truck. "
Something cold settled into Josie's stomach, sharper than she expected. "Postponed. What does that mean, postponed?"
"I don't know, Josie." Cole's frustration cracked through, the same raw worry from Wednesday afternoon amplified into something closer to fear.
"I'm not allowed in the room. I just know my brother walked out of there looking like he'd aged ten years, and I don't know where he went, and I don't know what new information means, and I don't know if I'm gonna have a brother in this club by next month. "
Nadia was already reaching for Josie's coat off the back of the stool, wordless, practical, the kind of friend who understood exactly when talk needed to stop and action needed to start. "Go," she said simply. "I've got the bar."
Josie drove to the warehouse district with her hands too tight on the wheel, the fog thickening off the river as the temperature dropped with the last of the daylight, and found Sawyer's truck parked not at the clubhouse but two blocks over, at the empty lot where the old freight scales used to sit, a place she remembered from years ago as somewhere he used to go to think when the noise of the clubhouse got to be too much.
He was sitting on the truck's tailgate when she pulled up, elbows on his knees, staring out at nothing in particular, his cut hanging open over a shirt that looked like he'd been wearing it since dawn. He didn't look up until she was standing close enough that the gravel crunched under her boots.
"You shouldn't be here," he said, though there was no real conviction in it.
"Cole came and found me. Told me church got postponed." She stopped a careful distance away, giving him room, though every instinct told her to close it. "He said new information came up."
Sawyer let out a breath that fogged pale in the cold air, and for a long moment he didn't answer, just sat there with his head bowed, the particular stillness of a man carrying something too heavy to set down in front of anyone yet.
"The debt," he said finally, quiet. "The old one.
From before. It's not as settled as we thought it was.
The people we owed it to, they've resurfaced.
Made contact again, this week, which is why Reeve pulled the ruling.
Says he can't decide what to do about me until they figure out what's actually still owed and to who. "
Josie felt the ground shift slightly under a version of the story she'd been building in her head all week, something bigger and more dangerous coming into focus than she'd let herself imagine. "What debt, Sawyer."
He looked up at her then, and in the gray last light of the evening she saw something in his face she hadn't seen in three years, not anger, not shame exactly, something closer to exhaustion worn down to the bone.
"I can't give you the whole thing yet. I promised you I would after tonight, and I'm not backing off that promise, but tonight got more complicated than either of us expected, and some of what I know now, I genuinely can't say until Reeve clears it.
It's not just my secret anymore. It never really was. "
"That's what you said three years ago." The words came out sharper than she intended, old hurt surfacing fast and involuntary. "Almost exactly that. Not my secret to tell. And I spent three years believing something that wasn't true because you decided silence was safer than the truth."
"I know." He didn't flinch from it, didn't deflect, just absorbed the accusation the way a man absorbs a hit he knows he's earned. "I know that's what it sounds like. I'm asking you to trust that this time is different, even though I know I don't have any right left to ask you for that."
She stood there in the cold, the fog thick around the empty lot, torn between three years of hard-won distance and the raw, unguarded exhaustion on his face that didn't match the careful, controlled man who'd walked into her shop a week ago.
Some part of her wanted to walk away right then, to protect the version of herself that had survived this exact pattern once already.
A different part of her, quieter and more stubborn, stayed rooted to the gravel.
"How long," she said finally. "Until Reeve clears you to tell me."
"I don't know. Days. Maybe less." He held her eyes, steady despite everything. "I'll tell you the second I'm able to. All of it. I need you to know that's not a line, Josie. It's the only thing I've got left to offer you right now."
The fog rolled in thicker around them, swallowing the streetlight two blocks over into a dim orange smear, and Josie felt the whole shape of the night narrow down to the small, cold space between them, neither of them moving, both of them waiting to see what the other would do with the silence.
"Okay," she said finally, and watched something in his shoulders break, not with relief exactly, but with something close to it.
She didn't reach for him. Not yet. But she didn't walk away either, and for the first time all week, that felt like its own kind of answer.