15. Chapter 15
Maya
***
The Conservatory is becoming real.
I know this because I have spent the last two weeks doing the kind of work that only happens when something is actually going to exist rather than simply being talked about.
Vendor contact lists. Greenhouse supplier quotes.
A site visit with the architect on Tuesday morning where I stood in the middle of the empty Main Street block with Sawyer and a man named Briggs who kept asking me questions about natural light and airflow that I actually knew the answers to, and Sawyer stood slightly behind us both and said very little and wrote everything down.
Lily says I have been humming while I work.
I told her I hum while I work all the time.
She said not like this.
I didn't have a useful response to that so I asked her to restock the sweet pea cooler and she did it with the smile she has been wearing since approximately the sketch on the worktable and I have decided, as a matter of personal policy, not to examine any of this too closely until I have more information.
What I have is this: something is building between Sawyer and me in the quiet spaces around the Conservatory work, in the site visits and the vendor calls and when Briggs asked about the seed library and Sawyer said, without looking up from his notes, that it would be community managed, and I felt something warm move through my chest that had nothing to do with greenhouse specifications.
Sawyer calls in the evenings sometimes. Not every evening.
Just when there is something to discuss, a supplier question or a planning detail or a timeline issue that Grace has flagged, and we talk through it with the practical efficiency of two people who are both good at their work, and then sometimes the practical efficiency runs out and neither of us hangs up immediately and the conversation becomes something quieter and less agenda-driven and I stand at my kitchen window with the phone warm against my ear and think about how this happened, exactly, and when.
I don't have a clean answer.
I am beginning to think I don't need one.
***
It is a Thursday afternoon when I drive to the Harwick estate.
I have a folder of revised vendor quotes that Briggs asked me to drop off, and I have told myself I am dropping them off because it is efficient and because Grace mentioned in passing that Sawyer would be working from the estate all day, and not for any other reason that I am not prepared to examine.
The folder is real. The efficiency is real. These are facts.
I turn onto the Harwick estate road at half past two and pull into the gravel parking area and am reaching for the folder on the passenger seat when I look up through the windshield and stop.
Sawyer is on the front steps. He doesn't see my car.
He is not alone.
There is a young woman with him, standing one step below him on the stone step, and he has both arms around her in the kind of embrace that is not a greeting and not a goodbye but something longer and more certain than either, the kind of embrace that belongs to people who know each other in the unrepeatable way of a history shared rather than built.
She has dark hair, shorter than mine, and she is laughing at something he said, her face turned up toward his, and he is looking down at her with an expression I have never seen on his face before.
Open. Unguarded. Warm in a way that has no careful distance behind it.
I sit in the van with the folder in my lap and the engine still running and something cold settling in my chest that I tell myself is not what it feels like.
It feels like a lot of things at once.
The eleven seconds in the community center. The roses from the Cotswolds grower. The word you placed carefully in a list alongside a town and its people.
Then the evenings on the phone when the agenda ran out and neither of us hung up.
And beneath all of it, because it matters, said across a worktable with no calculation behind it.
And it feels, underneath all of that, like the specific, humiliating clarity of someone who has been paying attention to the wrong details.
The young woman steps back from the embrace and says something that makes Sawyer's expression do something I have never once managed to make it do.
He laughs. Not the almost-smile, not the corner-of-the-mouth suggestion of one.
A real laugh, unguarded and unhurried, the laugh of a man in the company of someone he has never needed to be careful around.
I put the van in reverse.
I back out of the Harwick estate slowly and carefully, the way you do when you need the motion to be quiet, and I turn onto the street and drive back toward Main Street with the folder of vendor quotes on the passenger seat and the stillness of someone who is not going to think about what they just saw until they are somewhere private enough to face it properly.
I get back to the shop at three.
Lily takes one look at me and puts the kettle on without being asked, which is either the kindest thing she has done all week or the most perceptive, and I sit on the stool behind the counter and wrap stems and say nothing and she brings me tea and says nothing and we exist in the comfortable, practiced silence of two people who have known each other long enough to understand that some things need to be carried for a while before they can be spoken.
I wrap stems until closing.
I think about open. Unguarded. Warm in a way that has no careful distance behind it.
Then my mind returns to the fact that I have never once, in all the weeks of sketches and phone calls and vendor quotes and one sleepless night that produced a margin note about a reduced lease rate, seen Sawyer Ransome look like that. Look at me like that.
Not even close.
I go home.
***
He calls that evening at seven-thirty.
I look at his name on the screen for four rings.
I let it go to voicemail.
I tell myself it is because I am busy, which is partially true, and because I need to think, which is entirely true, and because some things need to sit a little longer before you know what to do with them.
I listen to the voicemail at nine o'clock. It is about the greenhouse supplier timeline. Grace's voice, not his, brisk and professional and entirely to the point.
I set the phone face down on the kitchen table.
I sit in the quiet of my kitchen for a long time.
I think about what I know, which is not enough.
What I saw was real.
And I can't stop thinking about the fact that Sawyer Ransome, who guards everything, who measures every word and every gesture and every degree of warmth he allows himself to show, stood on his own front steps and held someone with both arms and laughed like a man who has never once needed to be careful.
I want to know who she is.
And I am not sure I am ready for the answer.