16. Chapter 16
Maya
***
I am fine.
I establish this clearly and repeatedly over the following three days: to Lily, who asks once and then wisely stops asking, and to Bette, who stops in for sweet peas and mentions entirely too casually that the Harwick estate has had a visitor this week, a young woman, very pretty, arrived Friday and is apparently still there.
And to myself, most of all, at six a.m. on a Saturday morning with my hands in a bucket of lilies and the shop still dark and quiet around me.
I am fine.
What I am is busy. The Conservatory timeline has three outstanding items that need resolution before the end of the week, the Millar wedding centerpieces need to be assembled by Thursday, and I have a standing order from the Harwick estate that I have been fulfilling with the precise, professional efficiency of someone who has absolutely no complicated feelings about the address on the delivery label.
I deliver the Harwick order on Monday morning.
Grace opens the door. Not Sawyer. Grace, in her usual composed Monday morning state, accepts the arrangements with a warm thank you and mentions that Mr. Ransome asked whether I had received the greenhouse supplier timeline she forwarded Friday evening.
I tell her I received it and will respond by end of day.
I do not ask about the visitor.
Grace looks at me for a moment with the careful, neutral expression of a woman who has an opinion and has decided, again, that this is not the moment for it.
Then she thanks me for the delivery and closes the door, and I walk back to the van and drive back to Main Street and tell myself that I am handling this with maturity and grace and that the tightness in my chest is entirely unrelated to anything at the Harwick estate.
Sawyer calls Tuesday evening.
I answer on the second ring, which is one ring faster than I intend, and we talk about the greenhouse timeline with the careful, practical efficiency that has always been the safe language between us, and he sounds exactly like himself, measured and precise and attentive, and I sound exactly like myself, warm and direct and entirely professional, and at no point does either of us say anything that isn't about the Conservatory.
When we hang up I sit in my kitchen for a long time.
I am fine.
***
The Conservatory planning meeting is Wednesday evening at the community center.
I arrive early, the way I always arrive early, and set up the vendor display on the side table and arrange my notes and tell myself that whatever I see tonight I will handle with the same composure I have been managing since Thursday afternoon at the Harwick estate.
Sawyer arrives at six forty-five.
He is not alone.
The young woman from the front steps walks in beside him, dark hair, easy smile, wearing a yellow jacket that is completely wrong for the occasion and completely right for the person wearing it, and she is saying something to Sawyer with the comfortable, teasing energy of someone who has been making him listen to her opinions since before he had any defenses against it.
He is listening.
Not with the careful, measured attention he gives to vendor timelines and planning documents. With the helpless attention of someone who stopped being able to pretend they weren't listening a very long time ago.
I arrange my notes.
I rearrange my notes.
Sawyer crosses the room toward me and the young woman follows, still talking, and he stops in front of my table and looks at me with that expression, the careful, attentive one, and says:
"Maya. There's someone I'd like you to meet."
The young woman stops talking.
She looks at me.
And then she smiles, wide and warm and completely uncontained, the smile of someone who has been waiting for exactly this introduction and has opinions about it already.
"Miss Finch," Sawyer says, with the quiet, careful formality of a man who understands this moment matters. "This is my sister. Ellie."
The room does something.
Or possibly I do something. It is difficult to be entirely certain because what happens in the three seconds following the word sister is a rapid and somewhat disorienting rearrangement of everything I have been carrying since Thursday afternoon, the cold thing in my chest simply dissolving, the tightness releasing all at once, like a knot that has been pulled from both ends and finally, simply, let go.
His sister.
"Your sister?" I say.
Ellie's smile widens. "The very same. And you must be Maya.
" She says it like she already knows, like she has known for a while, like my name is something she has heard enough times to have formed opinions about before we ever stood in the same room.
"I have heard so many things about you, Maya.
Genuinely so many things." She glances at Sawyer.
"But the one thing I really need to know, and I mean this sincerely, is how in the world do you stand him? "
Sawyer closes his eyes briefly in the way of a man who knew this was coming and chose to bring her anyway.
I laugh.
Not the polite laugh of someone being gracious at a planning meeting. A real one, the kind that catches you off guard and comes out bigger than you intended, and Ellie laughs too, delighted, and even Sawyer's expression does something that is unquestionably, undeniably a smile.
"I'm still working that out," I tell her.
"Sensible," she says approvingly. "Take your time. I've had twenty-five years and I'm no closer."
Sawyer says her name in a tone that is trying to be a warning and landing somewhere closer to fond, and she pats his arm with the affectionate, entirely unbothered ease of someone who has been patting that arm since before it belonged to a billionaire, and then she turns back to me with the warm, open interest of someone who genuinely wants to know the person in front of her.
"He told me about the flower shop," she says. "And the Conservatory. And the ranunculus." She pauses. "He told me quite a lot about the ranunculus, actually."
I look at Sawyer.
He is looking at the planning documents on my table with the focused, careful attention of a man who has decided that the planning documents require his immediate and complete concentration.
"Did he," I say.
"Mm," says Ellie, with the serene satisfaction of a woman holding several cards and in no hurry to play them.
We work through the planning meeting together, Ellie asking questions that are sharper than they appear and making observations about the vendor layout that are genuinely useful, and I watch Sawyer beside her, watch the way he is with her, easy and unguarded in a way I have only glimpsed in the rarest, most undefended moments between us, and I think about what it means that this version of him exists.
That somewhere underneath the charcoal suits and the measured precision and the ice-blue eyes that land like a court summons, there is a man who laughs at his little sister's jokes and listens to her opinions and brought her to a Conservatory planning meeting because he wanted her to meet me.
He wanted her to meet me.
I think about that for the rest of the evening.
After the meeting, while Sawyer is talking to Briggs about the site survey, Ellie finds me at the vendor table where I am packing up my notes, and she leans against the table beside me with the comfortable ease of someone who has decided we are already friends and is simply waiting for me to catch up.
"He's different," she says quietly. Not a question.
I look at her.
"Since Willow Creek," she says. "Since you.
" She looks across the room to where Sawyer is talking to Briggs, and something warm and careful moves across her expression.
"He calls more. He laughs more." A pause.
"He told me about a flower shop on Main Street like it was the most important thing he'd said in years. "
The vendor table is very quiet.
"Ellie," I say, and I am not entirely sure what I intend to say after that.
She smiles. It is a smaller smile than the ones she has been deploying all evening, quieter and more deliberate, the smile of someone saying something true.
"I don't know what you did," she says. "But whatever it is." She glances at her brother once more. "Don't stop."
She pushes off the table and crosses the room to Sawyer and says something that makes him look up from his conversation with Briggs, and our eyes meet across the room, and neither of us looks away for a moment that is longer than a planning meeting requires and shorter than everything I am feeling.
***
I drive home with the night air coming through the open windows, cool and clean, with the strange lightness of someone who has just had something heavy lifted from them without quite realizing how heavy it was.
I think about what Ellie said: "he told me about a flower shop on Main Street like it was the most important thing he'd said in years."
The words stay with me all the way home.
They follow me into the kitchen while I make tea.
They're still with me when the tea goes cold.
And then I stop thinking about it and just let it be true.