"Six years. Met in their second year of grad school." He looked at the water. "She was from Dallas. Funny—not performing funny, just actually funny, the kind where you didn't see it coming. She'd say something completely deadpan and Forrest would just—" The corner of his mouth moved. "He'd lose it every time. Couldn't keep a straight face around her for five minutes."
I tried to map that onto the man I'd sat across from at Sunday dinner every week. The careful stillness. The economy of expression.
“They were good together,” Sawyer added. “Good enough I stopped worrying about him. Knew he was okay because he had her.”
The creek moved below us.
"She got sick in October of 2020," he said. "Forrest called me when she went on the respirator. I was on a shoot in Vancouver and I couldn't—" He stopped. "Nobody could go. That was the thing about that time. You couldn't be with people. You just had to wait on the other end of a phone and—" He set his cup down on the rock. "She died on a Tuesday. He identified her over a video call."
I closed my eyes.
"He packed up their apartment by himself," Sawyer said. "Drove home. Showed up at the ranch with everything he owned in the back of his truck and Uncle Adam just opened the door." He paused to sip his wine. "That's the Holt way, I guess. You just open the door."
I thought about my first Sunday dinner. Adam's questions, all of them genuine. Peggy's water glass. The way none of it had felt like an audition.
"He renovated the bunkhouse in 2021," Sawyer said. "Spent about four months on it. I think he needed something to build." He picked up his cup again. "He's better than he was. He's just—not back. And I don't know if back is even the right word anymore. Maybe it's just forward. Some different version of forward."
I looked at the still pool below us, at the sky sitting in it.
"Is that why you check on him every Sunday?" I asked.
He frowned. "What do you mean?"
"You look at the cottage first," I said. "Then whether the light's on. Then what he's eating." I paused. "You've done it every week since I've been here."
He looked at me for a long moment.
"I think," he said, "that you notice everything."
"Occupational hazard."
"Must be exhausting."
"Constantly." I bumped his shoulder with mine. "I noticed you, didn't I? Day one. Craft services."
"You threw yourself at me at craft services."
"I hugged you. There's a difference."
“Nearly knocked me off my feet,” he snorted. “Aggressive hug.”
I looked at him.
He was already looking at me.
I put my wine glass down to lean over and kiss him.
He made a low sound against my mouth and his hand came up to my jaw, tilting my face, taking it over the way he always did—not rushed, just certain, like he had a particular idea about how this was going to go and was committed to it. I grabbed his jacket lapel and held on.
"We're outside," he said against my mouth.
"I noticed."
"It's February."
"Sawyer." I pulled back just far enough. "We're on two thousand acres of private land."
He looked at me. Looked around at the limestone and the cedar and the still pool below us with the sky in it and nobody, nobody, in any direction as far as you could see.
