“I warned you idiots,” Natalie says, scooping up Juniper. “I told them it was a bad idea, but somehow they convinced me this was the best way to do it.”
“Do what?” I ask. None of them answer. I fish a strand of fettucine from the pot and nibble the end of it to check for doneness, watching them as I chew.
Ben stares at the floor and Natalie busies herself pretending to pick something out of Juniper’s hair.
Sawyer pushes himself up from the sofa and leans against the counter behind me, forcing me to turn and face him.
“Well, Tabitha, it’s like this.” He crosses his arms over his chest like he’s settling in and making himself comfortable. “I want a do-over.”
I frown at him. “A do-over?”
“Yeah, Tab. I want a chance to show you I’ve grown up, and I want us to fix our friendship.”
I almost laugh. This is ridiculous. We haven’t spoken innine years, and he wants to be friends like we never stopped? But I say nothing because the look on his face is very clear:
Sawyer Reed means it.
Ben clears his throat. “Hey, we’re realizing, uh, about the sunset and…the trail, and with the baby, while it’s dark, um, so we should—”
“Are we the rudest if we ask to take dinner to go?” Natalie asks. “I hate to peace out on you, but Ben’s right. Better get Juniper home.”
I pack their dinners, glad for the fuss of leave taking so I can process Sawyer’s words, not sure how to respond.
Natalie leaves me with a tight hug. “I was going to tell you tonight that he’s here,” she whispers. “I wanted to make sure you’d be okay with talking to him before you saw him.”
“It’s okay,” I whisper back. “I trust you.”
Once the Mendozas hustle out, I’m not sure what to say to Sawyer, but I came into this evening with the upper hand, and I’m not ready to give it up. I pull out a chair on my side of the table where Sawyer has plated servings of fettucine for each of us.
“What’s this about?” I ask him. “I mean, ‘Let’s be friends’ sounds nice, but you didn’t show up here after not speaking for a decade to tell me we should pretend like no time has passed.”
“Nine years.” He twirls noodles around his fork, a thoughtful look on his face. “How about if we eat this dinner, play catch up, then walk down to the dock, and I’ll tell you why I mean it?”
I stare at him, trying to figure out how we’re supposed to “catch up” on nine years over a twenty-minute dinner. But whatever it is he wants, he isn’t ready to spit it out yet, and Sawyer had always been stubborn about doing things on his own time, and that doesn’t seem to have changed.
I shrug and pick up my fork. “Sure, let’s do that. What have you been up to since you dumped me?”
He chokes on his wine. “Maybe we ease into that. Let’s play Five Questions.”
It’s another camp game we’d played with the new counselors every year. We’d make the first fire of the season, and everyone took turns in the hot seat while the rest of the group got to ask them five questions to get to know them better.
“Sounds great,” I say. “I already asked my first one: fill in the last ten years.”
“Nine. Well, I’m a developer now. I mostly try to protect or develop urban green spaces, buying up declining properties and revitalizing them.”
“Like the camp?”
“Kind of. It’s not urban, obviously.”
“If it’s not urban, why buy it?”
“You,” he says. “Ben. Natalie. My younger self. Memories.” He rubs his palms against his thighs, a nervous gesture he’d had back then too. “I have a pretty good sense of place. I have to; my company depends on it. I know when a property will thrive or fail. I can see what it wants to be when I look at it.”
The soft buzz at the edges of my brain warns me my anxiety is gathering itself. “Oak Crest only wants to be what it is.”
He looks at me like I’m sporting extra eyeballs. “I know.”
“Are you going to develop the area more?”
