Page 27 of The Strawberry Field
The letter is short. One page. No greeting, no closing. Just his voice.
Sawyer,
I know I’ve asked a lot of you, loving someone who lives by clocks and capital markets. And I know I don’t always say what you probably need to hear. But if I haven’t told you lately—thank you. For showing up. For staying. For reminding me there’s a world beyond the one I try to control. I don’t know what our future looks like. But I know you’re the only one I want in it.
Michael
I read it twice.
And then I cry. Not with guilt. Not with regret. Just love for the kind, caring man he had been.
He knew something was coming.
Maybe not death. But change.
An ending. A shift.
He left me a kindness.
He left me a door I didn’t know I needed to walk through.
I close my eyes and whisper a thank you.
To Michael.
To Kate.
To the woman I was then, who kept showing up. Even when she was drowning.
Some things in my life are going to be left unfinished.
But this doesn’t feel like one of them anymore.
Chapter Ten
Jake
FOR DINNER THAT night, I pull some things from the fridge for the grill—red peppers, onions, zucchini, squash. I slice the vegetables on a wooden cutting board, wrap them in foil, drizzle olive oil over the top, then sprinkle sea salt.
I carry the foil pouch out to the deck, fire up the grill, and place the vegetables inside.
Hattie follows me, flopping down near the railing with her chin on her paws. Her eyes drift closed.
I lean against the rail and look out at the lake. A couple of boats glide across the water, one with a skier slicing through the stillness. Another floats idly, its passengers content to watch the sunset.
And I try to make sense of what happened with Sawyer earlier today.
There’s not much sense to make. The only real conclusion is the obvious one—it was a bad idea. I shouldn’t have asked her to come for dinner. I don’t even know what made me say it. Habit, maybe. Kindness.
Hope.
The chasm between us is twenty-five years wide, and Sawyer clearly has no interest in closing it. Not that I can blame her. Seeing me probably brings up more pain than peace. The same is true for me, if I’m honest.
Still, seeing her cracked something open. The scent of smoke and rain drifts off the lake, and suddenly I’m seventeen again.
A reminder of when I first realized that life doesn’t always hand out consequences based on fairness. That sometimes bad things happen to good people. And there’s no changing it—no matter how much you wish you could.
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