Page 43 of The Strawberry Field
It’s the thought of Sawyer, just down the road.
I’ve thought about her so many times over the years. Always with the same ache, the same certainty that she was out of reach. Not just in miles, but in the way time and tragedy carve out distances we can’t always close.
But now she’s here. And though I know she doesn’t plan to stay, just knowing she’s nearby stirs something I hadn’t felt in a long time.
Hope. Maybe. Or memory.
She’s not the same girl I knew. I can see that. I can feel the heaviness in her, the weight of things that haven’t let her go. But there’s still something in her, the same pulse of quiet strength. The same hunger for truth. I wonder if being here, in this place that once brought her joy, might start to heal the fractures she thinks will never mend.
Maybe I’m fooling myself. Arrogant enough to believe I know what she needs.
But when you’ve known someone when they were young, really known them, you remember who they are at their very foundation. And I once knew Sawyer to be someone who believed fiercely in the good in this world. In its ability to overcome the bad.
I take another sip of coffee and wonder if I still believe that too.
I think I do.
I’ve lived long enough to know that pain is part of the deal. There’s no clean path through a human life. We all get knocked down. We all lose people. We all come apart in our own quiet ways.
But there are also moments of peace. Beauty. Grace.
I’ve found them here, on this land, in the slow rhythm of tending to the things that grow.
It’s not the life I once imagined.
But in many ways, it’s better.
And then my thoughts return to Sawyer.
Did she look me up?
I’m guessing she did. Not out of doubt or suspicion—but out of need. Need to know if the person she once believed in was still real.
A stab of fear rises in me.
Because if she did read the stories, there’s every chance she might believe them.
And if she does…
Then I’ll know I was wrong about what we shared.
And that’s what scares me the most.
Not the stories.
Not the fallout.
But the possibility that I was wrong about what I felt between us all those years ago.
“I can be changed by what happens to me.But I refuse to be reduced by it.”
—Maya Angelou,Letter to My Daughter
Chapter Seventeen
Jake
I’M OUT IN the field, pulling weeds with Hattie, when a vehicle comes up the driveway. I hear a door opening and then closing. Several seconds later, Sawyer appears around the corner of my tool shed.
