Chapter 5
The door behind them creaked open.
Wren Calloway stepped into the barn office.
She was dressed for a meeting, not a wedding — a pale cream blouse and a straight navy skirt, low heels, the silver bob freshly cut. Her pearl strand was still at her throat, and she carried a small clutch purse with the top button open, as if she had been expecting to take a note.
Rosalind's mouth opened. Closed. She had not seen Wren since Saturday, had not spoken to her since Saturday, when Wren had said "let him finish the aisle" and Rosalind had ignored her.
Wren looked around the room. She looked at the table, at the deed, at the binder clip, at Doyle standing against the wall with his cap in his hands. Then she looked at Rosalind, and her face was not angry and not triumphant. It was the careful face she wore when she needed to remember exactly what someone said so she could repeat it accurately to a lawyer.
"Mrs. Calloway," Rosalind said, and her voice had the old smooth surface on it, like ice sliding back over a pond. "I'm sorry you had to see this. This is a private meeting between the property owner and myself. I'm sure we can resolve everything in a way that protects your daughter's wedding and the others upcoming."
Hollis did not speak. He looked at Wren, and she nodded, and then she walked to the table and sat down in the empty chair beside Hollis, across from Rosalind.
It was an act so deliberate, so weighted, that it was a sentence before she said a word.
"I came to observe," Wren said quietly. "Hollis left a message at the house yesterday evening asking if I'd be willing to sit in on this meeting. He said he wanted a witness with no tie to the business. I said I would."
Wren glanced at Hollis, then back at Rosalind. "Saturday, I watched you throw a man's rake at his own property. I watched you order him off the lawn on a day when the barn was earning its keep for every month he'd put into it. And I heard you tell me, more than twice, that you had a contract with the owner of this venue. I want to hear you say now, in front of me, what you thought that contract was worth."
Rosalind took a breath. The air was thick in the small room, the late-morning light through the window falling across the table in a sharp rectangle that seemed to separate her from the other three.
"I believed," she said, and she heard her own words as if they were coming from a speaker in another room, "that Tri-State Hearthstone owned the barn and had the authority to rent it to me in perpetuity. I had a contract. I paid them. I believed—"
"You paid a firm that had sold the property in March," Wren said. "You were told, by an employee who witnessed the closing, that the ownership had changed. You were mailed, twice, by the new owner, with notice of that change. And when you received those letters, you sent them back without reading them and left no record of doing so."
"I wasn't required to read letters from a stranger," Rosalind said.
"You were required to read mail from an entity that holds title to the property where you run a business," Wren said. "Or you were required to hire a lawyer who could read it for you. The law doesn't protect a person who keeps her own eyes shut. That's not a moral opinion — that's how contract law works in this state. A notice is effective when it's mailed, not when it's read. You were paid the courtesy of a try."
The heat rose in Rosalind's cheeks — the blush from the throat, blotching, something she had always hated about herself. She pressed her palms flat on the table.
"Whatever I did or didn't read," she said, and her voice was thinner now, the gravel underneath showing through, "the harm is in the future, not the past. The brides — the events I've already booked for this fall, the deposits I've taken, the vendors I've contracted under the Ridgeline name — they have contracts with me, not with the barn. If the venue is gone, they'll sue me, all of them, and every single one of those families will have a ruined wedding and a legal bill."
Wren looked at her for a long, still moment. Then she said, quietly, "And whose fault is that?"
The room was silent.
Rosalind felt the room around her become a cell. The table was narrow, the walls were old, the door was shut. She had booked forty weddings on the strength of a paper that meant less than nothing, and every one of those brides had signed her name to a deposit in good faith, and every one of them was going to look at her across a folding table on the other side of a lawsuit.
Doyle shifted against the wall. "Miss Deacon," he said, and his voice sounded almost gentle, "Hollis is a fair man. That's the problem. He's too fair. He's gonna spend this whole meeting figuring out how to not destroy you, and you're gonna spend it figuring out how to keep the prize. You might want to hear what he's offering before you plan the funeral."
Rosalind looked at Hollis. He had not moved. His hands were still flat on the table, the deep-set gray eyes fixed on her, the sun lines around them deep and calm.
"I'm not going to sue you," he said. "I'm not going to demand the deposits you've taken. I'm not going to hold the spring weddings over your head to watch you squirm."
Wren turned her head sharply. Doyle stood up straighter. Rosalind blinked once, not understanding.
Hollis reached into his shoulder bag and pulled out the letter she had already seen — the management firm's notification, dated March, from a box in the office that he and Doyle had sorted the week before. He unfolded it carefully and set it on the table next to the binder clip.
"There's an alternative proposal on the table," he said. "And it comes from the management firm's own paperwork."
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