Morning came too early.
Nora woke to the sound of the old alarm clock on her nightstand buzzing like an angry hornet. For a second, in that blurry space between sleep and waking, she forgot. Forgot the letter. Forgot the man in her brother’s old room. Forgot that this harvest wasn’t just another in a long chain, but the last one she’d shepherd on land that still technically bore her name.
Then memory slid back into place like a too-tight shoe, and she groaned.
5:30 a.m. The sky outside her window was still more indigo than blue. She could just see the tops of the vines over the barn, a darker line against the lightening horizon. The air through the open window held a hint of cool that would burn off by nine.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat for a minute, her feet on the scarred wood floor, letting herself feel the heaviness in her limbs. Crush season tired was its own special category of exhausted, a deep, bone-level ache that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Like she’d spent all day doing something real.
She could have stayed in that liminal space another half hour, sipping coffee, stretching slowly. On any other record-low cash flow morning, she might have. Put off the rush as long as possible.
Today, she had a billionaire in the guest room.
He’d said he wasn’t a billionaire; his fund was only half a billion. But he wore his money like a second skin. The watch on his wrist, the cut of his shirt, the way he moved through space as if the air itself bent a little around him—all of it said, I get what I want.
Except, here, he didn’t. Not without her.
That’s what she clung to as she yanked on clean work pants and a faded Figueroa Vineyards T-shirt. That tiny sliver of control. The clause some ancestor had penciled in seventy years ago that meant she, the broke farmer’s daughter who’d never gotten around to finishing her viticulture degree, had something he needed.
She brushed her teeth, twisted her hair into a tight bun at the back of her head, and went downstairs.
Her mother was already in the kitchen, because of course she was. The coffee maker burbled, filling the room with the smell of cheap beans.
“Morning, mija,” her mother said without turning. “You’re up early.”
“Or I never really went to sleep,” Nora said. “Hard to tell.”
Her mother glanced over her shoulder. “You look like you slept.” Her gaze softened. “You look…calmer.”
“That’s probably shock,” Nora said.
“Or purpose,” her mother countered. She set a mug on the table. “You always do better with a list.”
Nora sank into a chair and wrapped her hands around the mug, letting the heat seep into her fingers. “Today’s list: sample the Merlot blocks, check the irrigation timers in five, eight, and eleven, call the mechanic about the main pump, and try not to commit homicide.”
Her mother smiled. “I made muffins,” she said. “Banana walnut. The crew will be here by six.”
“Trying to bribe them into not mutinying when they see the new overlord?” Nora asked.
“The overlord is sleeping in your brother’s old bed,” her mother said. “He can get his own muffins.”
“He’s not an overlord,” Nora muttered. “He’s an…interloper.”
“An interloper with your future in his hands,” her mother said gently.
“Don’t remind me.”
As if summoned by the words, footsteps creaked on the stairs. A door closed softly. Then he appeared in the doorway, filling it in a way that annoyed her just on principle.
He’d dressed down, if this was what he thought dressing down meant: dark jeans, an expensive-looking gray T-shirt, the same watch, a pair of boots that did, she had to admit, look like they’d been used for more than photo ops. His hair was damp, pushed back carelessly. He carried his portfolio under his arm like a shield.
“Morning,” he said.
Her mother, traitor that she was, smiled warmly. “Buenos días,” she said. “Coffee?”
“Please,” he said. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
“Trouble is what keeps us alive,” her mother said, already reaching for another mug.
Nora watched the little exchange with narrowed eyes. Her mother could charm snakes out of baskets. That didn’t mean she should.
“This is my mother, Rosa,” she said, because manners had been drilled into her whether she liked it or not. “Mom, this is—”
“Rhys Carrick,” he said, crossing the room with an easy stride and extending his hand.
Her mother took it. “We’ve been expecting you,” she said, her tone pleasant but not warm. “You’re very…tall.”
He blinked. “Um. Thank you?”
“Mom,” Nora said.
“What? It’s an observation.” Her mother handed him a mug. “Sugar? Cream?”
“Black is fine,” he said. He took a sip and didn’t grimace, which earned him a fraction of reluctant respect from Nora. Their coffee was strictly utilitarian.
“We don’t have any oat milk or whatever you city people like,” her mother said.
“I’ll survive,” he said. “I grew up on diner coffee.”
“Did you?” her mother asked, head tilting. “Where?”
“Vacaville,” he said. “My dad worked at a distribution center off 80.”
“Ah,” Rosa said. “The one that smells like cardboard in the summer.”
“You’ve been?” he asked, surprised.
“Of course,” she said. “There’s a little Mexican place on the corner of—”
Nora cleared her throat. Loudly.
Both of them looked at her.
“Fascinating as this trip down I-80 memory lane is,” she said, “we have fruit on the crush pad. And in the vineyard. And a day that gets hotter by the minute.”
“Of course,” he said smoothly. “I just wanted to make sure we’re aligned on expectations before—”
“Expectations,” she repeated. “Right.”
Her mother shot her a look. Be nice, it said, as clearly as if she’d spoken.
“Here’s my expectation,” Nora said anyway. “You stay out of my way. You don’t touch anything that has moving parts. You don’t give orders to my crew. And you don’t say the word ‘synergy’ anywhere within a five-mile radius of my vines.”
“Those seem…reasonable,” he said. “I’ll add a couple of mine, if I may.”
“You may not,” she said. “But go ahead.”
“I expect that you’ll keep me apprised of harvest timing,” he said. “Block by block. That you’ll provide me with your latest production and sales numbers. And that you won’t engage in any…creative interpretations of the deed restriction language to delay completion.”
She stiffened. “Is that what you’re worried about? That I’ll leave one last cluster on the back side of Row 12 so I can argue in court that harvest isn’t ‘complete’?”
He held her gaze. “I’m saying we both know what ‘harvest’ means here. Let’s not play games.”
She stood abruptly, chair scraping back. “You think I have energy for games?” she demanded. “I have three crews, fourteen blocks, and a press that cries every time I turn it on. I have a main pump that could give out any day. I have birds that apparently called a convention on block seven. And I have you. Showing up with your…boots and your…smug little spreadsheet smile—”
“I don’t have a smile,” he said. “Much less a ‘spreadsheet’ one.”
“—and telling me not to cheat?” she finished. “Please. I don’t have time to cheat.”
He watched her for a long beat, something like amusement flickering in his eyes. “Good,” he said softly. “Neither do I.”
The air between them felt charged. Nora was acutely aware of her mother at the stove, pretending to fuss with a pan that didn’t need fussing.
“Mom,” she said without looking away from him. “Can you make sure the muffin tray makes it out to the crush pad? Diego will inhale half of them if you leave them on the counter.”
“On it,” her mother said. She wiped her hands and, with a last assessing glance at Rhys, slipped out the back door.
The kitchen seemed to shrink.
He set his mug down. His fingers were long, she noticed. Strong. Not as soft as she’d expected from someone who spent his life typing.
“Nora,” he said.
“No,” she cut in. “You don’t get to ‘Nora’ me in my own kitchen on day two.”
He nodded, once. “Fine. Ms. Figueroa,” he said, and she flinched despite herself. “We’re stuck with each other for the next few weeks. You don’t like me. That’s…understandable.”
“Understatement of the decade,” she muttered.
“But,” he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken, “we do have shared objectives, whether you want to admit it or not. You want to make the best possible wine. I want to preserve the asset’s value. Those two things align, at least for now.”
“You mean you can’t sell a vineyard with dead vines and half-fermented mouse pee in the tanks,” she said.
“I prefer ‘oxidized product,’” he said. “But yes.”
“Then we’re aligned,” she said. “You stay out of my way, I’ll make the wine, and we’ll both get what we want.”
“And what is it you think I want?” he asked quietly.
“To turn this place into a luxury resort where people pay $800 a night to drink wines with names you can’t pronounce,” she shot back.
He didn’t deny it. “And you?” he said. “What do you want?”
The answer rose in her, hot and simple: To keep it. To stand out on the porch in ten years and watch the sunset over vines that still answered to her. To fix the south fence. To finally buy a new press.
But that wasn’t on the menu.
“Right now?” she said instead. “I want to get through harvest without murdering you. Let’s start there.”
Something like a smile ghosted over his mouth. “Reasonable goal,” he said. “We’ll benchmark against it later.”
“And there it is,” she said. “The MBA-speak.”
He spread his hands, palms up. “Help me out,” he said. “If I can’t say ‘synergy’ or ‘benchmark,’ what can I say?”
“‘Yes, Nora,’” she said sweetly. “That’s always a good one.”
He chuckled, low. The sound did something annoying to her stomach.
“Noted,” he said. “Lead the way.”
* * *
By eight, the sun had cleared the low hills, and the crush pad was a hive of controlled chaos. Bins arrived from the Sauvignon Blanc block, stacked and waiting. The press groaned, but held. Fruit moved from one machine to another, each step supervised by someone with a stained shirt and a sharp eye.
Rhys had stationed himself just out of the main traffic pattern, leaning against a stack of neutral barrels with his portfolio open. He watched everything with the kind of focused attention that made Nora’s skin itch.
“Stop staring,” she snapped at him at one point, hauling a hose across the concrete. “You’re making the grapes nervous.”
“The grapes are fine,” he said. “You, on the other hand…”
She glared. “Finish that sentence at your own risk.”
“…seem like you could use some water,” he said dryly, nodding toward the hose. “Not that one.”
She realized she was breathing hard. Sweat dripped from the ends of her hair onto her collarbone. The air shimmered with heat and humidity.
“You want to be useful?” she said. “Grab those buckets and go check the sloping end of block three for rot.”
He looked at the twelve-gallon white plastic buckets. At his boots. At the sun.
Then he set his portfolio aside, rolled up his sleeves again, and picked up two buckets without comment.
“Third row from the west fence,” she called after him. “If you see anything fuzzy and gray, cut it out and bag it. Don’t just drop it on the ground.”
“I took Biology in high school,” he said over his shoulder. “I can identify mold.”
“That’s Botrytis cinerea to you, Mr. CitiBank,” she yelled.
“Crestlake,” he called back. “And I know Botrytis. It can also be noble rot, depending on—”
“On whether we’re making Sauternes,” she said. “Which we’re not. Gray rot is not my friend right now. Go.”
He went, surprisingly without further argument.
She watched him walk down the row for a moment, bucket in each hand. He moved like an athlete, even if his T-shirt probably cost as much as her monthly power bill. She’d pegged him for soft when he got out of the SUV—some office guy playing at being rugged. He wasn’t. Not exactly.
Not that it mattered.
“Jefa,” Yolanda said softly beside her. “You’re staring.”
“I’m making sure he doesn’t get lost,” Nora said. “He’d sue us if he fell in the creek.”
“Uh-huh,” Yolanda said, unconvinced. “You warned us he was coming. You did not mention he looked like that.”
“Like what?” Nora asked, feigning ignorance as she turned back to the incoming fruit.
“Like he has a personal trainer and a sad backstory,” Yolanda said. “You know. The kind that makes good TV.”
“He’s not TV,” Nora said. “He’s reality. And he’s here to sell this place.”
Yolanda’s expression sobered. “You think he will?” she asked.
“Yes,” Nora said. “People like him don’t do anything halfway. If he came all the way up here, it’s because he wants to make sure every I is dotted before he pushes us off the cliff.”
Yolanda was quiet for a beat. “So what are we going to do?” she asked.
“We’re going to make wine,” Nora said. “Like we always do.”
“And after?”
“After…” Nora swallowed. “I don’t know yet.”
Yolanda nodded slowly. “Well,” she said. “If we’re going out, at least we’re going out with perfect fruit.”
“That’s the spirit,” Nora muttered.
* * *
By midday, the heat was brutal. They’d finished with the Sauvignon Blanc for the day and shifted to some early ripening Chardonnay from the lower block. Nora’s shirt stuck to her back. Her calves ached from the constant back and forth.
She grabbed a clipboard from the table by the lab door and sat for a second on an overturned bucket in the shrinking patch of shade.
“What’s our tonnage so far?” her mother called from the doorway, a straw hat shielding her face.
“Six and a half tons of Sauv Blanc,” Nora said, scanning her numbers. “Three and change of Chard. We’ll finish block seven tomorrow, then move to the Merlot in nine.”
“Birds?” Rosa asked.
“Losing maybe five percent,” Nora said. “I’d love to put the nets up, but they’re in worse shape than the press.”
“We’ll manage,” her mother said. “We always—”
Her words cut off as Rhys emerged from between the rows, buckets in hand. His T-shirt was darker now, damp with sweat down the spine. Dirt streaked his forearms. Something that looked suspiciously like grape juice stained his thigh.
He set the buckets down carefully near the compost pile.
“Botrytis in the low spot, as expected,” he said. “You’ve got good drainage on most of it, but that corner by the old oak is…”
“…a nightmare,” she finished. “Yeah. We lose that fruit most years if we get any late rain. How bad?”
He considered. “Maybe two percent of the block,” he said. “If you’re aggressive. I bagged what I could see. You’ll want the pickers to cut out anything that looks suspicious, but you know that.”
She did. She also knew his estimate was probably right. He didn’t sound like a guy guessing. He sounded like a guy who’d done this before.
“You’ve worked a harvest,” she said, suspicion creeping in.
“Two,” he said. “Back in college. Internships. One in Texas Hill Country, one in Paso.”
She stared. “You? Interned at a winery?”
“I needed the money,” he said with a shrug. “And the owner was a friend of my econ professor. He was experimenting with Rhône varietals on calcareous soils—”
She held up a hand. “Stop trying to impress me.”
“Is it working?” he asked.
“No,” she lied.
He smiled, quick and sharp. “Then I’ll try harder.”
She rolled her eyes, but couldn’t entirely stop the answering curl at the corner of her mouth.
Her mother, who’d been watching this exchange like it was her favorite telenovela, cleared her throat. “Lunch,” she announced. “If you don’t eat, you fall down. And if you fall down, you can’t pick.”
“Words to live by,” Rhys said politely.
They trooped into the cool of the winery’s multipurpose room—the space they used for staff meetings, winter barrel tastings, and, in leaner years, weddings. An industrial fan hummed in the corner. A long folding table held a spread of simple food: tortillas, grilled chicken, salsa, a pot of beans. Muffins. Someone had brought watermelon.
The crew lined up with easy camaraderie. Rhys hung back, waiting until the last of the workers had filled their plates before he stepped up, nodding at people as if he belonged.
He didn’t. But he also didn’t act as if he expected special treatment. Nora filed that away under annoyingly competent.
She sat at the far end of one of the picnic tables, between Yolanda and Diego. Her mother, naturally, sat across from Rhys, peppering him with questions.
“So,” Rosa said, scooping salsa onto her tortilla. “You’re from Vacaville, but you live in San Francisco now?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Crestlake’s office is downtown. I live…nearby.”
“In one of those buildings with the windows that don’t open,” she said.
“Unfortunately,” he said. “Something about energy efficiency.”
“Energy,” she scoffed. “You want energy, you open a window.”
Nora pretended not to listen, but it was impossible not to.
“What about your family?” Rosa asked. “Your parents?”
“Mom’s still in Vacaville,” he said. “Same house. She works at the high school now. Administrative assistant. My dad passed away when I was in college.”
“I’m sorry,” Rosa said. “Too young.”
He shrugged one shoulder. “He smoked,” he said. “Lung cancer. We told him, but…”
“They never listen,” Rosa said. “My husband drank too much coffee and not enough water. Heart attack. One minute he was yelling at the tractor, the next…”
She trailed off. For a moment, the only sound was the hum of the fan.
“I’m sorry,” Rhys said, and that, at least, seemed to come from somewhere real.
“Life,” Rosa said around a bite, as if shaking something off. “It goes how it goes.”
He nodded. “He always said he wanted to go out doing something he loved,” he said. “Maybe not that soon, but…”
“Do you love this?” she asked him, gesturing vaguely. “All the numbers. The…what do you call it…”
“Finance?” he supplied.
“Yes,” she said. “That.”
He thought for a second. Nora watched him over the rim of her water cup.
“I love solving problems,” he said finally. “Putting things together in a way that works better than they did before. Systems. Deals. Making all the pieces fit.”
“At what cost?” Nora asked before she could stop herself.
He looked at her. Held her gaze. “Everything has a cost,” he said evenly. “You know that better than most.”
“Don’t make it sound like we’re in the same business,” she said.
“We’re both trying to make something out of something else,” he said. “You take grapes, yeast, time, and make wine. I take capital, distressed assets, and time, and make…different capital.”
“You make money out of other people’s mistakes,” she said.
“Or their bad luck,” he said. “Or their bad timing. Or their bad planning.”
She stabbed a piece of chicken with more force than necessary. “Nice to know we’re a bullet point in your thesis about why people like my father shouldn’t be trusted with spreadsheets,” she said.
“That’s not what I—”
“Isn’t it?” she demanded.
The table had gone quiet. She was aware, distantly, of twenty pairs of eyes flicking between them like they were watching a tennis match.
“Nora,” her mother said softly. “Eat.”
“No,” she said. “He wants to talk about costs? Let’s. Let’s talk about how this ‘distressed asset’ was my childhood. Let’s talk about how my father believed a man from the bank when he said, ‘The valley’s changing. You have to leverage to grow, or you’ll be left behind.’ Let’s talk about how every time we had a frost, or a wildfire, or a distributor who ‘decided to go in a different direction,’ those leveraged numbers got worse, but the bank kept saying, ‘We can structure this. We can help.’”
She leaned forward. “And then they sold the note. To you.”
“To Crestlake,” he said. “Technically.”
“You embody Crestlake in this room,” she shot back. “You’re its face. You’re the one who flew up in the private plane, who gets to decide if my parents’ ashes stay under that oak tree or get bulldozed for a spa.”
Something flickered across his face at that. Surprise, maybe. Or guilt. She hoped it hurt.
“I don’t make decisions about people’s ashes,” he said quietly. “That’s not mine to—”
“Everything here will be yours,” she said. “That’s the point. You and your investors. You’re going to carve it up, package it, and sell it to someone who thinks cows are cute because they’ve only ever seen them in cartoons.”
“Enough.” Rosa’s voice cracked like a whip.
Nora snapped her mouth shut. She hadn’t heard that tone since she was sixteen and had snuck out to a party the night before harvest. Shame prickled under her skin.
“You can yell at him all you want when you’re out there,” her mother said, pointing toward the vineyard. “But not at my table.”
“He started it,” Nora muttered, sounding, to her horror, like a sulky teenager.
“No,” her mother said. “The bank started it. Your father started it when he signed those papers. The drought started it. The world started it. He is just the man standing in the doorway when the music stopped. Don’t waste your anger on the wrong verse.”
Nora stared at her plate. Heat climbed her neck.
“I’m not saying he’s innocent,” Rosa added. “I’m saying he’s not God. He does not get to be the villain and the hero in your story. He’s just another character, mija. One who’s here, and who, for better or worse, you have to dance with until the season’s over.”
The room was very quiet.
Across from her, Rhys’s jaw was tight. His eyes were…difficult to read. Not cold. Not exactly soft.
“Rosa,” he said slowly. “If I may—I don’t want to be the villain in anyone’s story. I really don’t.”
“And yet,” Nora muttered.
He ignored her. “But I also can’t be the savior,” he said. “That’s not what my investors pay me for. My job is to take something that’s not working for them and turn it into something that does. That’s the…cost structure I operate in.”
“And we are the ones who pay the price,” Nora said.
“Yes,” he said, and the blunt honesty of it hit her harder than any platitude. “You are. And I’m…not sorry enough to walk away from the deal.”
“At least you’re honest,” she said flatly.
“About the economics,” he said. “But there are…lines. I could have brought in a management company. Told you to hand over the keys and go. We chose not to.”
“Because you needed me,” she said. “Because of the deed.”
“Because burning bridges is bad business,” he corrected. “We invest in agriculture. People talk. Word gets out that we threw a farmer off her land in harvest season when we didn’t have to, it affects future deals.”
“Ah, there it is,” she said. “Self-interest dressed up as ethics.”
“Self-interest is ethics, in my line of work,” he said. “Mine and other people’s. The only reason one of your distributors kept you on after two bad vintages was because they liked you. They valued more than the numbers. They were running their own version of self-interest.”
She hated that he was right. She also hated that she’d once believed she could make this business run on loyalty and grit alone. The valley had disabused her of that.
“Maybe the problem,” she said, “is that people like you and people like me are speaking different languages.”
He tilted his head. “What’s yours?”
“Dirt,” she said. “Weather. Gut. You can’t put those in a spreadsheet.”
“I’ve tried,” he said. “It gets messy.”
She hadn’t meant to laugh. But she did. A small, unwilling sound.
“Messy,” she echoed. “You came to the right place.”
* * *
That afternoon, she took him up to block nine.
The Merlot there always ripened a little unevenly, thanks to a weird dip in the slope that caught cool air. You had to walk it, row by row, cluster by cluster, making judgment calls that had nothing to do with numbers and everything to do with a kind of intuition built from years of watching vines respond to sun and stress and wind.
“Why this block?” he asked, following her up the dirt path between rows.
“Because if you’re going to stand over my shoulder all season, you might as well understand what ‘ripe’ means in my mouth, not just on your printout,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you when to pick.”
“Good,” she said. “Because if you tried, I’d take that fancy watch of yours and—”
“—beat me with it?” he supplied.
She smirked. “It looks heavy enough.”
He glanced down at it, then back at her. “You really hate me,” he said, without self-pity. More like curiosity.
“I don’t know you well enough to hate you,” she said. “Yet.”
He walked a few more paces in silence. “You could,” he said. “If you wanted.”
“I already told you,” she said. “I don’t have time.”
She stopped at the top of the block and shaded her eyes with her hand. The valley spread out below them in waves of green and gold, dotted with houses and the occasional red barn. In the distance, a line of oaks traced a dry creek.
Despite everything, the sight still tugged at her. This view had raised her. First as a kid, running up here to escape chores, then as a teenager, sneaking out to kiss boys on rickety wooden fences. Later, as a woman who’d stood right here, three days after her father’s funeral, and sworn she wouldn’t be the one to let it all go.
She felt Rhys come to stand beside her. Not touching. Close enough to feel the heat from his body.
“It’s beautiful,” he said quietly.
“Don’t get attached,” she said. “You’ll just make it harder when you sell it.”
“I don’t get attached to land,” he said. “Too risky.”
“What do you get attached to?” she asked.
He considered. “Closing dinners,” he said finally. “Clean numbers. An empty inbox.”
She snorted. “You’re fun at parties, huh.”
“You have no idea,” he said. Something in his tone made her glance over.
He was looking straight ahead, jaw set, eyes hooded. For a second, she glimpsed something under the polished, practiced surface. Tiredness, maybe. Or hunger of a different kind.
“Here,” she said abruptly, reaching for a cluster. “Taste.”
She plucked a berry and held it out. He looked at her hand, then at her face, then leaned in.
His lips brushed her fingers, just barely, as he took the berry.
Heat flared up her arm, shocking in its intensity.
He chewed, eyes closing briefly. “Still a little green on the seeds,” he said. “But the skins are getting there. Good color. Flavors running ahead of Brix, which is…nice.”
She swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. “You really did work harvest,” she said.
“You thought I was making that up,” he said.
“I thought you read a book on plane,” she said. “Let me see.”
He opened his mouth obediently. She leaned in, close enough to see the crushed seed on his tongue. Brown. She tried not to think about how intimate the moment was. Her face was inches from his. She could feel his breath, warm against her cheek.
She pulled back. Too fast. “Okay,” she said, too brightly. “So we wait.”
“For what?” he asked.
“For the moment,” she said. “The day when I walk up here and my nose and my tongue and my gut all say, ‘Now.’ Not tomorrow. Not next week. Now. And then I call in eight extra pickers, and we run like hell to get it all in before the sun gets too high. And if we get it right…” She trailed off, searching for the words.
“If you get it right?” he prompted.
She looked down at the clusters, at the way light filtered through the leaves.
“If we get it right,” she said softly, “we bottle a year. We trap it. Every stupid thing that happened—the frost, the heat, the time the irrigation line broke at two in the morning, the day the pump finally died and then came back like Lazarus… It all lives in there. And five years from now, someone in a restaurant in Chicago will open a bottle, pour it, and for a second, they’ll taste this hill. This sun. This moment.”
She hadn’t meant to say that much. It tumbled out anyway, pulled by some force she didn’t quite understand.
He was watching her with an intensity that made her want to fidget. She didn’t.
“That’s why you stayed,” he said quietly. “Isn’t it.”
She shrugged, trying for nonchalance and probably failing. “Someone has to make sure the city people don’t ruin all the wine,” she said.
He smiled, slow. “We’re not all villains,” he said.
“Prove it,” she said.
He held her gaze. The sun beat down on the back of her neck. The air hummed with heat.
“Maybe I will,” he said.
* * *
That night, after twelve hours of harvest, two arguments about pump scheduling, and one emergency run to the hardware store when a hose coupling failed, Nora stood in the cool semi-dark of the barrel room and listened to the sound of fermentations beginning.
It was subtle—a soft fizzing, like a distant carbonated drink being poured. The yeast had found the sugars, had woken from their dry packets and sprung into action. The air smelled richer now, deep and sweet and a little wild.
She leaned against a stack of barrels and closed her eyes.
Footsteps echoed on the concrete. She didn’t move.
“You hide down here often?” came his voice.
“Only when I think no one will find me,” she said without opening her eyes.
He came to stand beside her, mimicking her posture against the opposite barrel stack.
“It’s quieter down here,” he said. “And cooler.”
“If you tell my crew where I am, I’ll have to kill you,” she said. “And then I’ll have two problems.”
He chuckled. “Your secret’s safe.”
For a few beats, they just stood. The hum of the refrigeration unit, the faint fizz, their breathing.
“You were good today,” she said reluctantly. “With the rot. With the hoses. You didn’t complain once.”
“I’ve had worse days,” he said. “At least this time the things trying to kill me were tangible.”
“Wall Street roadshow that bad, huh?” she said.
“Worse,” he said. “At least Botrytis doesn’t ask you to explain why your projected IRR is one basis point lower than the last deck you sent.”
“You lost me at ‘basis point,’” she said.
He smiled faintly. “It’s one hundredth of a percent.”
“Now you’ve lost me at ‘percent,’” she said.
He glanced around. “So,” he said. “Do you talk to them?”
“The barrels?” she asked.
“The wines,” he said. “Do you…” He made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know. Tell them things.”
She opened her eyes. “Like secrets?” she asked. “Hopes? Fears?”
“Maybe,” he said.
“Are you picturing me whispering sweet nothings to a tank?” she asked.
“Maybe,” he said again, lips quirking.
She considered the question seriously. “Sometimes,” she said. “Not the way you mean. But when I’m topping them, or tasting through, I…remember. What was happening that year. Who picked. Who worked the night shift. Who broke up with whom in block five.”
“Does it change the wine?” he asked. “If you do that?”
“It changes me,” she said. “And I make the wine. So…maybe.”
He nodded slowly. “That makes sense.”
She tilted her head. “What about you?” she asked. “You ever talk to your…what do you call them…assets?”
He huffed out a breath. “I send them quarterly reports,” he said. “That’s about as close as I get to love letters.”
“That’s sad,” she said.
“That’s efficient,” he countered.
“Those two things are not mutually exclusive,” she said softly.
The hum of the refrigeration unit filled the space for a moment.
“Nora,” he said.
She looked at him.
“You know this…can’t end the way you want,” he said quietly. “I’m not going to have some epiphany in this barrel room and decide to tear up the note. That’s not how this works.”
“I know,” she said. Her voice surprised her with how steady it was. “I’m not…waiting for that.”
“Then what are you waiting for?” he asked.
She thought of the way the Merlot berries had tasted that afternoon, sunlight and tannin and something on the edge of becoming. She thought of her mother at the kitchen table with the foreclosure letter. She thought of her father, stomping snow from his boots by the door, saying, One more year, mija. One more good vintage and we’ll be fine.
“I’m waiting,” she said slowly, “to see if I can make you feel anything about this place that doesn’t fit in a spreadsheet.”
His throat worked. “Why?” he asked.
“Because if I can,” she said, “then maybe—maybe—you’ll sell it to someone who cares. Not to the highest bidder with the shiniest golf clubs. Maybe you’ll leave a little room in your ‘IRR’ for…memory.”
“And if I don’t?” he asked. “If I feel nothing?”
She took a breath. It tasted like fermenting Cab.
“Then I’ll know I did everything I could,” she said. “And when I drive away, I won’t spend the rest of my life wondering if there was one more conversation I should’ve had. One more barrel I should’ve made you taste.”
He stared at her. The cool of the room seeped into her bones.
“You think highly of your persuasive abilities,” he said finally.
“No,” she said. “I think highly of this place’s. I’m just…an interpreter.”
He exhaled, a short, almost disbelieving sound. “You’re something, you know that?”
“So people keep telling me,” she said.
His gaze dropped briefly to her mouth. When it came back up, there was a new heat there. One that had nothing to do with deed restrictions.
Danger. Her nerves sang with it.
“This is a bad idea,” she said, before he could say whatever he was about to say.
“I haven’t suggested anything yet,” he said.
“You don’t have to,” she said. “I’m not blind.”
Silence stretched, tight as a wire.
“You’re right,” he said, after a beat. “This is a bad idea.”
“Glad we agree,” she said.
He pushed off the barrel and straightened. “I’ll be on the porch,” he said. “Your Wi-Fi is…an adventure. I’m going to see if I can catch enough of a signal to send a few emails before your crew comes looking for you.”
“They won’t,” she said. “I trained them too well.”
He smiled, faint and crooked. “Goodnight, Nora.”
“Goodnight, Crestlake,” she said.
He walked away, footsteps echoing on the concrete.
She watched him until he disappeared around the corner.
Then she leaned her head back against the barrel and let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
The fizz of fermentation wrapped around her, soft and insistent.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she muttered to the barrels. “I know what I’m doing.”
They didn’t answer. They just kept changing, quietly, inexorably, turning sugar into something stronger.
* * *