Love You Always (Buttercup Hill #5)

Epilogue

A rcher

Two Weeks Later

The whole family walks down to the cellar, and as I’m comforted by the casual chatter of the group, all paired up with the ones they love, I notice Graham following behind. I signal for him to join Ella and me at the front of our family herd, my dad’s words echoing in my brain. “Family is family.” We’ve never treated Graham much like family, but there’s still time.

“How’d bottling season go for you?” I ask.

He looks momentarily surprised by my interest. “Good, actually.” I see the hint of a proud smile. “I’d love to have you taste some of the new wines if you’re down for it.”

“I’m down.”

Ella slips her hand into mine. I don’t need to see her face to know she’s grinning at me and my slight progress toward being less grumpy.

The wine cave runs nearly a mile underground, so it takes us a good ten minutes to reach the area that corresponds to the numbers on the slip of paper.

Trix insisted we wait until after the adoption went through—and then the wedding and the honeymoon—to follow our dad’s instructions and come down here. “Just in case it’s something stressful. I want to give you two at least a little time to be a happy family,” she said. The idea that I have my own family still takes some getting used to, but it’s the best fucking thing in the world.

It’s dark, lighted only by small path lights on the ground and sconces every hundred feet or so that illuminate the lot numbers of the various bottles.

“Now we know why Archer likes it down here. It’s dark and quiet like your personality,” Jax teases.

“Hilarious. Actually, I rarely come to this area. It’s all the really old vintages that mostly sit here unless collectors or high-end restaurants order cases of them.” In other words, they’re bottles that can run in the hundreds and thousands of dollars because of their age and rarity.

I use the flashlight on my phone to lead us to the area specified on the paper and find the section of bottles in question. When I pull the first one out and look at the label, I notice something familiar about the date, which is over thirty years old.

“Trix, you were born in ninety-six, weren’t you?” I hand over the bottle so she can inspect it, already anticipating what I’ll find when I pull out the other bottles. Sure enough, they all correspond to our birth years, including one for Graham.

“You never noticed these were here, Arch?” Dash asks, looking at the label of his bottle of cabernet.

“There are sixty thousand bottles down here. I don’t look at every one of them,” I say .

“Maybe you should.”

“Maybe you should, since you’ll be taking over the wine-making operations.” I let the words land in the dark room and wait for my siblings to pick up on the conversation. It takes a moment for their chatter to die down, but one by one, they stop talking and look from one of us to the other.

“Hang on, did you just say—?” PJ tilts her head as though it will bring my words back for her to hear them again.

I nod. “Yes. I’m stepping down, as soon as I can get Dash trained. He’s going to run the show here, and I’m going to…I’ve been working on something else.” It feels good to say it. “Something I like.” I give them the broad strokes of the wine app, which is fully funded and almost ready to launch, and everyone seems fine with my change of direction. Happy, even.

“Well, cheers to that,” Beatrix says, holding up her bottle. We each bring ours up and clink them against hers and each other’s.

“I know I knew our dad the least, but I’m pretty sure we’re not just supposed to be looking at these bottles,” Graham says.

“Smart man,” Jax says, his arm around Ruby who is geeking out on the various vintages she never knew we had.

“If we’re opening these, we need some fat and salt. Palate cleansers. Good glasses,” she says, her voice getting higher in excitement. Jax beams at her and nods.

“Let’s do it.”

The chatter is louder as we make our way back out of the cave. The mood feels lighter, at least mine does. With the final piece of our dad’s cryptic puzzle in place, I let out a sigh of relief. “I know what my first toast is going to be,” I say, my voice booming in the cavernous space. “To no more weird charges on our balance sheet, no unexplained fires on our property…” I trail off before putting my foot in my mouth, but Graham punches my shoulder.

“It’s okay, you can say it. No new surprise family members.”

“Hey, if they’re all as great as you, I’ll take ‘em,” Jax says .

“Hear! Hear!” Dash agrees.

A few minutes later, we exit the cave, returning to the lazy afternoon sunlight filtering through the vineyards. Out of sheer excitement, Ruby practically skips down the path toward the outdoor patio next to the tasting room. She busies herself with glassware and snacks while the rest of us pull out chairs and push three tables together so we can sit together.

Colin pulls PJ onto his lap, and I revel at what a great couple my oldest friend and my sister make—and how I never saw it coming back when they were sneaking around Buttercup Hill and trying to keep their relationship under wraps.

Beatrix sits and keeps a chair open for Ren, who’s busy talking to Dash about hockey. My poor brother actually thinks that after our scrimmage with the team he might have a chance at trying out for the Otters. Ren is humoring him, but I can see a future beat-down on the ice, similar to what I endured, if Dash persists.

Polly is at Trix’s house with her daughter, Daisy. It’s nap time for both of them, and Fiona takes her job seriously as babysitter.

Graham and Jax have been locked in conversation during the entire walk out of the wine cave. I’ve caught bits and pieces, but mostly it seems like they’re strategizing how to connect the two pieces of adjacent land we each own and turn them into one large property. “We can keep yours under the Duck Feather brand and do limited-edition wines, but we should still share our labor pool and resources,” Jax says. It makes me feel better about leaving the family business when I know that he’s minding the bottom line. More than that, he likes what he does. It makes all the difference, as I’ve come to understand.

“I’m game for that, but do we want to do a big rollout in the media to announce the merger, maybe do some open house days with tastings?” Graham is the most animated I’ve ever seen him. Jax nods, rubbing a hand over his chin in that way he does when he’s thinking.

“Totally. PJ will eat that up. ”

“What are you saying about me?” PJ calls from her perch on Colin’s lap.

Jax waves a hand. “Fill you in later.”

I can’t help but think that Dad would be happy about Graham and Jax joining forces. It seems like that’s what he wanted all along, but he was too afraid to connect us in person while he was able.

Ella comes over from where she’s been talking to Mallory. “Hey.” I pull her into my side and drape an arm over her shoulder. “That looked serious. You two planning to take over the world?” Mallory and Ella have really connected in the time Ella’s been spending at Buttercup Hill, and it makes me happy to see Ella at home here. Even if I’m no longer running the winery, we’re still going to live on the property for part of the year—one big family.

“Oh, yeah. She says Dash wants me to do another guacamole taste-off. He’s determined to win,” she says with the wink of a woman who knows that’s impossible.

“Of course he is.”

“Do you have some tricks up your sleeve to keep your title as reigning avocado champion?” I kiss her temple and feel her whole body melt against me. I’ll never get tired of the feeling.

“You better believe it. Gotta keep a man on his toes.”

I lean back and regard her smile. “Feels like you might mean someone other than Dash.”

Her eyebrows bounce. “All to be revealed, Wine Daddy.”

Before I can ask her to be more specific, Ruby comes back with wine openers and glasses, and I can see a few of our tasting room employees busy behind her putting together cheese plates with bread. “Whose are we opening first?” she asks, holding up the corkscrew.

We all look at each other, no one offering up their bottles. “You want to hang onto them, keep ‘em as a reminder of Dad?” I ask the group .

“I dunno. I feel like he wants us to drink them,” PJ says, offering hers up. She shrugs. “We’re a winery, after all.”

One by one, each of my siblings agrees and hands the bottles over to Ruby. She opens the first with a flourish. “This is the oldest vintage.” Ruby pulls out the cork and hands it to me. I roll my thumb over the end of it and smell the fruity residue on the cork. I think of my dad putting the bottle aside the year I was born, and I wonder if he knew he’d have five more kids. The thought of him as a young man with big dreams makes me feel wistful that I didn’t know him better when he was healthier, but I don’t feel sad. I may not know him, but after walking in his shoes at the helm of Buttercup Hill, I feel like I understand him.

“You know what they say, oldest is best,” I point out.

“I think they say oldest is just really fucking old,” Jax says, earning a fist bump from Dash.

Ruby pours a taste and hands it to me. “You should do the honors.”

I swirl the deep red liquid in my glass and watch it drip down the sides, the sugars stretching the legs of the cabernet. I dip my nose into the glass and inhale the heavy scent of the full-bodied wine.

Then I take a sip. Again, I imagine my dad doing the same thing before he instructed his team to bottle the vintage up. Just like I did a month ago when our cabernets were ready.

“It’s amazing. Dad knew his wine,” I say, tipping my head toward Ruby to pour glasses for everyone. She metes out small pours so we can all taste it, and everyone chimes in to agree that the wine is among the best we’ve ever had.

Jax holds up his glass and clinks it with a butter knife. “Feels like we should toast him.” He looks at me and I nod, standing up. I wish our dad could be here with us, but he’s not well enough. He’s regained some function in his left side after the stroke, but his cognitive abilities are all but gone.

“To Dad. And all the half-baked ideas he had, and also to the really good ones. We’re standing here together because of them, and I couldn’t ask for a better bunch of people to call my family. Love you guys.”

Glasses clink all around and everyone takes another sip of the wine.

I look at Ella, seeing everything I never knew I wanted in my life. “My heart knew all along.”

“Knew what?”

“That you were the one. Back at that party when I tried to meet you, I think my heart knew you were it for me.”

She smiles. “I’m glad you didn’t give up on your heart.”

I lift her up and hold her tight, transfixed by her beautiful pink cheeks, the light shining through her wild hair, her lips, which she lowers to mine. “I’m never going to want more than what I have right here in this moment. You are everything.”

“You’re my everything too,” she says.

I look down at her flat stomach in disbelief that there’s a baby growing in there. My baby. Against the odds, we’re going to have another child in seven months. We’re waiting a couple more weeks to tell anyone, but no one will be more excited than PJ. After all, she taught me everything I know about manifesting.

I think about all the years I convinced myself I couldn’t be a father because I was too afraid to be the wrong kind of dad to kids who deserved better. “I’m going to give this baby the best possible life.”

Ella nods, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I know you will. I’ve always known.”

Wrapping her in my arms, I hold her tight, aware that there are three of us in this embrace. In less than a year we’ll be a family of four. After that…who knows?