Chapter 4
RHETT
Istand at my study window with my signature still wet on my copy of the agreement, and I already know this deal is going to take more out of me than a season's worth of labor ever could.
Sadie's truck kicks up dust down the long drive, past the iron gate, past the rows of Cabernet just starting to show color on the vine, her signed copy of the agreement tucked under her arm on her way out the door.
The gate closes slow behind her, iron settling into iron with a sound I've heard ten thousand times and never once paid attention to before now.
Ten minutes ago she sat across my desk and laid out her terms without a single crack in her voice. One season. Strictly business. When the last grape comes off the vine, we're done.
I keep looking at the empty drive longer than I should before I make myself stop.
I signed anyway.
Told myself it was about a hundred jobs on my side of the fence line and a hundred more on hers.
That part is even true. Just not the whole truth.
Evelyn had already slipped out to her roses by the time Beck let himself back in, muttering something about giving me some peace.
Beck still leans against the bookshelf, arms crossed, watching me like I'm a horse he's trying to decide whether to bet on.
"You good?" he asks.
"Fine."
"You signed a season-long partnership with a woman who hates your last name and you didn't negotiate a single line item."
"The terms were fair."
"The terms were generous. There's a difference, and you know it, and so does she."
I don't answer that.
"You used to carry her books home from school," Beck says. "I remember. You were eleven and insufferable about it."
"I don't remember that."
"You remember everything about her. That's the problem."
"Don't you have a barrel to check?"
"Not yet." He grins, that grin that's talked him out of speeding tickets and into more trouble with women in this town than any one man deserves. "I just want to watch you pretend this is about jobs for a little longer. It's the best entertainment I've had all week."
"Get out of my study."
"See, a normal person laughs when I say something like that. You just look like you want to throw me through the window."
"I'm considering it."
"Grumpy," he says, like it's an accusation and a compliment at the same time, and finally pushes off the bookshelf.
"You've been calling me that since I was sixteen."
"And I've been right every single time."
He heads for the door, shaking his head like he already has the story ready for our brother Knox over dinner.
"Barrel inventory," he says, which is not a thing that needs doing today, and we both know it.
He leaves me alone with the papers and the smell of her perfume still sitting in the air.
I catch myself trying to place it. Something dark, something like ripe blackberry and worn leather.
She laid out every term the same exacting way she reads a glass of wine, giving nothing away until she'd decided I'd earned it.
I pour a glass, mostly to have something to do with my hands.
The study goes quiet except for the ceiling fan turning slow overhead. Through the window, the vineyard rows run gold all the way to the tree line, the same view my father used to stand at when he had something on his mind he wasn't planning to say out loud.
I sit down at my desk. Pick up the signed copy again, even though I've already read it twice. Her handwriting is small and slanted, rushed-looking even though every word is careful.
I think about the courthouse steps, the morning her family's world came apart in public. Her mother's car idling at the curb, engine running rough, exhaust curling up into cold morning air. Sadie's face pressed against the window, already crying, already leaving.
Someone had talked to the paper before we ever got there. Negligence, the word said, printed right under a photograph of vines that used to belong to her grandfather. I never once asked if it was true. Nobody in this town did either. They just decided and moved on.
I remember the sound the gravel made under my boots when I didn't cross the parking lot to stop her.
That's the year I bought the land under Collins Cellars through an LLC with my name nowhere on it, before some developer could carve it into lake houses. Sadie runs the winery. She has no idea the ground underneath it belongs to me.
I close the drawer harder than I need to.
My father's voice in my ear. Beaumonts do not get involved in Collins business. Not one word, Rhett. Not one.
I was thirty-two. Scared of a man I'm not sure I've ever stopped being scared of, even three years after we buried him.
I said nothing. She left three weeks later.
I've spent a long time telling myself silence isn't the same thing as a lie.
I don't believe that anymore.
The door opens without a knock.
"Well," Evelyn says. "Isn't this interesting."
My grandmother stands in the doorway in her gardening clothes, dirt still on her knees, looking far too pleased for a woman claiming she only came in to check on her roses through the window.
"You were listening."
"I was pruning roses under your window. If you wanted privacy, you should have thought to close it."
"Grandma."
She crosses the study slow, the way she does everything, like the whole world can wait on her if it knows what's good for it. She stops in front of my desk and looks down at the signed papers like they're something precious.
"Sadie Collins," she says. "Sitting in this house again."
"It's a business arrangement."
"Mm-hmm."
"One season."
"Mm-hmm."
"Strictly professional."
Evelyn finally looks up at me, and there's something in her eyes I recognize from every important conversation of my life. The one that says she already knows how this ends and is simply waiting for me to catch up.
"You've never once in your life called anything strictly professional unless you were trying hard to convince yourself of it," she says.
"That's not true."
"Rhett Beaumont. I changed your diapers."
I rub the back of my neck and don't have an answer for that.
A knock sounds at the half-open door. Rosa leans in with a coffee tray, catches the two of us mid-standoff, and backs out just as fast.
"I'll come back," she says.
"Rosa, wait?—"
"I'll come back," she says again, already gone, door clicking shut behind her like she's done this a hundred times before.
Evelyn doesn't even turn her head.
Outside the window behind her, cicadas start up in the tree line, that low steady hum that means the real heat of the day has arrived.
She rounds the desk and sits on the edge of it, closer than my father ever would have allowed anyone to sit, papers be damned.
"I remember the summer you were twelve," she says. "Sadie trailing after you like she owned the place, eight years old and already too stubborn to be told no. You carved something into the Old Oak that summer. I never told your father I saw it."
Two sets of initials, a crooked heart neither of us knew how to carve straight, sap still sticky under my thumbnail for a week after.
"That was a long time ago."
"So was the day you stood on that curb and said nothing while her whole world fell apart."
The words hit like a slap, gentle and precise, the way only Evelyn can manage.
"You don't know what that was like," I say. "Dad had already?—"
"I raised that man from a boy, Rhett. I know exactly what his silence cost this family before you were ever old enough to inherit it."
That stops me.
She reaches over and rests her hand on my arm. Small hand. Grip stronger than it has any right to be at seventy-eight.
"You have been waiting a long time to fix this," she says, quiet now, just for me. "Do not waste the harvest."
I open my mouth to tell her she's wrong.
Nothing comes out.
Because she isn't wrong. She's never been wrong about a single thing that mattered in this house.
I don't say any of that.
I nod, once, and let her think that's an answer.
She pats my arm and heads for the door, satisfied in the way only a woman who already won an argument can be.
I sit alone with the papers a long time after she's gone.
All this time keeping my mouth shut, and my grandmother still found a way to make me the one who has to fix it.
I pull out my phone and call the crew foreman before I let myself think too hard about it.
"Move the east crew to start on the Collins fence line Thursday," I say. "Full repair, not a patch job. I want it done right before harvest, not after."
"That's not on the schedule, boss."
"It is now."
I hang up before he can argue. It's not much. A fence line isn't an apology.
But it's the first thing I've done about her in a long time that isn't just staying quiet and hoping it fixes itself.
A shadow shifts in the doorway. Evelyn never left.
"Full repair," she says, like she's tasting the words. "Not a patch job."
"It's a business decision."
"That's a start," she says, and walks out humming, pleased with herself, and it unsettles me more than I want to admit.
A start. Like there's a finish line somewhere in this I'm supposed to run toward.
Problem is, I have no idea what winning looks like. Or whether Sadie Collins would even let me cross it if I got there.