Chapter 18
RHETT
Iam leading Sadie down to a hidden cove on the far side of the lake at the edge of Beaumont land, a stretch of shore I have not brought another soul to since before she left, and I am about to tell her something I have never said out loud to anyone.
An hour ago she was standing at the Crush Pad railing with her clipboard, telling me a barrel needed racking before it turned.
Now the crew's gone home, the equipment's shut down for the night, and I'm walking her toward the one stretch of shoreline on this ranch I've never let anybody see.
I've had all afternoon to talk myself out of this. Didn't work.
The path narrows past the last row of Cabernet vines. Live oaks lean in overhead, their branches catching the last amber light before dusk.
"You realize you're being mysterious right now," Sadie says, half a step behind me. "Grumpy and mysterious. That's a lot for one Tuesday."
"Just walking."
"You've said maybe eleven words since the Crush Pad."
"Saving them up."
She laughs, low and a little disbelieving, and it catches me off guard how much I've missed hearing it.
"Careful here," I say, catching her hand over a root that cuts across the trail.
She takes it. Doesn't let go once we're past it. Her palm is warm against mine, her grip sure in a way that doesn't feel like an accident, and I'm the one who ends up watching the ground so I don't stare at our hands instead.
The water opens up below us, still and silver, ringed by limestone and cattails, the tree line cutting this cove off from the open shore near the barn where the rest of the property gathers. Nobody comes down to this stretch. Not Beck, not Knox, not even Evelyn since Grandad died.
"I didn't know this was here," Sadie says. Something in her voice has gone soft, the teasing dropped clean out of it.
"Nobody outside the family does."
"Not even Camille Ashford, with everything she's been digging into?"
"Not even her."
She looks at me then, waiting, like she already knows this walk was never about the view. I feel the weight of that look pull something tight behind my sternum.
We walk the last stretch to the flat rock at the water's edge, the one I used to sit on as a kid when the house got too loud with my father's temper. I lower myself onto it. Sadie sits beside me, close enough that her shoulder brushes mine.
For a minute neither of us says anything. The lake doesn't need filling with words. It never has. Somewhere out past the cattails a bullfrog starts up, then quits, like it thought better of interrupting.
"I used to come here after my father laid into one of us," I say. "Didn't matter who. Beck, Knox, the ranch hands. I'd sit right here until I could breathe normal again."
"Sounds lonely."
"It was."
I pick up a flat stone, turn it over in my hand instead of skipping it. Some things you don't throw away just because you can.
Sadie pulls her knees up, wraps her arms around them, watching me the way she watches a glass of wine before she tells a room what's wrong with it. Patient. Thorough. Like she's working through the layers on purpose, first the easy read, then whatever's underneath it.
"You've got a lot of structure and not much give," she says. "Tight, closed off. Like you need another year in the bottle before you'll open up to anybody."
"That a professional opinion?"
"Occupational hazard. I can't help reading people the same way I read a glass." She tilts her head, studying me. "There's something under all that tannin tonight, though. Something you're trying to decide whether to let breathe."
"You didn't bring me down here for the view, Rhett."
"No."
"Then talk."
"I need to tell you something," I say. "And I need you to let me get through it without stopping me."
She goes still beside me. "Okay."
"The day the bank posted the notice on your family's door. The day everybody in town decided your father was a thief before anybody proved a thing." I keep my eyes on the water.
My forearms find my knees, elbows braced the same way I'd stand checking a fence line, like my body still doesn't know how to sit still with something this heavy in my hands.
"My father called a family meeting that night. Told us the Beaumont name doesn't get dragged into another family's mess. Told us to keep our mouths shut and our distance."
"I remember," she says quietly. "Nobody from your family said one word in our defense. Not one."
"I was thirty-two. Old enough to know better. Old enough to stand up at that table and tell him he was wrong." The words stick in my throat before I force them loose. "I didn't say anything either."
The silence after that lands heavier than anything I've said yet.
There's more sitting behind my teeth. My grip tightens on the stone in my hand. The land. The LLC with my name buried three layers deep in paperwork nobody's supposed to find. What I did after her family lost the deed, and why. I open my mouth around the shape of it. Close it again.
Not tonight. I set the stone down on the rock beside me. She's not ready to hear it, and I'm not sure I'm ready to watch her face change when she does. Not until what I've already handed her tonight has had time to hold on its own.
"There's things I still can't tell you," I say instead. "Not because I don't want to. Because I need you to trust the rest of this first."
Sadie studies me a long moment, sommelier eyes narrowed like she's caught a note she can't quite place. "That's not an answer."
"No. It's not."
"I've spent years telling myself I was just following orders," I say. "That's a lie I got real comfortable with. The truth is I was scared of him. Scared of losing my place in this family if I picked your side over his."
"Rhett."
"Let me finish." My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to. "Your family lost everything. The land, most of the town's respect. And I stood in a kitchen eight minutes away and let it happen because speaking up cost me more than I was willing to pay."
She doesn't answer right away. Out on the water, a heron lifts off the far bank, wings slow against the darkening sky.
"You know why I got certified," she says finally. "Really certified, not just good at guessing. Because people lied to me more than wine ever did. A glass can't spin a story. It just is what it is, and you either learn to taste past the first impression or you don't."
"And me?"
"You're still the first impression. I haven't decided what's underneath yet."
Evelyn's voice comes back to me from a dozen different Sunday dinners. I turn the flat stone over once more in my hand. Wine tells the truth. So do people, eventually. I've spent years hoping the second half of that never applied to me.
"My grandmother would say I'm overdue," I say.
"She'd be right."
I don't laugh. But I come close to it.
"My father's silence cost you everything," I say. "But my own silence made me just as guilty as he was. Maybe more, because I knew better and did it anyway."
"Why are you telling me this now?"
"Because you deserve to know exactly what kind of man you're sitting next to before you decide anything else about him.
" I turn to face her fully. "And because what happened on that porch wasn't the harvest deal talking.
Wasn't gratitude, or guilt, or trying to fix something long overdue.
It was me, finally done pretending I don't want you. "
Her eyes hold mine, dark and careful, the same way they were the day I pulled that colt off the road.
"That's a lot to say out loud," she says.
"Never said it to anybody. Not Beck. Not Evelyn." I let that sit. "Wasn't ready until you."
She doesn't answer right away, long enough that I start rehearsing ways to walk it back, tell her to forget I said any of it. Before I get the chance, she shakes her head, slow, like she's arguing with herself and losing.
"I told myself I was over you," she says. "Over this place, over your family, over everything your silence cost mine."
"And now?"
"Now I'm sitting on a rock with you at your private stretch of the lake, and I can't remember why any of that mattered five minutes ago."
"It mattered," I say. "It still does. I'm not asking you to pretend it doesn't."
"I know what you're asking."
"Then tell me it's not too much."
She looks down at our hands, still joined between us on the rock. When she looks back up, something in her face has shifted, softened at the edges without giving all the way.
"I hear you, Rhett."
Four words. I watch what it costs her to say them, the careful way she picks through each one like she's handling something sharp.
Her eyes flick past me for half a second, toward the trail that leads back up toward the truck, like she's already measuring the distance to somewhere else. Gone as fast as it comes. I don't know what to make of it, so I let it go.
I don't push for more. Don't ask her to hand me forgiveness she isn't ready to give.
"I'm not asking you to trust all of it at once," I say. "Just the part where I'm not going anywhere."
"That's a big ask, Rhett Beaumont."
"Never claimed it was small."
She almost smiles at that. Almost.
"That's enough for tonight," I say.
The light's nearly gone by the time we start back up the trail, that last stretch of purple before full dark settling over the vineyard rows.
Fireflies start blinking on down near the fence line, the first of the season.
Neither of us mentions them. She walks close beside me, quiet in a way that doesn't feel like distance anymore.
She breathes in deep through her nose, cataloguing the night air out of habit. "Wet limestone. Cut grass. Something green underneath, still holding on to the day's heat." She glances at me sideways. "Sorry. Occupational."
"Don't be."
"For what it's worth," she says as we climb, "I didn't think you had it in you. The honesty."
"Fair."
"I'm not saying it to hurt you."
"I know." I keep my eyes on the trail ahead of us, on the last of the light draining out of the sky over the East Vineyard. "Some days I'm not sure I had it in me either."
"So what changed?"
"You came back."
She's quiet at that, long enough that I think maybe I said too much for one night. Then her fingers find mine again, loose at first, then not.
Near the top of the path, a piece of dark hair falls loose from behind her ear, caught by the evening breeze. I reach over before I think better of it, tuck it back where it belongs. My knuckles brush her cheek on the way.
Her breath catches. I hear it clear as anything in the still evening air.
She doesn't step back. If anything she steps closer, close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off her skin, close enough that her hand finds the front of my shirt like she needs something to hold onto.
I don't kiss her.
I want to. Want it bad enough that my hand stays right there against her cheek a moment longer than it needs to, thumb tracing the line of her cheekbone like I've got all the time left in the world to memorize it.
My whole body's leaning toward her before I catch it, pull it back an inch, hold the line I told myself I'd hold tonight.
She doesn't pull back. Doesn't lean in either. Just stands there in the last of the light, her fingers curled loose in my shirt, waiting to see what I do with all this restraint I've suddenly found.
My thumb moves once against her cheekbone, slow, like a question I already know the answer to.
She doesn't answer it. Just stands there in the dark with my hand still against her face, her eyes on mine, and neither one of us moves toward the house.
Somewhere behind us, the lake goes on being still and quiet, keeping every secret I've ever brought down to it. Tonight it's keeping one more.