Chapter 23
SADIE
Iam sitting across from Camille Ashford in my own tasting room's back office, and she is sliding her phone across my desk with the practiced confidence of a woman who came here to end something.
She's early for the meeting she called to request yesterday afternoon. I only agreed to it because she said it concerned Collins Cellars directly, and I've learned by now not to ignore anything with the Ashford name attached to it.
The phone sits there between us on the desk, screen still lit, waiting.
"Read it," she says. "Take your time."
I don't want to touch it. I touch it anyway.
Her nails are painted a soft, unbothered pink, the kind of color that has never once been anywhere near a harvest crew or a barrel room. She sits back in the chair across from my desk like she's waiting for tea, not watching a woman's world come apart one line at a time.
The screen shows a message thread. Harrison Beaumont's name sits at the top, next to a contact saved simply as Ashford Water Holdings.
My eyes catch on a line halfway down before I mean to read it at all.
The Collins situation is a manageable variable. Rhett's attachment is useful. Keeps him distracted from the filing while we close it out.
I read it twice. The words don't change.
"I wanted you to see his own words," Camille says. "Not hear them secondhand from me. They carry more weight that way."
My hand goes flat on the desk to keep it from shaking. "Where did you get this."
"I have access to a great many things, Miss Collins. It's the nature of my work." She folds her hands in her lap, patient, at ease, like she has all afternoon to sit here and watch this land on me. "I could have told you weeks ago. I thought you deserved to draw your own conclusions first."
"Does it matter?"
She tips her head, and there's nothing cruel in her face, which makes it worse. "I came here to warn you once. You didn't listen. I'm not here to warn you again."
I set the phone down between us like it might burn through the wood. "Rhett didn't write this."
"No," she agrees. "Harrison did. Rhett's uncle, in case nobody's mentioned it. Steps in wherever his brother left a gap, funds Beaumont's legal team, sits on every board that matters to that family, and has more say over how this season ends than you'd like to believe."
She stands, smooths her blazer, and looks at me with something almost like pity. "Rhett's a good distraction. That's all this ever needed him to be."
She lets herself out through the tasting room, past a half-poured flight of Iron Oak Cabernet I was walking a customer through twenty minutes ago.
I watch her go through the front window, composed, satisfied, like she just closed the deal she came to close. Her car pulls out of the gravel lot. She doesn't spare a single backward glance, and I understand, watching her go, that whatever she came here for today, she got every bit of it.
I don't cry. Not yet.
I sit very still instead, the way you do right after an injury, before the pain finds you and tells you exactly how bad it is.
I sit at my desk with my hands folded in my lap and my whole chest gone hollow, and I think about every barrel I have ever tasted blind, how you learn to separate what a wine wants you to believe from what it is underneath.
For half a second, an old email flickers behind my eyes. A cellar door in the Willamette Valley that doesn't come with a Beaumont name attached to any of it, an offer I never answered. I shove it down before it finishes forming. Running isn't a plan. It's just a habit I haven't broken yet.
Tannin dressed up as structure. Sugar dressed up as balance. A finish that lingers sweet and hides something bitter right behind it, if you wait long enough to catch it.
You train your palate for years to catch a trick like that before it fools you. Nobody trains you for this.
I didn't catch this one. I didn't even taste it coming.
Out front, the half-poured flight is still sitting where I left it, five glasses going warm on the counter, a customer who walked out confused and a little insulted, no doubt.
I don't go check. I can't make myself care about a stranger's tasting notes right now, not with Harrison Beaumont's words still sitting behind my eyes like a stain that won't lift.
My mother knocks on the office door an hour later, asks if I'm all right. I tell her I have a headache. She doesn't push, but she studies me a long moment before she goes back out front, and I know she can tell it's more than that.
I think of my father when she looks at me like that. How the weight of this place broke something in him that never healed right, and how he didn't live long enough to see if it was worth it. I am not losing this winery. Not after everything it already cost us.
I clear the flight glasses myself, rinse each one, set them upside down on the rack in a row, because my hands need something to do that isn't shaking.
Then I grab my keys off the counter and I don't let myself stop moving long enough to change my mind.
I drive to the Beaumont estate before I let myself think it through.
The gate is open. I don't go past it.
I sit in my truck at the end of the long gravel drive, engine running, and I write the note on the back of an old delivery slip because it's the only paper I have. My handwriting comes out steadier than I feel.
The partnership ends today. Don't call. Don't come by. I don't want an explanation, because I already have one.
I fold it once, drive up far enough to reach the porch, and tuck it under the brass handle of the front door. I don't ring the bell. I don't knock.
Rosa's truck isn't in the drive, and for that I'm grateful, because I don't think I could look at her right now without falling apart on the porch steps.
The house stands in front of me, white limestone catching the last of the afternoon light, and for a second I let myself remember the string lights, the dinner table, Evelyn's hand on my arm like I already belonged there. None of it was mine to keep.
I'm back in my truck and turning around before the screen door even settles.
I don't look at the house in my rearview mirror. I don't let myself.
The drive home takes seven minutes and I don't remember a single one of them.
That night I pour myself a glass of our own Collins Reserve, not to taste it, just to hold something familiar in my hand. I sit on the back porch and watch the vineyard go dark row by row, the way it always does, like nothing in the world has changed.
Everything has changed.
I think about the porch kiss. The lake. The storm. His hand finding mine across the small space between us like it was the easiest thing he'd ever done.
I think about how careful he was with every one of those moments, and how none of it matters if his own family was using me as cover the whole time.
I think about how good I am at reading wine, and how badly I read him.
My phone buzzes twice that night. Both times it's Rhett. I let it ring out both times, the screen glowing against the dark porch boards, his name sitting there until it goes quiet again on its own.
The next two days move like they belong to someone else. I run Crush Pad logistics without him, timing the crew shifts around a schedule he built with me weeks ago, his handwriting still in the margins of my clipboard.
I lead a tasting flight for a bus tour from Austin and hear my own voice describing tannin structure like nothing in my chest is cracked down the middle.
My mother watches me across the kitchen table both mornings with the particular quiet she saves for things she isn't ready to ask about yet.
On the second night she sets a plate in front of me I never asked for and says only, "You'll tell me when you're ready.
" I nod and don't tell her anything at all.
Rosa calls once, on the second afternoon, and I let that ring out too. Whatever she wants to say on his behalf, I'm not ready to hear it filtered through someone kind.
On the third morning, a courier truck pulls into the Collins Cellars lot.
I sign for the envelope without thinking much of it. Vendor paperwork, most likely, or another notice from the county about the equipment loan. I set it on the corner of my desk and finish restocking the tasting room first, because whatever it is, it can wait ten more minutes.
It doesn't feel like it can wait. I keep glancing at it between customers, the Beaumont return address sitting there in bold block letters, and something in my chest won't settle until I've dealt with it.
I don't open it until I'm back behind my desk with a cup of coffee going cold beside me, the tasting room hushed before the morning rush. I turn the envelope over once in my hands before I finally break the seal, like putting it off another few seconds might change what's inside.
It's a legal notice. Beaumont letterhead, Marcus Whitfield's signature at the bottom, dense with language I have to read twice to untangle.
This confirms that any and all inquiries filed by Ashford Water Holdings against the property deed associated with the Collins Cellars address have been formally challenged and blocked by Beaumont Vineyards & Ranch, effective the date below.
I find the date.
It sits three lines from the bottom, small, easy to miss if you aren't looking for it. I look for it. I read it once, then a second time, certain I've made a mistake.
I haven't.
The date on the notice is four days before Camille Ashford ever introduced herself to me at the Cork and Spur as a water rights consultant with a few pointed questions.
Rhett blocked this before she ever sat down across from me. Before she ever slid her phone across my desk. Before he had a single reason to think I would need protecting from anything at all.
I try to make the two things sit together in my head, side by side.
Harrison Beaumont calling me a manageable variable in one message.
Rhett quietly moving to shield the deed under our winery in another, days before Camille Ashford ever walked through my door with a smile that wasn't a smile at all.
They can't both be true about the same family. Except they are.
I set the notice down on the desk, careful, like it might tear if I hold it too tight. Outside the window, my mother is walking a tour group through the East Row, laughing at something a guest said, her hand resting easy on a vine like it's always belonged to her.
I sit there with the paper in front of me long after I've read it enough times to know every line by heart, and I don't know what to do with a man who moves to protect me before there's ever a threat in the room.
I don't know what to do with a man like that when I've already left a note under his door telling him not to call.