Chapter 24
RHETT
Iam standing outside Collins Cellars at seven fifteen without my hat, without a plan, and without any idea whether she is going to let me through the door.
Light spills out of the tasting room windows into the dark lot. I can see her through the glass, moving between a cluster of guests, a bottle of Legacy Red in one hand. Six people. A private tour, by the look of the folder on the bar.
I should wait until she's done. I know that. I stand there a second longer anyway, watching her laugh at something a guest says, that easy laugh she gives strangers and rarely gives me.
My truck is still running behind me in the lot. I left it that way on purpose, some part of me wanting an excuse to change my mind before I made it to the door.
I think about the note she left under mine. Four lines, no signature, telling me not to call. I think about two days of silence that felt longer than anything that came before it.
There's no version of tonight where I stand out here and let that note be the last word between us.
Then I open the door.
The bell above it rings too loud in the quiet room. Every head turns. Sadie's does too, and the laugh drops off her face like it was never there.
"Rhett." Her voice is flat. Careful. The voice she uses on people she doesn't trust.
"I need five minutes."
"I'm working."
"I know." I don't move toward her. I stay by the door, hands loose at my sides, because if I reach for her now she'll read it as another play. "I'll wait until you're done if I have to. But I'm not leaving until you hear this."
One of the guests, an older woman in a Beaumont Reserve tour shirt she must have bought at the gift shop, leans toward her friend and whispers something. Nobody in this room is leaving. I can see that plain as day. Small towns don't work any other way.
Sadie sets the bottle down. Slow. Deliberate.
Even now, her hands stay steady, no shake to them at all, the same trained precision I've watched her bring to a glass a hundred times this season no matter what's happening around her. I doubt she even knows she does it.
"Fine." Her chin comes up. "Say it here."
I look at the six strangers standing between us with their wine glasses half raised, and I understand what she's doing. She wants witnesses. She wants this on the record, in front of people who will talk, so I can't slip back into whatever version of the truth serves me best later.
I respect that more than she wants me to.
I stay where I am, weight settled back on my heels, hands loose at my sides. Every instinct in me wants to cross the room and put a hand at her back. I don't.
"Harrison's message was real," I say. "Camille showed it to you and it wasn't doctored, wasn't taken out of context. He called this a manageable variable. He called what's between us a distraction."
Sadie's arms cross over her chest. She doesn't say anything, just watches me, waiting to see if I'll flinch.
I don't.
"Harrison sounds just like my father used to," I say. "The same way of talking about people he doesn't respect enough to fight for. It's not how I see you. It was never how I saw you, not even before any of this started."
"You're going to have to do better than that." Her voice cracks on the last word, just slightly, and she hates it, I can tell, the way her hand curls at her side like she wants to take it back.
"I shut it down before Camille ever walked into this room.
" I keep my voice even. Steady. If I let it shake now I'll lose the thread of it.
"Before she introduced herself at the Cork and Spur.
Before any of this became public. I severed the negotiation myself, and it cost us a water access deal my father had been chasing for two years. "
A woman near the bar sets her glass down without drinking from it. Nobody pretends not to be listening anymore.
Somewhere behind me a phone tilts up, then lowers again, like whoever's holding it thinks better of it. Small mercy. I don't look to see who.
"Why," Sadie says. Just the one word.
"Because the day I found out Ashford was circling both properties, I knew I couldn't sit in a room with people who saw you as a line item.
" I take one step closer. Just one. "I wasn't protecting a deal.
I was protecting you. I didn't tell you because I didn't want it to look like something I did for credit. "
Her eyes are shining now, bright and wet, and she blinks hard like she can will it away.
"I need to know this was never a calculation." Her voice barely holds. "I need to know I wasn't a strategy to keep the Collins name quiet, or the Beaumont name clean, or whatever this is underneath everything you've told me."
"You were never a strategy." I say it plain, no dressing on it.
"You are the first thing in longer than I want to admit that made me stop managing my life and start living it.
I have spent my whole life running numbers, running acreage, running every decision through what keeps this family standing.
You are the one thing I never once ran the numbers on. I just wanted you."
The room is dead silent. Somewhere behind the bar a bottle sweats a ring onto the wood and nobody moves to wipe it.
Sadie doesn't answer right away. Her throat moves like she's swallowing something down, and for one long second neither of us breathes.
I notice the small things. The way her hand has stopped curling at her side. The way she isn't looking at the six people around her anymore, only at me.
Sadie's eyes fill over before she can stop them. One tear slips loose, and she doesn't bother catching it, just lets it fall, standing there in front of six strangers with her whole face open for the first time since I walked in.
"Okay," she says.
Her arms stay crossed over her chest, guard still up even with her eyes shining wet in the low light. She doesn't step toward me. Not yet.
It isn't much. It isn't everything. But it's more than I came in here expecting to leave with.
"Okay," I say back.
She wipes her cheek with the back of her wrist, fast, like she's annoyed at her own body for betraying her in front of an audience.
Nobody in the room moves. It's like they know better than to break whatever this is before it finishes on its own.
Slowly, something shifts in her expression. The wet eyes stay, but the set of her mouth softens into something almost like the girl who used to dare me to jump off the rope swing at the lake before either of us thought too hard about it.
"Come to Sunday dinner," she says.
I didn't see that coming. Not tonight. Not after a legal notice and a note under my door telling me not to call.
"Sadie."
"My mother's making pot roast." Her mouth twitches, not quite a smile, but close enough that my chest loosens for the first time all week. "You can bring the wine. God knows you people have enough of it."
A laugh breaks out of me before I can stop it, short and rough, and one of the guests near the bar claps once, quiet, like she can't help herself.
"I'll bring the wine," I say.
Sadie picks the Legacy Red back up like nothing happened, like her whole face wasn't just cracked open in front of a room full of tourists, and turns back to her guests with a smile that only shakes a little at the edges.
"Now. Where were we. The Legacy Red pairs beautifully with anything smoked, and if you ask me, it's the most underrated bottle we make."
I let myself out. The bell rings behind me, too loud again, and I stand on the porch a minute in the dark, listening to her voice carry through the window, steadier now than it was five minutes ago.
I didn't say all of it. I know that. There's a piece of this I still haven't told her, the land underneath every vine she just poured a glass from, sitting quiet in an LLC with my name nowhere on it. Tonight isn't the night. Maybe there isn't a night that's ever going to feel like the right one.
But I told her the part I could, and she let me stay long enough to say it. That's more ground than I had this morning.
The Gala is four days out. If I'm ever going to say the rest of it out loud, that might be the only stage big enough to hold it.
The drive back to the estate cuts through dark fields, the headlights catching nothing but fence posts and the occasional pair of eyes low in the grass. I keep the radio off. I want the silence, want to sit with what just happened instead of talking over it.
Camille's face keeps surfacing anyway, unreadable and patient at the gate, like a woman who already knows how a hand plays out before the cards are down. I push it back. Tonight was supposed to be about Sadie, not her.
My phone rings before I reach the Beaumont gate, Marcus's name lighting up the dash.
My hand tightens on the wheel, boot pressing steady against the floorboard, some old instinct from years of reading trouble in a herd before it ever shows itself rising up before Marcus says a word.
"Tell me something good," I say.
"I'll tell you something." A pause on his end, the kind he does when he's choosing his words instead of just handing them over. "The Ashford assessment. The one covering both properties. It's been withdrawn."
I ease off the gas without meaning to. "Withdrawn how."
"Quietly. No explanation filed, no response to my request for one. One day it's an active land assessment request, the next it's pulled clean off the county docket like it never existed."
"That's good news." I say it, but it doesn't sit right in my chest, not the way good news is supposed to.
"It should be." Marcus doesn't sound like a man delivering good news either. "But nobody walks away from a filing like that without a reason. Somebody wanted this on record. Now somebody wants it gone."
I think of Camille's face at the gate, that flat, patient look she wore even after I told the whole ranch Sadie was under my protection. Her leaving the back office satisfied afterward stays with me too, like a woman who'd already gotten what she came for.
She never looked rattled. Not once. And a person who's finished doesn't leave rattled.
"Whoever's really behind this," I say, more to myself than to Marcus, "they're not done. They just changed how they're coming at us."
Marcus doesn't argue with that. He doesn't have to.
I pull through the estate gate a few minutes later, the mansion dark except for the porch light Rosa always leaves on, and I sit in the truck a long moment before I cut the engine, staring at that one lit window like it might tell me something the withdrawn filing didn't.
Whatever's coming next, it isn't finished with either one of us.