Chapter 26
SADIE
Iam standing in the middle of the Harvest Gala in the dress my mother talked me into buying, watching every Beaumont and half of Red Oak Ridge gather under the string lights, when Evelyn taps a glass and the whole tent goes quiet.
The band winds down mid-song. Someone laughs too loud and then catches themselves. The air smells like crushed grapes and candle wax and the last of the season's heat still rising off the ground.
I recognize half the faces under this tent. The Hendersons, who stopped ordering from Collins Cellars the year everything fell apart. Mrs. Whitlow from the co-op, who used to look right through my mother at the farmers market.
Above the head table, a strip of canvas has faded to a slightly different white than the tent around it, the exact shape and size of where the Collins Cellars banner used to hang before it came down and never went back up.
Tonight they are all here, glasses in hand, waiting on a toast that has my name somewhere inside it, and I cannot decide if that feels like healing or just a very good show.
I find Rhett across the tent before I mean to. He is already looking at me.
Evelyn raises her glass higher. "Sixty years I have stood under this tent for harvest," she says, and her voice carries without her raising it, like it never has to be. "I have watched this family bring in this harvest more times than I can count. But this season, we did not do it alone."
A murmur moves through the crowd. My stomach tightens.
"This season, Beaumont Vineyards stood alongside Collins Cellars," Evelyn continues. "Two families who once could not sit at the same table now share a harvest. And I would like to raise this glass to the woman who made that possible. Sadie Collins."
My name lands in the open air and stays there.
Every eye in the tent turns toward me. I feel my mother's hand find mine at my side, her fingers cold from the glass she is holding and trembling faintly around the stem, a tremor she never quite lets anyone see. She squeezes once.
I catch Mrs. Whitlow raising her glass toward me from three tables back, and something in my chest cracks open a little. This same woman once would not meet my eyes across a folding table of tomatoes. Tonight she is toasting my name in front of the whole valley.
"To Sadie," Evelyn says, and the crowd echoes it back, a wall of sound rolling toward me.
I lift my glass because my hands need somewhere to go. My face goes warm. I have spent years training myself not to be the center of a room in this town, not after everything, and now an entire tent full of Red Oak Ridge is looking at me like I belong in it.
The wine in my glass is Old Oak Reserve, I register without meaning to, the gold shield on the label catching the string lights. Collins Cellars had a crest like that once, before the banner came down. I wonder, just for a second, what it would look like on a bottle with both names on it.
Beck catches my eye and grins, easy and unguarded, like this is exactly how it should be.
I am still holding the glass to my mouth when Rhett stands.
He does not tap anything. He does not need to. The tent stills on its own the second he is on his feet, the way a room does for a man who has never once had to ask for its attention.
"I want to add something," he says.
Evelyn's mouth curves. She sits back down like she has been waiting all night for exactly this.
Rhett looks out at the crowd, and then he looks at me, and I feel the whole tent notice him doing it.
The silence stretches. He does not fill it right away, and for one long second I wonder if he is going to say anything at all, or if he is just going to stand there and let the moment speak for itself the way he usually does.
Then he starts talking, and I understand he has been building toward this all night.
"Back then, my father chose silence. I let him."
A ripple moves through the older guests. I know some of them remember. I know some of them were part of it, the whispers, the way Red Oak Ridge turned its back on my family's name back then.
"I told myself it was respect," Rhett says. "It was not. It was fear of disappointment."
My mother's hand tightens around mine. I do not look at her. I cannot, not right now, not without falling apart in front of everyone.
"I watched the Collins name get dragged through this town for something that was never fully their fault, and I said nothing," Rhett continues. "I let a family I grew up next to lose everything they built, and I told myself it was not my place to speak up."
"That is not loyalty. That is cowardice wearing a nice suit."
His knuckles have gone white around the stem of his glass. He sets it down on the table instead of finishing the thought with a drink, like even that small comfort would feel like cheating this moment.
Someone near the back clears their throat. Nobody moves to leave.
"I am not doing that again," he says. "Not this year. Not with this partnership, and not with this family standing next to mine tonight."
"From here on, if the Beaumont name means anything in this valley, it means standing next to the people I love in daylight, not just protecting them behind closed doors. That starts tonight, in front of every one of you."
He is not looking at the crowd anymore. He is looking straight at me, like the rest of the tent has gone somewhere else.
"The Beaumont name does not get to take credit for a harvest that Sadie Collins crafted with her own hands," he says. "Not silence. Not again. I won't lose the people I love."
The word lands before I am ready for it. Love. Said out loud, in front of the entire valley, like it costs him nothing to say it here when it cost him everything to feel it in private for so long.
The tent goes still for one long breath.
For a second I am not under string lights at all. I'm back, standing at the edge of a courtroom hallway, watching my father's face collapse while nobody from this town said a single word in our defense. I remember exactly how loud that silence was.
This is the opposite of that silence, and it is deafening in an entirely different way.
Then the tent erupts.
Applause breaks over the crowd like something physical. Glasses lift, Knox whooping from somewhere near the bar, Beck laughing and shaking his head like his brother has finally done something he has been waiting years to see.
My mother is crying, unashamed of it, still holding my hand. When I finally look at her, she mouths one word at me. Finally.
I cannot move.
Rhett Beaumont just stood in front of his entire family, his entire town, everyone who watched my family lose everything, and told them he loves me.
He did it the way he does everything that matters to him. Once, and completely, and without asking permission.
Evelyn reaches me first, pulling me into a hug that smells like rosewater and candle smoke. Her hand pats my back twice, like she is sealing something in place.
"About time somebody in this family said it out loud," she murmurs against my ear.
Then she is gone again, already turning to accept congratulations from a Hendersons cousin, like nothing unusual just happened.
I want to cross the tent to him right now. I want to close the distance between us in front of the whole valley and let this be the moment everyone remembers, the one where the Collins name finally gets to stand in the light instead of hiding from it.
I set my glass down on the nearest table, deliberate, both hands free, and take one full step toward him.
But something pulls my eyes to the edge of the tent instead.
Camille Ashford is standing just past the string lights, half in shadow, a glass of untouched wine in one hand.
She is not clapping. She is not moving at all.
She is watching Rhett. She is watching me. She is watching the applause roll through the crowd like it is happening to someone else, something that does not touch the ground she is standing on.
I expect to see her lose something in this moment. A public declaration like that should cost her whatever ground she thought she had. It should look like defeat.
It does not.
Camille's mouth curves, slow and certain, the same look I imagine she wears right before she closes a deal nobody saw coming.
She lifts her glass a fraction of an inch, then turns it a slow quarter-turn in her fingers before she drinks, like she's tasting the moment rather than the wine, something none of the rest of us are close enough to read yet.
Patience.
That is the only word I have for what settles over her face while the whole tent celebrates around us. Not defeat. Not even close. It is the expression of a woman who already knows how tonight ends, and it is not with applause.
I look back toward Rhett, and for one second I almost say something, almost cross the distance and pull him aside to tell him what I am seeing at the edge of the light.
Then the crowd surges toward him, hands reaching to shake his, Evelyn beaming like the harvest itself just came in early, and the moment slips past me before I can catch it.
When I look back toward the shadows, Camille Ashford is already gone.
The only sign she was ever there is her wine glass, left balanced on the corner of a folding table at the tent's edge, barely touched, a faint smear of dark lipstick on the rim, and something small tucked beneath the base. I cross the grass to look closer.
A business card, plain and unfamiliar, not hers. Cottonwood Basin Holdings, the print reads, and underneath it, a title. Resource Development.
I do not recognize the name, and dread settles cold in my chest before I can even finish reading it a second time.