Epilogue
SADIE
Iam pulling through the Beaumont gate on a Friday morning with two coffees in the cup holder and a crate of the first bottled blend riding shotgun, and I am not nervous, and that still surprises me every single time.
Six months ago this drive used to twist something tight behind my ribs. Now it just feels like coming home to a second one.
The colt is grown, a gelding these days, grazing fat and lazy in the pasture like he has no idea what he set in motion that morning. I slowed down anyway, the way I always do passing that spot, and gave him a nod like an old friend.
The wrought iron gate swings open before I even reach for the code, Rosa's doing, watching from the kitchen window like she has some sixth sense for my truck's engine.
The vines roll out gold and green on either side, heavy with a harvest that belongs to both of us now, not just one family or the other.
Six months holds more than I ever expected it to. The first hard freeze of the year, Rhett and I out at two in the morning covering the young vines in the East block, laughing too hard to work fast.
One weekend, my mother and I drove down to the coast, just the two of us, our first trip together since before everything fell apart. Rhett, teaching me to sit a horse without white-knuckling the saddle horn, patient in a way I never expected from a man who runs eight thousand acres like clockwork.
Small things. The kind that don't sound like much until you stack them end to end and realize they built an entire life.
I climb down from the truck in my red boots, the same ones I wore the first week I came home determined to save my family's name on my own. Scuffed at the toe now from a season of barrel rooms and crush pads.
I don't wear them like armor anymore. I just wear them because they're mine.
Collins Cellars and Beaumont Vineyards released our first joint label two weeks ago. A blend, half Collins fruit, half Beaumont, aged in barrels from both cellars.
We named it The Long Way Home. My mother cried when she saw the label.
Evelyn framed the first bottle and hung it in the front hall next to a photo of Rhett and me as kids, filthy and grinning under the Old Oak.
I stood in the tasting room the morning the first case arrived from Beaumont's bottling line and thought about my grandfather, the way he used to say a good blend takes patience nobody wants to give it anymore.
He built Collins Cellars from nothing, and it nearly went under before I ever got the chance to prove I could hold it together.
I think he'd have loved this bottle more than any of the awards on my old shelf. I think he'd have loved that his name is still on the label.
A trade magazine out of Austin called last month asking for an interview, wanting to profile the sommelier turned co-vintner who saved her family's legacy in one harvest season. I still don't know what to say when people use the word saved.
It never felt like saving anything. It just felt like refusing to lose.
My mother hosts Sunday dinner with Evelyn every other week now. Two women who spent years circling each other's grief from opposite ends of a fence line, trading recipes and Cabernet like they've been doing it their whole lives.
I still don't know exactly when that started.
Last Sunday I walked into my mother's kitchen and found the two of them elbow deep in cornbread batter, arguing over whether it needs sugar. Evelyn said a Beaumont recipe never has and never will.
My mother said that explains a few things about the Beaumont men, and Evelyn laughed so hard she had to sit down. Neither of them looked up long enough to explain the joke to me.
They didn't need to.
The Ashford filing never got a clean answer. Marcus traced Cottonwood Basin Holdings back through three shell companies before the trail went cold, and eventually the whole thing just closed, quiet and unexplained.
Camille left town before Thanksgiving and nobody's heard from her since. It's the one loose thread the town still pulls at over coffee at the Red Oak Café.
Rhett and I stopped losing sleep over it months ago. Some things you let go of because chasing them costs more than they're worth.
Beck met me at the Crush Pad gate the day the label got approved, held the first bottle up to the light like it was something holy, and told me the blend tastes like two families finally agreeing on something. Knox wanted to throw a launch party big enough for the whole valley.
Evelyn talked him down to something smaller, then quietly invited half the valley anyway.
The vines look different now too. Somewhere along the property line, someone pulled the old fence posts marking Collins land from Beaumont land.
The rows just run together now, Cabernet into Cabernet, like the ground never noticed there used to be a border there at all.
I pull up in front of the house and Rhett is already on the porch steps, like he heard the truck before it cleared the gate.
He comes down to meet me before I've even got the door open.
He reaches into the cup holder for both coffees and hands mine back first, the one with cream and no sugar, without even having to ask which cup was mine.
Then he ducks back in for the crate, tucking it under one arm like it weighs nothing.
"Morning," he says, and leans down to kiss me like it's the easiest thing in the world, because by now, it is.
"How do you always know which one's mine?" I ask, nodding at the cup.
"Six months of practice." He nods toward the house. "Come inside a minute before you head to the Crush Pad."
The kitchen smells like Rosa's biscuits, cinnamon warm underneath it all, the kind of morning that only happens once fall settles in for good. Rhett sets the crate on the counter and doesn't let go of my hand right away.
"I've been thinking," he says.
"That's usually when I get nervous."
One corner of his mouth twitches, not quite giving in to a smile.
He leans back against the counter instead, pulling me with him, close enough that I have to tip my head up to see his face.
"About the closet," he says.
"What closet?"
"The one in my room. The empty side." He says it plain, no dressing it up, the way he says most things that matter to him.
Then he stops, like the next words don't come as easy as the first ones did. "I keep walking past it. Every morning. Empty hangers, empty shelf, and I keep thinking about how stupid it is, an empty closet in a house you're already half living in."
"Rhett."
"Let me finish." His hand finds mine on the counter, thumb tracing slow over my knuckles.
"There's a coat of yours hanging on the hook by my back door. Rosa keeps your mug on the shelf without being told which one it is anymore. You've walked through that gate every morning this week, same as the week before, and the one before that."
"I'm not blind to what that means," he says. "I just never said it out loud."
I don't say anything yet. I just watch him, this man who once couldn't say six words about his own feelings without a fence line between us, standing in his kitchen laying himself open like it's nothing.
"I'm not asking you to decide today," he says. "I'm not asking you to decide this week."
"I just want you to know the space is there. Whenever you're ready to fill it. I'd wait years for you again if that's what it took, but I'm hoping it doesn't."
Six months ago I would have found ten reasons to talk myself out of hearing that the way he means it.
Now I just feel something settle, warm and certain, low in my chest, no fear left in it at all.
"I'll think about it," I tell him, and he knows exactly what that means, because he's learned me as well as I've learned him.
His mouth curves, slow and sure, like the outcome was never really in question.
He sets his coffee down on the counter. So do I.
He turns me by the waist, unhurried, like we've got nowhere else to be for the next five minutes, which we don't. His hands find the small of my back the way they always do, easy now, certain, no hesitation left in either one of us.
"You've got the Crush Pad in twenty minutes," I remind him, though I don't move away.
"I've got twenty minutes," he agrees, and doesn't let go.
His mouth finds mine slow, no rush behind it, the kind of kiss that isn't trying to prove anything anymore because there's nothing left to prove. My hands find his shirt front, gripping the fabric there out of habit more than urgency.
He pulls me in closer, one hand sliding up my spine, and I feel him smile against my mouth when I press up onto my toes to meet him halfway.
He walks me back a step, then another, until the counter edge meets my hip, and his hand comes up to cradle the back of my head like I'm something worth being careful with. I let my fingers slide into his hair, tugging just enough to feel him exhale against my mouth.
Neither one of us is in a hurry. That's the part I still can't get over, some mornings.
That we finally have all the time we could ever want, and neither of us needs to rush through this like it might slip away.
"Twenty minutes," I remind him again, breathless now, my voice giving me away.
"Then we'd better not waste it talking," he murmurs against my cheek, and I feel the low rumble of his laugh more than I hear it.
This is what six months of choosing each other looks like. No storm forcing it. No crisis making it feel more urgent than it is.
Just a Friday morning kitchen, coffee going lukewarm on the counter, and a man who kisses me like he still can't quite believe I keep driving through that gate.
He finally pulls back, forehead resting against mine, both of us breathing a little uneven.
"Go," he says, soft, "before I make you late for your own harvest."
"You're the one who started this."
"I'll finish it tonight." His thumb brushes along my cheek, quick and light. "Go sell some wine, Collins."
I laugh and grab my coffee off the counter, and he catches my free hand at the door, pressing a kiss to my knuckles, easy and certain, before he lets me go.
"Tell Beck I said the blend needs another six weeks in oak before he touches it again," I call over my shoulder.
"Tell him yourself. He's driving down to the coast this weekend. Says he wants some space." Rhett leans in the doorway, arms crossed, watching me go.
"Something's got that man distracted lately, and for once it isn't the wine."
I make a mental note to ask him about it myself. Beck's never been distracted by anything that wasn't fermenting in a barrel.
That old business card is still tucked in the glove box, the one from Cottonwood Basin Holdings that Camille left behind at the Gala. I don't know why I've never thrown it away.
Some mornings I catch myself glancing over at it like the name might mean something one day, and then I remind myself it's a beautiful morning and I have a harvest to run, and I let it go again.
The gate closes behind me in the mirror as I pull down the drive, amber light spilling over the vines on both sides of the fence line that used to mean something so different.
Somewhere behind me, Rhett is still standing on that porch, coffee in hand, watching me go the way he always does, like he still can't quite believe his luck.
I finish my coffee, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, I do not have anywhere else I would rather be going.