Chapter 8
Eight
The chair was deep enough to swallow her, the kind of comfort she could lose hours in if she let herself.
Riley sat sideways in it, knees hugged to her chest, a half-empty wine glass on the windowsill.
Her favorite Pinot. The very first wine she’d ever tasted at seventeen.
Outside, the half-moon draped the vineyard in an eerie white glow, and every vine danced in the breeze.
She remembered sitting in a very different chair—harder, splintered from years of use—on the porch of her childhood home.
She’d been maybe ten, swinging her legs, waiting for her father to come home from his shift.
The smell of crushed grapes had been thick in the air that evening, drifting in from the winery, a comfort she hadn’t understood then but had carried with her everywhere since.
Now, that same scent crept through the partially-opened window, and instead of comfort, it carried an ache. She reached for her wine and took a slow sip, staring past the rows of vines, wondering if it would ever feel like home again.
Her phone buzzed against her thigh. Grant. She’d been avoiding him. Avoiding everyone.
She hesitated, thumb hovering over the screen. Their last conversation had ended well enough, but one never knew. However, this was all about new beginnings. Fresh starts. Mending fences. She owed it to her family to try more than she ever had before. She swiped to answer. “Hey, big brother.”
“You busy?” His voice was tight.
“No. What’s going on?”
His sigh was heavy, like a dense fog, thick and difficult to see through.
She sat up taller.
“This autopsy… Sandy poking around the vineyard… now Mom’s dragged Erin and me into the middle of everything.”
Riley felt like she was drowning in regret. She'd come home to bury her father and somehow managed to turn his death into a battleground. Her mother's histrionics, the family taking sides, Grant looking like he was ready to crack—all because she'd needed answers that maybe weren't hers to seek.
“I’m getting it from all sides. I can’t take the pressure anymore. I feel like I’m going to explode. I just know that it will be at the wrong person,” Grant said.
She set her glass on the coaster. “What can I do to help?”
“It’s not that. Mom’s gone off the rails.” He didn’t even try to soften it. “Erin and I knew she wouldn’t welcome you with open arms. The longer you stayed away, the more bitter she’s become.”
The words confirmed what Riley had always known but never wanted to face—that her mother's love came with terms and conditions.
Stay close, follow the rules, be the daughter her mother wanted, or forfeit your place in the family.
Riley had chosen freedom over approval, and now she was paying the price her mother had always promised she would.
“Erin and I, we never wanted you to stay away. For our relationship with you to suffer. We’re tired. We want to make things right with you. To see you. To have you in our lives. Our kids' lives.”
All this time, she'd been the one keeping the distance, thinking she was protecting everyone from more disappointment. But her siblings had wanted her. They'd been waiting for her to come home.
“But then mom gets involved, and she clings to her pain like she won it in a war. She can’t let it go.
One wrong move and you’re out. She even said she’d stop seeing my children if I didn’t either get you to start making the right decisions or stop talking to you.
Can you imagine? My kids are old enough to have some understanding of emotional blackmail, but not so old that this wouldn’t mess with how they process love, like it did with us. ”
The words hit Riley like ice water. Her mother was holding Grant's children hostage to force him to choose sides. Those kids would grow up thinking love was conditional, that family came with threats and ultimatums—exactly the toxic legacy Elizabeth had passed down to her own children. “Grant—”
“I’m tired,” he cut her off. “Tired of being the one holding it all together while you blow back into town after years away and start stirring things up. And I’m pissed, because it feels like you’re still choosing the Boones over your own family. Just like before.”
“That’s not fair,” she said, heat rising in her chest. “I’m choosing us. How can you not see that? And dad. All I want to know is how he died.”
“You think I don’t want that too?” His voice cracked, low and raw. “You think I’m not hurting? You think I didn’t love him?”
She closed her eyes. Grant had always been the kind of person to lash out at others when he hurt and right now, he was carrying a heavy burden. “I never said you didn’t.”
“Jesus, Ry. I know. I’m sorry. I was so angry.
You left. You didn’t call. You didn’t write.
It took us a couple of years for us to manage a single call without one of us hanging up.
And now you’re back, and it’s done something to Mom.
I can’t explain, but that’s what Erin and I have to deal with.
” He sighed. “There’s a part of me that wishes I could just walk away from that, like you can. But I can’t.”
“I get I have some big boundaries and higher walls,” she said quietly. “It’s the only way I can survive Mom without feeling like I’m not a worthy human.”
“I know that feeling, but I guess I handled it differently. I’m sorry I came into this conversation so hot,” he said. “To be fully transparent, I just ran into Bryson, and we had… words.”
“What does that mean?”
“ Same thing it always does. I say something stupid that I’ll regret later… this is later. I’m just trying to deal with my grief… and mom… and that’s—”
“A lot. I get it. I do. She threw me out of her house.”
Grant chuckled. “I was there, remember?”
For a long beat, neither of them spoke, and all she could do was remember her mother’s cruel words on that fateful day. Her calling Riley ungrateful. The accusatory tone. The shrill of her voice had haunted her dreams for years.
The sound of a TV droned in the background and the muffled thud of something—maybe a cupboard door—closing. She and Grant had made so much progress since she’d been home, and she wasn’t ready to lose that connection while it was still so fragile and new.
In an effort to keep him talking, and because she genuinely wanted to know, she asked, “Care to tell me about Robert Wilkerson and how Mom got involved with that?”
He exhaled loudly. “The Ponzi scheme… I warned her. Robert was bad news even in college. I cut ties with him for a reason. But she didn’t listen, and when it blew up, she was humiliated. Still is. Now she just blames everyone else—like she always has.”
A wry smile tugged at Riley’s mouth. “Sounds familiar.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he muttered, but there wasn’t much bite behind it.
“I’m just saying, maybe the two of you are more alike than you realize. We all have a little piece of her in us. Look at me. I push people away and slam the doors behind them.”
“I suppose that’s true.” He sighed again, softer this time. “We’ve got to stop making this harder on each other than it already is.”
“That would be Mom, and there’s nothing we can do about her,” she said. “But… we can call a truce and find better ways to communicate.
Another pause. “I can do that.”
After they’d said goodnight and ended the call, she sat there for a long moment, phone resting on her knee. It wasn’t forgiveness, but it was something.
She texted Erin: Coffee tomorrow? My treat. Stone Bridge Café?
A reply came almost instantly: 9 a.m.
Setting the phone aside, she leaned back into the chair, gaze drifting toward the vineyard. The light was starting to soften, the sky turning that rich, burnished color that always made her think of endings.
A knock startled her.
Standing, she smoothed her sweater out of habit. She checked the peep hole before opening the door. Bryson stood there—hands in his pockets, eyes warm and safe in a way that made her breath catch.
“Hey,” he said, voice low.
Her hand tightened on the doorframe, something unsteady sparking in her chest. “Hey.” She leaned against the frame for a heartbeat longer than necessary, taking him in—the way the fading light caught in his hair, the faint crease between his brows like he’d been debating something the whole way over.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, softer than she’d meant to.
His mouth tipped into that slow, crooked smile that used to undo her. “Thought you might need some company.”
A dozen responses crowded her throat, but instead, she stepped back, opening the door wider. “Come in.”
As he crossed the threshold, the air shifted, warmer somehow, threaded with the familiar scent of his cologne. She closed the door behind him, allowing her fingers to brush the wood just long enough to ground herself before she turned to face him.
“Bryson…” she started, but the words tangled. There were too many things she wanted to say and not nearly enough courage to say them all.
Unreadable, he held her gaze. “We need to talk. But first, maybe we just… sit.”
Something in her shifted. Stilled. All the anger from earlier, when Monica had glided into the tasting room like a whispered threat, vanished. It didn’t matter anymore. Monica had never actually been the problem, and that was a cold, hard truth that Riley had to come to terms with.
Bryson leaned back in the chair, letting the silence sit between them. The lamplight spilled gold over the table, catching in Riley’s hair and painting the strands a gleaming amber. Outside, a light drizzle tapped a steady rhythm on the partially open window, the scent of damp earth sneaking in.
She sat curled into her chair, one leg tucked under her, a half-full wineglass cradled loosely in her fingers. Her eyes were far away—not cold, but shuttered, the same glint he remembered seeing when she was trying to hold her ground.