Chapter 3
SADIE
Isit in my truck outside Beaumont Vineyards with a legal pad full of my own handwriting on the passenger seat, telling myself this is strictly business, and failing completely to convince myself of anything of the sort.
The vines roll out amber and green behind that iron gate, neat rows stretching all the way to the limestone bluffs. What's left of my family's business never looked like this.
If this works, my grandfather's name stays on a label instead of a bankruptcy filing. That's the only reason I'm still in this driveway.
My apartment back in Sonoma is still paid through October. I told myself that was practical planning. It might just be an exit already picked out.
The gate alone could swallow everything my grandfather built.
Wrought iron. A quarter mile of stone pillars. A bronze horse poised on the far side, one foreleg lifted like a champion caught mid-stride, guarding something worth guarding.
Worked into the ironwork above the gate, the Beaumont crest catches the morning light: the gold shield, the elegant "B," a grapevine curling toward a live oak, Est. 1891 stamped along the bottom ribbon.
A Texas star sits bold at the top, the kind of detail most people glance past without ever guessing what it means.
I grew up right next door and I still forget how big it is until I'm sitting under it.
I pick up the legal pad and read over my own handwriting again, even though I've read it three times already.
Numbers don't change just because I want them to.
Collins Cellars owes forty-one thousand dollars by the end of the month, or the bank takes the equipment and the label my grandfather built with his own hands. Three generations. Gone, because of one bad frost and two years of bad luck stacked on top of it.
I set the pad back down.
"Strictly business," I say out loud, like saying it again will make it true.
My reflection in the rearview mirror doesn't look convinced either.
I think about Rhett standing in the middle of the road yesterday, sawdust and sweat, saying my name like he'd been holding onto it too long.
Sadie Collins.
Like he'd been carrying it around for longer than he should have, and finally got to set it down.
I think about him showing up at our door by evening, telling me he wanted to help before I'd even asked him to.
I shove the thought away and grab the pad and get out of the truck before I can talk myself out of the whole thing.
My boots scuff over stone the whole walk up. It's a long walk. Everything here is designed to make you feel small before you even reach the door.
Off to the left, past the fence line, a string of horses moves through a training pen. Even from here I can tell they're not ordinary stock. Rhett always did have an eye for a good reining horse, even back when we were kids sneaking into the arena after hours.
One of them stops mid-circle and watches me walk by, like it already knows who I am too.
I've felt small in front of this house before. I'm not doing it again.
By the time I reach the porch, my spine is doing all the work my nerves can't.
The front door opens before I knock.
"Sadie Collins." Rosa's face breaks into a smile so wide it nearly undoes me. "Look at you. All grown up and still got that same walk. Like you're daring the ground to trip you."
"Rosa." My throat goes tight. I didn't expect that. "You remember me."
"Baby, I remember every kid that ever tracked mud through this kitchen." She reaches out and squeezes my arm like no time has passed at all. "And you tracked more than most."
"In my defense, the mud was very inviting." I hold up my hands like I'm still five. "It called to me."
Rosa snorts, and something in my chest eases for the first time since I climbed out of my truck.
"I'm here to see Mr. Beaumont," I say, because if I don't say something businesslike, I might just stand here and let this woman hug me like I'm still twelve years old.
"I know why you're here, sugar." Rosa steps back to let me in, and her eyes have gone soft enough to make me nervous. "Come on, then. He's been pacing that study since eight o'clock."
Pacing.
I let that sit and don't ask about it.
The house smells like leather, aged wood, coffee, and something baking, and my steps slow down without me telling them to. I spent half my childhood in this kitchen, at this table, back when the Beaumonts and the Collinses still shared Sunday dinners instead of a legal history.
Rosa leads me down a hallway lined with photographs. Generations of Beaumonts on horses, at ribbon cuttings, standing under an oak tree so big it takes up three separate pictures.
I don't see a single photo of anyone smiling like they mean it.
Except one.
Near the end, tucked smaller than the rest. Two kids, maybe ten years old, sitting on the tailgate of a truck with wine-stained hands and matching gap-toothed grins.
I don't need to look twice to know who it is.
Rosa catches me looking and doesn't say a word. She just knocks once on a heavy door at the end of the hall.
"Mr. Beaumont." Her voice carries through the wood. "Sadie Collins is here."
There's a pause on the other side. Long enough that I start rehearsing my terms in my head one more time. Strictly business. Strictly this season. Nothing about that hallway, or that photograph, or the way he said my name yesterday like a confession.
Rosa pushes the door open.
"Mr. Beaumont is expecting you," she says, and steps aside.
I walk in already telling myself to stay steady.
It doesn't work.
Rhett stands at the far end of the study, one hand braced on the edge of his desk, like he's been standing there since before I pulled into the drive. Not sitting behind it. Not pretending to be busy when I walked in.
Just waiting.
Morning light cuts through the window behind him, and for one second all I can see is the outline of him, broad shoulders, boots planted like he's bracing for something.
Then my eyes adjust, and it's just Rhett. Just the man from the road, cleaned up in a gray button-down with the sleeves pushed to his forearms, looking at me like I'm the only thing in the room worth looking at.
A second man leans against the bookshelf by the window, arms crossed, watching the two of us like he already bought a ticket to this show.
"Beck Beaumont." He pushes off the shelf and holds out a hand, easy smile, nothing guarded about it at all. "Master winemaker. Long-suffering brother. Whichever title gets me out of this room first."
"Sadie Collins." I shake his hand, grateful for one person in the family who doesn't look at me like I'm a ghost. "It's been a while."
"Try a decade." Beck's grin widens. "You were about seven and you bit me for eating the last of the peach cobbler."
"That cobbler was mine by rights."
"That's exactly what you said at the time." He glances at Rhett, then back at me, something knowing in it that makes my neck go warm. "I like her already."
"You came," Rhett says, like Beck isn't even in the room.
"Don't sound so surprised." I set the pad on the edge of his desk, careful, deliberate, the same way I'd set a glass down in a client meeting. "I'm not here for you. I'm here for the forty-one thousand dollars."
He doesn't laugh, but the corner of his mouth moves like it wants to.
Beck drags a second chair over from the corner and straddles it backward, arms folded over the top rail. "Broke, desperate, and still mouthy. This is going to be a good season."
"Beck." Rhett doesn't look away from me. "Numbers."
"Right. Numbers." Beck pulls a folder from under his arm, all business for exactly as long as it takes him to open it. "Harvest yield projections, crush pad scheduling, equipment allocation. I did the math three times because my brother doesn't trust anyone's math but his own."
"Your math is good," Rhett says. "I just like mine better."
"See, this is the kind of thing I've had to live with my whole life."
I almost laugh before I catch myself.
"My brother's got a mouth on him, calling you broke and desperate.
" He rounds the desk and takes the seat across from me instead of behind it.
Near enough that I catch the leather and pine of him instead of the room.
"That's not how I'd describe the woman who just walked in here holding a legal pad like a shield. "
My pulse trips over itself. I keep both hands flat on the legal pad so they have something to do besides reach for him.
"It's not a shield." I pick it back up anyway, if only to give my hands something to do besides notice how close he's sitting. "It's terms."
"Let's hear them, then."
I lay it out the way I practiced in the truck.
Harvest season only. Shared crush pad access, staggered so both crews aren't tripping over each other.
Beaumont equipment, Collins labor, split evenly on cost. No long-term entanglement.
No handshake deals that turn into something neither of us can walk back from.
Beck lets out a whistle. "She came prepared."
"She always was the smart one," Rhett says, and doesn't seem to notice he said it out loud.
Beck's eyebrows go up, and he looks between the two of us like he's just found something worth teasing his brother about for the rest of the season. He doesn't say a word. He doesn't have to.
He flips through his own numbers against mine, nodding here and there, and inside ten minutes he's crossed out two of his own projections in favor of my scheduling instead.
"Her plan's tighter than yours," Beck says, tapping the page. "Just saying."
"Nobody asked you," Rhett says, but there's no heat in it.
"That's it?" he asks when I finish.
"That's it."
"Strictly business."
"Strictly business," I say, and I almost believe myself this time.
He studies me for a second too long. Long enough that I feel it in my chest before I feel it anywhere else.
Beck clears his throat and gathers his folder, suddenly very interested in being somewhere else. "I'll let the crew know we'll need the east barrel room cleared out by Friday." He pauses at the door. "Good to have you back, Sadie."
The door clicks shut behind him, and the room goes quieter, missing Beck's noise already.
"Alright," he says. "Strictly business."
Part of me wants him to push back. Fight me on the terms so I can hate him a little longer. It would be easier than whatever this is.
He reaches for a pen on his desk, and for one absurd second I think he's going to sign his name to my handwriting without a single note, without a single push back, and something in me deflates a little at how easy that is.
Then the door opens without a knock.
"Rhett, I need five—" Evelyn Beaumont stops in the doorway, one hand still on the frame, taking in the two of us sitting across from each other like she's just walked into the middle of a play she already knows the ending to.
Her whole face lights up.
"Well." She looks between us, and there's nothing subtle about the way her eyes go soft and knowing. "Isn't this something?"
"Grandmother." Rhett doesn't look at her. He's still looking at me. "We're in the middle of business."
"Of course you are." Evelyn's smile doesn't move an inch. "I'll just be right outside, then. Take your time."
She doesn't leave.
She stands right there in the doorway, arms crossed, watching us like she's waiting for something to happen that neither of us has agreed to yet.
Rhett signs his name at the bottom of my legal pad without looking away from me, pen moving on instinct while his eyes stay locked on mine like he's daring me to be the one who looks away first.
He's never been a man who explains himself. He just does the thing and lets you catch up.
I don't.
He sets the pen down.
His fingers brush mine when he slides the pad back across the desk. Neither of us moves to make it look like an accident.
"Strictly business," he says again, quiet, like he's reminding himself more than me.
"Strictly business," I say back.
Neither one of us sounds like we mean it anymore.