Chapter 5
SADIE
Iam standing at the edge of the Beaumont Crush Pad at seven in the morning with a clipboard and every intention of treating Rhett Beaumont like any other business partner, and it lasts exactly as long as it takes him to walk out of the barrel room with oak shavings dusting his forearms from patching a cracked stave.
He has not seen me yet. That gives me exactly three seconds to remember why this is a terrible idea.
Then he looks up, and the three seconds are gone.
"Morning," he says. Like it costs him nothing.
"Morning." I hold up the clipboard so he has anything else to look at besides me. "I made a schedule."
"Of course you did."
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
He did not have to. It is all over his face, that same amusement he used to wear whenever I got bossy as a kid, standing in this exact spot telling him how the crew should stack crates. Some things do not change. That should not feel like comfort. It does anyway.
We start walking the Crush Pad together, and for the first hour, it works.
I run the numbers on tank capacity. He listens, nods, asks the right questions. When his foreman asks whether the Collins crew reports to me or to Rhett, Rhett answers before I can. "Both. Equally." No hesitation. I did not expect that.
By nine, we are standing over a spreadsheet comparing harvest windows, his shoulder an inch from mine, close enough that my brain does the thing it does with an unlabeled glass, sorting notes without asking permission.
Leather. Diesel. Then I catch a warmth underneath both of them that has nothing to do with wine at all, one I refuse to name.
I catch myself cataloguing him like a wine I'm scoring and make myself look back down at the spreadsheet instead.
"Your Cab block ripens two days before ours," he says. "We split crews or we lose fruit."
"We split crews."
"Agreed." He looks at me sideways. "That was easy."
"Don't get used to it."
A crew member hollers from the pump line, word of a stuck valve, and Rhett moves before the man finishes the sentence.
I watch him roll his sleeves higher and drop to one knee in the gravel, hands working the fitting loose without a wasted motion.
All that time in a boardroom hasn't touched the parts of him that still know how to fix what's broken with his own two hands.
"You could call maintenance for that," I say.
"Could." He does not look up. "Faster this way."
The valve gives. He stands, wipes his palms on his jeans, and catches me watching. I go back to my clipboard like I have somewhere else to look.
We settle the last of the schedule at the sorting table, arguing good-naturedly over whether the Collins crew or the Beaumont crew gets first pull on the good bins. He wins. I let him, mostly because the bins do not matter and the arguing does.
"You're stalling," he says, when I flip past the schedule to a page I do not need.
"I'm being thorough."
"You're stalling."
I close the clipboard. "Fine. What's next on your agenda, boss man?"
"Property line." Something shifts behind his eyes, quick, gone before I can name it. "Figured we should walk it before the crews start staging equipment along the boundary this week."
He opens his mouth like there's more to it than staging equipment, maybe about the fence itself, or why a man just leasing crew hours cares this much about a boundary line. Then he closes it again and nods at the schedule instead. "Next item."
The morning holds. Barely. We move through logistics like two people who know what they are doing, which we are, and like two people who are not aware of every place the other one stands, which we are not.
I catch him watching me check a brix reading longer than the reading requires. He catches me noticing.
Neither of us says anything about it. That is its own kind of conversation.
I catch myself smiling at him over the sorting table and make myself stop. This is a business partnership. He does not get to make it feel like anything else, whatever this pull between us keeps insisting.
Around eleven, we finally head out to walk it, the stretch where Beaumont land meets what used to be Collins land, before either family called in surveyors for the harvest agreement. I do not have to go. I do it anyway.
The path runs along the fence, live oaks throwing long shade across dry grass, the kind of quiet that only exists this far out from town.
A hawk circles somewhere above the ridge.
Neither of us talks for a while, and it does not feel like the awkward silence from before.
It feels like the ease we used to share.
Then the fence line bends, and there it is.
The Old Oak.
I stop walking before I mean to.
It is bigger than I remember. Wider. A tree that looks like it has been standing since before either family owned a single acre of this valley, branches thick enough to hold a hundred years of summers.
"You remember this tree," Rhett says. Not a question.
"Hard to forget a tree you used to climb every day of your childhood."
He walks toward the trunk, slow, like he is letting himself feel a thing he does not let himself feel often. I follow because my feet decide before my head does.
He runs a hand along the bark, low, near a knot in the wood, and I know exactly what he is looking for before I see it.
Two sets of initials. Carved deep enough to survive twenty years of Texas weather. R.B. and S.C., a crooked heart between them, cut by two kids with a pocketknife who thought no one would ever find it.
"You still have that knife?" I ask.
"Somewhere." His voice goes quieter. "I was twelve. You were eight. You told me if I didn't carve it right you'd tell your mama I cried during the calf branding that spring."
"You did cry."
"I did not."
"Rhett."
He almost smiles. Almost. "I was sensitive."
I trace the heart with one finger, and my chest goes soft, an ache I am not prepared for, standing this close to him, under this tree, all this distance and a whole lot of ruin later.
"We were just kids," I say, mostly to remind myself.
"Yeah." He is not looking at the carving anymore. He is looking at me. "We were."
A breeze moves through the branches overhead, dry grass rustling at our feet, and for a second the whole valley feels like it is holding still just to watch us.
I remember lying under this tree with him one summer, counting stars, before either of us knew what our families would become to each other.
Before Beaumont and Collins meant anything but two kids and one pocketknife.
"Do you ever think about it?" I ask. "Before everything."
"Every day." He says it plain, no dressing it up, and looks back at the carving instead of at me.
Something in me goes still, somewhere I have spent a long time bricking over.
The air between us goes thick, and it has nothing to do with the Hill Country heat.
I feel it low in my stomach, the same pull I have been trying to talk myself out of since he ran into the road for me.
He does not step closer. Neither do I. But neither one of us steps back either, and that feels like an admission all its own.
"Rhett Beaumont carved a heart into a tree," I say, because someone has to say something before this turns into more than it should.
"Don't tell my brothers."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
He studies me a moment longer than he needs to, like he is deciding whether to say more, a thought that has nothing to do with trees or harvest schedules. Whatever it is, he swallows it back down.
"We should head back," he says instead. "Crew's waiting on the split-crew plan."
"Right. Crew."
We walk back toward the house in a silence that feels different than the one on the way out. Heavier. Charged. The kind that sits in the space between two people who both know exactly what they are avoiding saying out loud.
The house comes into view first, white limestone catching the noon sun, and then the porch, and then Evelyn, standing at the porch rail with her hands on her hips like she has been waiting for us the whole time.
"There you two are," she calls out, voice carrying clean across the yard. "Dinner starts in twenty minutes, Sadie. You're staying."
I stop walking. "Oh, I really shouldn't intrude on family?—"
"Nonsense. Rosa's already setting an extra plate." Evelyn does not wait for an argument. She turns and disappears back through the front door like the matter is settled, because apparently it is.
I look at Rhett.
His face gives him away completely. The tight set of his mouth says this was not his idea, that his grandmother just steamrolled him in front of the one person he least expected her to steamroll him in front of.
But underneath the irritation, there is something else. Something that looks a lot like relief.
He is not sorry about it. Not even a little.
"Looks like you're staying for dinner," he says.
"Looks like it."
Neither one of us moves toward the house. Not yet. We just stand there in the yard, the Old Oak at our backs, twenty minutes suddenly feeling like the longest and shortest amount of time in the world.