Chapter 11
SADIE
Iam leading a training tasting for the Beaumont harvest crew when one of Rhett's ranch hands asks, in front of the whole room, whether the sabotage happened because somebody wants both properties gone, and the room goes completely silent.
Half of them will be pouring for gala guests in a few weeks, not just running equipment, so Knox asked me to walk them through the lineup before then.
I set the bottle down slow. Give myself a second before I answer.
"I don't know," I say. "But I'd rather find out than guess."
The hand, a wiry kid named Dusty who can't be older than twenty-five, has the decency to look embarrassed. Somebody in the back mutters something about the Collins name and bad luck following it around, and I pretend I don't hear it.
I've heard worse. Growing up with the Collins name, I learned to let it roll off.
The tasting drags through the rest of the lineup, the room too quiet for it.
Iron Oak Cabernet, then Legacy Red, then a barrel sample of this year's blend that should have people asking follow-up questions and instead just gets polite nods.
Nobody wants to talk about tannin structure when they're wondering if their paychecks are next.
I catch pieces of the whispering anyway.
Somebody brings up the Collins scandal like it happened last year instead of six.
Somebody else says the word "cursed" like it's a fact instead of an opinion.
I keep pouring, keep smiling, keep my voice even, because that's the only thing I've ever been able to control in this town.
By the time the room clears out, I'm exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with standing on my feet for two hours.
I'm wiping down the tasting counter when I catch movement through the front window.
Rhett, standing just past the cattle guard at the edge of the Collins Cellars drive, hat in his hand instead of on his head. Not waiting to be waved in. Waiting like a man who knows this visit isn't about the harvest schedule, and hasn't decided how to say so yet.
My stomach flips, half dread, half something warmer I'm not ready to name.
I walk out to meet him.
"You could've called," I say.
"Could've." He doesn't explain why he didn't.
"Dusty asked me today if somebody wants both properties gone." I fold my arms. "In front of the whole harvest crew. So if you're here to tell me something, I'd rather hear it now than read it in the county paper."
"I'm not here about that." He looks past me, toward the vines running gold in the last of the light. "I'm here to walk your fence line with you. Personally. Every foot of it, so we know if anybody's been using it as a way in."
"I've got hands who can do that."
"I know you do." His voice doesn't budge. "I want to do it myself."
I could tell him no. I've got a stack of invoices on my desk and a mother who calls twice a day now, worried, and every reason in the world to send him home.
Instead I grab my jacket off the porch rail and fall into step beside him.
The fence line around Collins Cellars runs longer than people think. Nearly two miles if you follow every turn of it, cutting through scrub oak and open pasture before it dead-ends at the creek that separates us from the Beaumont side.
We start at the north corner, where the old gate hangs crooked on a hinge nobody's fixed since my dad.
"This one's been loose since I was sixteen," I say, giving it a shove. It groans wide open. "Dad kept saying he'd get to it."
"Want me to send someone out?"
"I want you to not offer to fix everything the second you notice it's broken." I say it light, but I mean it too.
Something eases at the corner of his mouth. "Noted."
We walk. The sun drops low enough that the limestone bluffs go the color of the wine in Beck's reserve bottles, and crickets start up their evening racket in the grass.
Rhett checks the fence posts as we go, testing the ones that look weak, not because I asked him to but because it's clearly just what his hands do without permission from the rest of him.
"You always this thorough," I ask, "or is this a special occasion?"
"Depends who's asking." He glances over. "You want thorough, or you want fast?"
"I want honest." The words come out before I think about them. "That's the one I care about most."
He doesn't answer right away. We walk another twenty feet before he does.
"Then I'll give you honest." He stops at a fence post, tests it, finds it solid. "I should've walked this line with you a long time ago. Instead of just paying to fix the stretch by the south crossing and calling that even with myself."
I stop walking. "You paid to fix the south crossing?"
"After the accident with your dad's truck. Right before everything else happened." He says it plain, no weight on it, like he's been carrying the fact around so long it doesn't cost him anything to set it down now. "Never told you. Didn't think I had the right to."
I don't know what to do with that, so I grip the top wire of the fence instead, cool and solid under my palm.
"Why are you telling me now?"
"Because you asked for honest." He looks at me directly, the way he did on the road that first day, like he's daring me to look away first. "And because I'm done letting you find things out secondhand from people who don't have the whole story."
I don't have anything ready for that. So I start walking again, and after a second, so does he.
The conversation loosens up after that, the way a rope does once you stop pulling against it.
He tells me about the reining horse he's training, a chestnut gelding with more attitude than sense. I tell him about the barrel sample that's finally coming together after three weeks of second-guessing myself.
I catch myself reading him the way I'd read a glass, cataloguing the structure underneath the surface before I've decided if I like what's there. Restrained up front. Something warmer opening up the longer it breathes. I don't finish that thought on purpose.
He laughs outright, caught off guard by it, when I describe Beck's face the first time I corrected his oak-aging notes in front of the harvest crew.
"He still brings that up," Rhett says. "Every year, like clockwork."
"Good. He deserved it."
We reach the creek as the last of the light goes soft and violet at the edges, the kind of dusk that makes everything feel like it's holding its breath.
Rhett crouches to check the last post before the water, and I crouch beside him, close enough that our shoulders almost touch.
"This one's solid," he says. His voice has dropped lower, quieter, like the two of us are the only thing left in the whole valley.
"Good to know." I'm not really talking about the fence post either.
He looks over. Doesn't move away. The space between us has gotten smaller somewhere in the last two miles, small enough that I can see the exact moment his eyes drop to my mouth and then come back up, deliberate, like he caught himself doing it.
Somewhere behind us a whip-poor-will starts up its call, and the creek runs low and easy over the rocks. None of it feels like enough to distract me from how close his hand is to mine on the fence post between us.
He's close enough now that I can feel the heat coming off him in the cooling air, and neither one of us looks away this time.
My breath goes shallow. I don't move away.
Some part of me is already rehearsing the version of tonight where I drove home twenty minutes ago and none of this happened. I stay anyway.
"Sadie." Just my name. Rough at the edges, the word dragging like it has to fight its way out of him.
I don't answer. I don't trust my voice to do anything but agree with him.
He's the one who looks away first, down at the water, like he's putting himself back in line by force.
He doesn't look sorry about how close he let it get. Neither am I.
We stand there a second longer than we need to, close enough that one bad decision would fix the distance between us completely.
He offers me a hand up. His grip is warm and sure, calloused from rope and reins, and when I'm on my feet again neither one of us lets go right away.
My pulse is doing something reckless. The dark makes it easier to pretend that's an accident.
We walk back in the dark, the porch lights of Collins Cellars glowing gold up ahead like something out of a memory I didn't know I still had.
"We'll finish the rest of it," Rhett says at the gate. Not a question. "Won't take but another evening or two."
"I'll hold you to that." I almost mean it as a joke. It doesn't come out like one.
He's barely back across the cattle guard when my phone rings. My mother's name lights up the screen, and something about the hour makes my stomach drop before I even answer.
"Sadie." Her voice is tight. "Patsy over at the county clerk's office called me this afternoon. I've been trying to reach you all evening."
"What is it, Mama?"
"Somebody filed an inquiry against the deed on the land under Collins Cellars," she says. "Not the equipment loans, not the business. The land itself. Patsy said it's not the kind of thing anybody's supposed to hear about ahead of time, but she thought I'd want to know."
"When?" My voice comes out smaller than I mean it to.
"Three days ago." A pause I don't like. "Three days before that Ashford woman ever walked into town and introduced herself to anybody."
For a second neither of us says anything. I stand there in the dark with the phone still pressed to my ear, watching Rhett's shape disappear across the field toward his truck. The ground under all of this suddenly feels a lot less solid than it did five minutes ago.