Chapter 25
RHETT
Iam walking the East Vineyard rows at sunrise on the morning of the Harvest Gala, coffee in one hand, watching the light hit vines Sadie helped save this season, and I already know exactly what I want to say to her tonight.
The rows are quiet this early. Mist sits low over the limestone, burning off slow as the sun climbs.
Every vine along this stretch was one bad irrigation cut away from losing the season, and every one of them is heavy with fruit now, amber catching along the leaves like the land itself knows what today means.
I stop at the end of the row and just look.
No Beaumont has ever missed this night. Not my grandfather, not my father, not me. But this is the first year I have ever stood out here wanting the sun to hurry up and set instead of dreading it.
Back then I stood in this same row and thought about nothing but what I hadn't said. This morning I stand here thinking about what I'm finally going to.
The land under my boots isn't just Beaumont land anymore, not in any way that matters.
I crouch and press my palm flat against the closest row, dirt still cool from the night.
I built a fence around a secret to protect what belonged to her family once. Tonight I want to build something out in the open instead. Something with both our names on it that nobody can take back with a filing or a phone call.
I finish the coffee and start walking.
By the time I make it back to the house, the whole valley is already moving.
Trucks line the drive from the gate to the event barn, and the lawn between the barn and the lake has turned into a small city overnight.
Knox is in the middle of it with a headset and a clipboard, barking directions at a crew stringing lights through the live oaks like this is a war he intends to win by noon.
"You're late," he says, not looking up.
"I own the place."
"Doesn't mean you get to be late to it."
I let that go. Knox has been running Gala setup since he was twenty-two, and every year he acts like the valley might collapse without him standing in the middle of the lawn yelling about tablecloths. Every year he pulls it off without a hitch, so I let him have the headset and the attitude both.
A crew hauls a folding dance floor across the grass toward the oaks. Beyond the tent, the lake sits still and silver, waiting for the string of lanterns someone will float across it by sundown.
Beck finds me near the barrel room an hour later, sleeves already rolled up, a case of Beaumont Reserve balanced on one shoulder.
"You look like a man with something on his mind," he says.
"I look like a man who hasn't had enough coffee."
"Sure." He sets the case down easy, like it weighs nothing. "You gonna tell her tonight?"
I don't answer that. Beck grins like I already have.
By mid-morning, Collins Cellars trucks are pulling through the gate too.
Sadie arranged the wine service for tonight weeks ago, a joint pour between both labels, her idea, one she pitched to me with a stubborn set to her chin like she expected me to argue.
I didn't. I would sign off on anything that put her name next to mine in front of the whole valley.
Knox hands me the final guest list to sign off before the caterers lock the headcount. Names I've known my whole life, half the county in one column. Then a plus-one under a name I don't recognize, no RSVP note, no company attached.
My phone buzzes before I can ask him about it. A text from Marcus, short and dry as always. Ashford assessment still dead. No new filings. Nothing to report. I read it twice, waiting for the unease in my chest to match the words on the screen. It doesn't quite.
I tell myself it's a caterer's mistake. Today isn't a day I'm willing to let Camille Ashford live in my head, so I hand the list back and let it go, even if it doesn't let go of me quite as easily.
I am checking a folding table near the tasting tent when I see her mother's car come up the drive.
Sadie's mother has not set foot on Beaumont land in longer than I can count. Not since before everything went wrong for her family. Not once, not even when Sadie started working the harvest here every day, not even the night of Sunday dinner when Sadie herself came dressed in red and stunning.
She parks near the barn. Gets out slow. Stands there a second with her hand still on the door, looking up at the house like she's checking whether the ground is going to hold her.
I set down the folding table and don't move any closer. Some ground a person has to test on her own.
My hand twitches toward the table's edge anyway, some old instinct telling me to go steady her. I make myself stay put.
Then Rosa comes out to meet her with two glasses of sweet tea and a hug like they've been doing this every summer for years, and something in the older woman's shoulders comes down that I don't think has been down in longer than I've known her.
"Told you the tea would still be sweet," Rosa says, loud enough to carry.
Sadie's mother laughs, a real one, the first time I've heard that sound out of her since before the world got hard on the Collins name.
She does not flinch walking toward the tent.
I watch it happen from thirty feet away and feel my chest go tight in a way I am not ready to name, not even to myself.
Sadie is already at the tent when her mother reaches it, sleeves pushed up, hair pulled back, going through a crate of glassware with the kind of focus most people reserve for something that matters more than glassware ever should.
She holds one glass up to the light, checks it for water spots, sets it aside, moves to the next.
Her mother touches her arm. Sadie looks up, and whatever passes between them in that one look does more work than any conversation I've overheard all morning.
I don't go over. Some moments aren't mine to stand in the middle of.
Instead I watch Sadie work the rest of the afternoon, and it does something to me every single time.
She moves through the chaos like she was built for it. Directing where the Collins Cellars barrels go next to ours under the tent.
Correcting a server on how to hold a glass by the stem instead of the bowl, patient about it, showing instead of scolding.
Tasting a splash from an open bottle of Iron Oak Cabernet, tilting her head, calling out to Beck across the lawn that this particular case needs another twenty minutes to breathe before anyone pours it for a guest.
Nobody questions her. Not my staff, not hers. She belongs out here the way the Old Oak belongs on the hill, like the place was only ever waiting for her to come stand in it.
She catches one of the servers about to pour Legacy Red into a glass still warm from the dishwasher and stops him without raising her voice, explaining in three quick sentences why heat kills a good nose before a guest ever gets the glass to their lips.
He nods like she just handed him something he'll remember the rest of his career. Knowing her, he will.
I catch myself more than once just watching her laugh at something Knox says, wine crate balanced on one hip, sun warming to brass in her hair.
Around three, I bring her a bottle of water from the cooler by the barn, because it's ninety degrees under that tent and she hasn't stopped moving since sunrise. I already dug through two cases to find the brand she likes, the one with the electrolytes, before she ever asked.
"You don't have to wait on me," she says, but she takes it, fingers brushing mine over the cap.
"Wasn't waiting on you. Just happened to be walking this direction."
"Sure you were." She twists the cap off, drinks half the bottle in one go, and studies me over the top of it. "You've been watching me all day, Beaumont."
"Been watching the setup all day. You just happen to be standing in the middle of most of it."
"Uh huh." She sets the bottle down on the folding table, close enough that our hands are almost touching again. "You planning on telling me what that look on your face is about, or am I supposed to guess."
"Tonight," I say, and it comes out lower than I mean it to. "Not yet."
Something shifts in her expression, something that isn't quite a question and isn't quite an answer either, and for one second the whole tent full of caterers and crates and clipboards goes quiet around us.
Then Knox hollers her name from across the lawn about a crate gone missing, and the moment breaks. She squeezes my hand once before she goes, quick enough that nobody else catches it, and I stand there another minute longer than I should, watching her walk away.
I have spent thirty-eight years being careful.
I roll my shoulders back, working out a tightness that has nothing to do with setup work.
Careful with the land, careful with the family name, careful with every word my father ever taught me could cost more than I meant to pay.
Tonight I do not want to be careful.
By late afternoon the tent is dressed, the tables set, the first cases of wine chilled and ready.
Evelyn walks the grounds twice, inspecting everything with the same look she gives a wine she's deciding whether to bottle or dump.
She stops beside me near the barn, arms crossed, watching Sadie direct the last of the setup crew.
"You've got that look again," she says.
"What look."
"The one your grandfather used to get right before he did something that scared the both of us." She pats my arm once, satisfied, and walks off before I can ask her what that's supposed to mean.
I find her again twenty minutes later, standing at the edge of the tent with a glass of Old Oak Reserve she hasn't touched, watching Sadie's mother laugh with Rosa near the barrel display like the two of them have been friends the whole time instead of strangers kept apart by a feud neither of them started.
"Wine tells the truth," Evelyn says, not looking at me. "So do people, eventually."
"You've said that my whole life."
"Because it's still true." She finally looks at me then, and there's nothing sharp in it, just something soft and knowing that makes me feel about ten years old again. "Don't waste tonight being careful, Rhett. You've been careful long enough for the both of us."
She walks off toward the kitchen before I can answer, leaving me standing there with her words settling in, right next to everything else I've been carrying all day.
For one second, standing alone at the edge of an empty tent, the doubt finds me anyway.
What if it's not enough.
I set the empty coffee cup down harder than I mean to, and go get dressed.
The sun starts dropping behind the ridge around seven, and the whole valley turns the color of the wine we're about to pour, deep gold sliding into red along the vine rows, limestone bluffs catching fire at the edges.
Knox flips the switch on the string lights strung through every oak between the barn and the lake, and for one long second, the whole property comes alive at once.
Lanterns drift slow across the lake, candlelight doubled in the still water. A fiddle warms up near the barn, low and easy. The air smells like crushed grapes and woodsmoke, mixed with cut grass and somebody's perfume drifting past on the breeze.
Guests start coming through the gate not long after. Trucks and sedans both, ranch families and wine club members and half the town, all dressed up for the one night a year Red Oak Ridge shows up in its best boots.
Women in sundresses with their hair done, men in pressed shirts they only wear twice a year, kids running between the tables until somebody's mother catches them by the collar.
I stand near the edge of the tent, shaking hands, saying the right things to the right people, hearing almost none of it.
Out of habit I run the crowd once first, gate to tent to lake, counting faces I know and clocking the ones I don't. Nothing out of place. Only then do I let myself look for her.
Because across the lawn, through the crowd and the string lights and the noise of a hundred conversations, Sadie looks up and finds me.
She's got a glass of something red in one hand, laughing at whatever her mother just said beside her, and for one second the whole party disappears and it's just her, looking at me across all of it like she already knows exactly what I'm thinking.
I hold her eyes and something in my chest settles into place, quiet and certain, the way land does after a long drought finally breaks.
There is no version of tonight where I stay quiet about what she means to me. Not one more hour of it. Not one more minute I let slide by unsaid.
Whatever happens after I open my mouth, I am done being careful with Sadie Collins.