2. Cormac
CORMAC
I'm passing through the study at ten past ten when Ryan's phone lights up on the desk.
He left it charging and I'm not looking at it, but the screen catches the light and the preview is right there: Coming for the boxes Tuesday. Her name above it.
I stop. I read it twice.
Then I go to the kitchen and start the braise.
The short ribs come out of the fridge. Dutch oven, oil. My hands know this work. While they're doing it I'm thinking about the guest room on the second floor and a woman who came here every Sunday for two years. Who left something behind each time without knowing it.
She didn't know I noticed. Or she knew and told herself I didn't.
My body has been half-hard since I saw that she was coming and imagined what it would be like to see her again, this time without my son at her side. It can wait. It has waited.
The onions go in on low heat. I have time, and I use it.
I call Killian while the oil heats. He picks up on the third ring—he's in the south field, I hear the wind and the tractor idling somewhere behind him.
"Need you back at the house by four," I say.
A pause. He knows what it means when I call him in without a reason. "Something wrong with the east rows?"
"No."
Another pause, longer. I hear him shift his weight, the creak of what's probably the fence post he's been meaning to fix for three weeks. "Is it Jade?"
I don't answer.
"I'll be back by three," he says, and hangs up.
I add the onions and let them go.
Ryan comes in around noon—back door, boots on the mat, the shuffle of someone trying to come in quietly and not managing it.
He appears in the kitchen doorway with cooperage sawdust on his jacket and his hair going sideways.
He looks at the dutch oven. The table already set for four. He looks at me.
I keep stirring.
"You need help with anything?" he says.
"No." I don't turn around. "Stay in tonight."
He goes quiet in a way that means he's working it out, and I hear the fridge open, the sound of him getting water. He drinks some of it. "I was going to head back out this afternoon, the east rows still need?—"
"Ryan. Stay in."
I hear the glass go down on the counter. When I glance back he's already red at the back of the neck, the Flanagan tell, same as it's always been, same as Killian gets it, same as I probably did at his age.
"Okay," he says, quiet and careful, and he goes back out the way he came.
I stand there after his boots are gone. Eight months and he hasn't once tried to soften what he did or ask me to look at it differently.
He shows up to breakfast every morning with it and doesn't make excuses.
That's not nothing. Tonight I'm asking him to give her the house and stay out of the way, and he said okay, and he'll mean it.
He's a Flanagan.
In the afternoon I go down to the cellar to check the back row of barrels—the temperature's been running warm and I want to get eyes on it before Thursday's rain changes everything.
I bring the thermometer and the clipboard.
The far end is dim; the bulb blew two weeks ago.
I find the spare, climb the step stool, replace it, and that's done.
And then I just stand there for a moment, because the light is on now and the back row is right there, and last spring she followed me down here with her wine glass still in her hand and asked about barrel aging.
She went at the same pace I did down the rows, her free hand running along the barrel heads as we went. She wasn't tentative about it. She touched things without asking permission.
"What wood?" she said.
"French oak. Tighter grain than American. Slower extraction."
"And the toast level—you choose that based on the varietal?"
"Based on what I want the wine to do at the end. Heavy toast, you get smoke, vanilla. Medium, you get more fruit."
She stopped at the far barrel and leaned in to look at the stave—the line of her jaw, the loose curl of auburn hair that had come free from where she'd pinned it.
Close enough that I caught the smell of her—warm skin, a little wine, something else underneath.
She asked about the char level and I answered and she went quiet for a moment, thinking it through, her shoulder almost touching mine in the narrow space between barrels.
Then she shifted her weight and her forearm came against my sleeve.
She was leaning in to read the stamp on the barrel head and it was nothing, just the way the space was, but she didn't move away right away and neither did I.
The thought arrived whole: no one would know.
Clear and wrong. Ryan upstairs. The dark. Her arm warm through my sleeve.
I stepped back and moved to the temperature gauge at the end of the row.
"Back row's been running a couple degrees warm," I said. "Been watching it."
"Does that matter?"
"Not yet."
She followed me to the gauge and we finished the tour and went back upstairs. I didn't look at her directly for the rest of the evening, and she either didn't notice or was kind enough not to say so.
The line was real. Ryan was my son and she was his and I was not that kind of man.
That was before February.
The first night Ryan brought her here, she came through the front door ahead of him and looked around—the table, the photo of the boys on the wall, the open door to the porch—like she was figuring out whether to stay.
She still had her coat on when she looked at me—green eyes finding mine before Ryan was through the door. "Cormac." Warm, easy, like she'd been saying my name for years. "Thank you for having me."
"Sit down," I said. "It's ready."
She didn't wait to be told where—just took the chair to my left and unfolded her napkin and that was that. It wasn't a big moment. It was just true.
We talked about the harvest. She asked about the north slope drainage, but the real version—what it actually cost us in a wet October, whether the rerouting I'd done three years back had held.
"It held," I said. "Better than I expected."
"What made you try it? Most people would've taken the loss."
Killian glanced up. Ryan was looking at his plate. I looked at her.
"I don't accept losses I can solve," I said.
She took that in, turned it over for a second. Then she smiled. Caught herself doing it, looked down at her fork like she was embarrassed by it. And there was a laugh just underneath that I've thought about more than I should.
I put the thought away the next day and got on with the week. That was two years ago. I'm done putting things away.
Christmas morning two years ago, I came downstairs at six and found her at the kitchen table in her pajamas with both hands around a mug, watching the north slope go gray with frost. Hair loose, dark auburn against her shoulders. The house still quiet.
She looked up when I came in and didn't startle. Just looked at me like she'd been waiting for the company.
"Good morning," she said.
"Morning." I went to the stove and started the coffee, aware of her at the table behind me. "Sleep well?"
"Surprisingly, yeah. Your guest room is better than my apartment."
"Low bar."
She laughed. "It really is."
I brought two mugs to the table and we talked about nothing much: the frost, whether it would hold past new year, what the cold snap meant for the late harvest rows.
Easy conversation. The kind that doesn't need to go anywhere.
She held her mug in both hands and watched out the window and I watched her, and underneath the easy morning was something I wasn't going to do anything about.
"You must love it," she said at some point. "Living here."
"I do."
"Do you ever get tired of the work?"
"No. The work and the land are the same thing. You can't get tired of one without the other."
She looked at me then, a real look, like something I'd said matched something she already knew. "Ryan doesn't feel that way," she said, quiet, no edge in it. Just the truth of it, sitting there between us.
I didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say.
We sat until we heard Killian's door, and the morning got going.
I thought about what she said for weeks afterward. Not about Ryan—about the fact that she'd set it down between us like something she'd figured out and was learning to carry.
Sandra and I were explosive. We had Killian at twenty, Ryan at twenty-two.
We built this estate between feedings, slept badly because nobody sleeps with two boys under three, and I cannot remember a day in those years I didn't want her.
We were good for a long stretch and faded for the years after.
By the time we divorced Ryan was fourteen.
What ended us was simple. I wanted more children.
She didn't. I hadn't understood—I hadn't been paying close enough attention—that the boys had been the limit for her, not the start of it.
By the time I was paying attention she was done.
I was thirty-five years old, looking at the woman I had built half a life with.
My body still wanted what hers had decided was finished.
For the first time, I knew it wasn't going to happen.
I loved her wrong after that—too certain how things should go, not enough room for her to be a person who didn't want what I wanted—and that's the part I've kept. Not the marriage failing. The way I failed at it.
Killian went mostly to her afterward. She needed him more than she'd say, and Killian is built to answer that without being asked. I had Ryan and the estate. I would do it the same way to end up with those two.
I have been alone for ten years.
There were a few women after. A woman from the distributor who stopped calling around month three. A woman in town raising two daughters who didn't want more children. A few others. Good women, wrong fit. None of them wanted what I wanted. I stopped trying.
Then Ryan brought her home.
Last March she came to dinner fresh off a phone call with Ryan that had gone short. I could hear the shape of it from the study—her voice, then his, shorter.
She sat down and Ryan came in after her and she said, while he was still pulling out his chair: "My friend Cara just found out she's pregnant. Second one."
"Already?" Ryan said.
"Eighteen months apart." She was smiling at the table. "It sounds insane but honestly—" She stopped. Picked up her fork. "I think it sounds nice, actually."
"Sounds exhausting," Ryan said, and reached for the wine.
She didn't answer. I watched her fold whatever she'd been about to say back up and put it away, and reach for the bread, and turn herself toward Ryan's conversation about the east row planting schedule like that was the evening they were having.
I sat at the head of the table and watched her listen and thought: he genuinely doesn't know.
She wants a family. Not someday down the road—she wants it now, has wanted it for years, and she spent two of those years sitting across from a man who was too afraid of his own feelings to see it. Eight months ago he made his choice.
She hasn't been his since February. She hasn't really been only his for a lot longer than that.
At one o'clock I go to the study and stand at the window.
The drive is empty. She'll talk herself into it before she gets in the car—is this a good idea, is it too strange, it's just twenty minutes, it's just the boxes. She'll decide it's fine. I've watched her decide things before.
The north slope is going gold. Harvest two weeks out. Rain Thursday. Two rows on the east side still need turning. I have a braise on the stove. The guest room made up. A fourth chair I have been thinking about for two years. My body—low, patient, done waiting.
At ten past two, I hear her tires on the gravel.