20. Killian
KILLIAN
I'm in the winery when I hear the study door open and close.
It's my father's study—I'd know that door by the sound of it in any room of any building on this estate—and I hear it from the barrel room, which means I wasn't looking for it, which means it lands differently than it would have if I'd been watching. Just a sound. The house settling in the rain.
But I know who was in there.
I finish the barrel check I'm doing and I write the numbers in my ledger and I don't think about it. Or I think about it the way you think about weather when you're trying to work—aware of it, accounting for it, not letting it stop you.
She went to him. In the middle of a rain day with all of us in the house, she went to my father's study and the door closed, and I finished my barrel check.
That's where I am.
He finds me in the winery at two.
Not on accident—my father doesn't do anything on accident, which I've known for thirty years and which stops feeling surprising around the time you're old enough to do the same.
He comes through the side door with his coat on and his boots and his ledger under his arm.
He looks around the winery the way he looks around everything he built, taking stock, and then he comes to where I'm working the second rack.
We work side by side for a while without saying anything. That's also him—he shows up where the work is, does it with you, and eventually says the thing he came to say. I learned patience from watching him do this. I'm not sure I'm grateful for that or not.
"Ryan," he says eventually.
"Yeah."
"He's earning it."
I look at the rack. "I know."
"That's going to mean something." He pulls a sample, holds it to the light from the high window. "Soon."
I don't say anything. I know what soon means. I've known what it means since she told Ryan he had to wait and I understood—for the first time, standing on the winery step with my jaw still aching—that wait was a timeline, not a wall.
"Does that bother you," my father says. Not quite a question.
I think about it honestly. That's the thing about my father—he doesn't ask things so you can say the comfortable version. He asks things so you'll tell him what's actually true.
"It would have," I say. "A week ago."
"And now."
I pull a sample of my own. Look through it at the window. The rain outside, the gray light, the rows invisible. "Now I want her to stay," I say. "That's the whole thing. Everything else is—it's just the shape of how she stays."
My father is quiet for a moment.
"That's a mature position," he says. Which, from him, is a whole speech.
"Don't make it weird."
The corner of his mouth. He sets the sample down. "Ryan's not going to take anything. You understand that. He's at the bottom and he knows it and he's going to stay there until she decides otherwise."
"I know."
"So the question is whether you can be in the same house with that without making it her problem."
I look at him. He looks back at me, steady, the look that means he already knows the answer and is asking anyway so I'll hear myself say it.
"Yes," I say. "I can."
He nods once. Picks up his ledger.
"The '22 east row is ready," he says. "Walk her through it this week, before harvest. You've been meaning to."
Then he goes back to the house. I stand in the winery in the rain sound and I think about what he didn't say, which is: this arrangement only holds if all three of you hold it. And two out of three isn't enough.
I find Ryan in the barn at four.
He's working the sections of wire he couldn't get to in the rain—the three that needed drying out before they could be properly set.
He's got his head down and his hands careful and he doesn't look up when I come in, which is Ryan, which is the version of him I've been watching do everything right for five days.
I stand in the barn door for a moment.
He looks up.
We look at each other. There's a whole conversation in it that neither of us is going to have out loud in a barn on a Tuesday afternoon: the fistfight, the Sunday dinners, two years of watching the same woman from different sides of the same table, every night since she arrived. All of it right there between us.
"South run?" I say.
"Three sections." He goes back to the wire. "I'll finish before dark."
I come in. Pick up the other end of the section he's working. He glances at me once—surprised, or something near it—and then goes back to his work.
We fix the wire. The rain eases outside, that slow letting-up that means it's done for now, the pressure breaking. The late afternoon light comes through the barn slats and falls in long lines across the floor, catching the dust.
"She's not going to make it easy," I say.
He doesn't look up. "I know."
"Good." I move to the next section. "She shouldn't."
He's quiet for a moment, the wire in his hands. "No," he says. "She shouldn't."
That's all. We finish the south run in the light that's left. I go in and wash up, and by the time dinner's on the table the four of us are back in our chairs like the whole day didn't happen, which is its own kind of thing. This estate keeps going. The work keeps going. The rain stopped.
She pours her own wine tonight.
I notice Ryan doesn't reach for it.
Small. But I notice.