27. Jade
JADE
Iwake up alone.
Ryan left sometime in the night—quietly, the way he does everything these days—and the space beside me holds the shape of him but not the weight. The blanket is still warm. The lamp is still on, turned low. He didn't slam the door.
I lie still for a moment.
Last night. My window still open and the warmth of it settled in my body and the knowledge of what may have begun and no way to know yet whose.
I think: I am not afraid of not knowing.
That surprises me a little. I thought I'd wake up afraid.
The kitchen is all four of us before seven.
Cormac is at the stove. He started the coffee before anyone came down—I can smell it from the stairs, rich and familiar, the smell that means this house is awake and working. He doesn't turn around when I come in. He just reaches for the fourth mug.
Killian is at the table with the ledger. He looks up when I come through the doorway and looks at me the way he looked at the '22 vines—like something he's been waiting to show someone for a long time and has finally gotten to. Not urgent. Just satisfied. He goes back to the ledger.
Ryan is at the window with his coffee. He turns when I come in and we look at each other and something passes between us—not last night, exactly, but the fullness of it, the weight of what he finally got to be and what it cost him to wait for it. He nods once.
I nod back.
I take the mug Cormac has set on the counter and I go to the fourth chair and I sit down and the morning organizes itself around me the way mornings do here.
Nobody says anything about last night. Nobody makes it a thing.
Killian slides the ledger across the table without being asked—the pressing schedule, the east section numbers—and I pull it toward me and pick up the pen he left beside it.
I start working through the figures. Cormac puts a plate in front of me.
Ryan comes to the table and sits across from Killian.
They start talking about the south slope timing.
Neither of them reaches for my coffee or my wine or the space between us.
They're just—organized. Around me. The four of us at the table, the estate going to work outside, harvest in four days.
This is what it looks like.
I've been waiting to find out what it looked like and this is it: ordinary. The fourth chair. The ledger. Coffee. The men moving around the kitchen and the table with the unconscious ease of people who have stopped negotiating their positions and started simply occupying them.
After breakfast Ryan does the dishes. Killian goes out to the east section. Cormac stays at the table with his own ledger and the morning quiet settles over the kitchen like weather.
I pour a second cup and stay in my chair and after a while Cormac sets his pen down and looks at me.
"How do you feel?" he says.
"Good." I think about it. "Settled, maybe. Is that the word?"
"That's the word."
I look at him across the table. The man who organized all of it—the guest room, the pressing schedule, the five minutes in the study, the order of last night. The man who built a place at this table and kept it empty until I arrived and then quietly, thoroughly, made it mine.
"Did you know it would feel like this?" I say. "Afterward."
He considers it. "I hoped."
I look at my coffee. "And if I'd decided differently. If I'd left."
"Then we'd have managed," he says. "The estate keeps going. The work doesn't stop." A pause. "But I'm glad you didn't."
"Me too," I say.
He picks up his pen. Goes back to his ledger.
I go back to mine.
Ryan finds me in the barrel room at noon.
He comes in without knocking—nobody knocks in the barrel room, it's a working space—and he stands in the doorway for a moment looking at me with the hydrometer and the ledger.
"Brix is up again," I say.
"I know. I checked the east rack this morning." He comes in and stands across the barrel from me. "Jade."
I look up.
"Thank you," he says. "For last night. For—all of it. The waiting. The—" He stops. Finds the right words. "For giving me the chance to be someone you'd let in."
I look at him for a moment.
"Don't make it a speech," I say. "Just be who you've been this last week."
Something in his face loosens. "Yeah?"
"Yeah." I go back to the hydrometer. "The peg's still holding, by the way."
A beat. Then, very quietly: "Good."
He goes back out to the south slope.
I write the brix number in the ledger. I put the pen down.
I think: this is what it is to be fully inside something. Not standing at the edge. Not deciding whether to step in. Just—here. The barrel room and the rows and the fourth chair and the three of them and the estate going to work around all of us like it's been doing this for years.
Maybe it has been. Maybe it's just been waiting for the rest of us to catch up.
I pick the pen back up.
I get to work.