28. Jade
JADE
Cormac has everyone up before five.
Not dramatically—just the sound of his boots on the floor below, the coffee on, the weight of his presence filling the house the way it fills the estate.
I'm dressed before six. Ryan is already on the south slope when I come out, checking the brix on the first cluster of the day.
Killian has the picking crew organized by seven.
This is harvest. This is what the whole thing has been building toward.
The east section goes first.
Cormac's call—he's been watching the east vines for two weeks, the ones he walked me through with Killian the morning everything was still uncertain.
The '22 rack's younger siblings, not as patient, ready now.
He walks the row one more time in the early light with his ledger under his arm and his coffee going cold in his other hand, and then he nods once and that's all anyone needs.
The crew comes in from the south road at half past seven.
Eight people, two vans, everyone knowing their station.
Killian runs the west side of the row, Cormac takes east, and Ryan—without being told, without making a thing of it—sets himself up at the pressing station where someone has to coordinate intake from both sides.
I watch that happen from the row end.
I think: four days ago he didn't know what a bladder press was. Now he's the one running it.
I go help Killian with the west side.
Harvest is physical in a way I'd forgotten.
The reaching and the cutting and the weight of the full clusters, the deep ache that sets into your shoulders by ten and doesn't leave.
The sun coming up behind the estate buildings and the temperature climbing and the smell of must beginning to rise off the crush pads.
The crew working efficiently around all of us, everyone in their place.
I work beside Killian all morning. He doesn't talk much during harvest—he's focused, counting, watching the intake numbers—but his shoulder is close to mine and occasionally he passes me a cluster to check before it goes in the bin and it's ordinary and easy in a way that nothing between us has ever been before.
Around noon he hands me his water bottle without me asking.
"East section's at sixty percent," he says.
"Ahead of schedule."
"Two more hours." He looks at the sky. "Temperature holds, we finish today."
I drink his water. Hand it back.
We go back to work.
Ryan finds me in the cellar at two.
He's bringing the first press yield down—careful with it, the way he's careful with everything now—and he sets it where Cormac showed him it goes and he checks the temperature gauge on the tank and makes a note.
I'm watching from the rack.
"You remembered," I say.
He looks at the gauge. "Sixty-two degrees. That's what it's supposed to be at intake?"
"Sixty to sixty-four."
He makes another note. "Good."
I watch him move through the cellar with the ease of someone who's been doing this for years—which he hasn't, which means he's been paying attention from the moment he got here, storing everything. The gauge. The tank position. The note in the ledger in the same column Cormac uses.
"You're going to be good at this," I say.
He looks up. Meets my eye.
"I want to be," he says. "I've got something to stick around for now."
I go back to the rack.
We finish the east section by four-thirty.
Cormac walks the stripped rows in the late afternoon light—just checking, the way he checks everything—and comes back to where the four of us have ended up at the crush pad.
The crew has packed up and gone. The estate is quiet in the way it gets after big work: settled, satisfied, the air still smelling of must and green.
The four of us stand at the crush pad and look at what we made.
Nobody says anything for a moment. Killian is reading the yield numbers off his phone. Ryan has his jacket off and his shirt sweat-dark at the collar. Cormac looks at the estate the way he always looks at it—like he built it and he's not sorry for a single thing.
The light is going amber. Late-afternoon October, the last of it before the temperature drops, and the must rising off the crush pad smells like fermentation beginning—the sweetness of sugar turning into something else.
I've been standing on this estate for fourteen days and I know that smell now.
I know what it means about timing. I know what sixty-two degrees looks like on the intake gauge and what the east-row clusters feel like in your hand when they're ready and which light through the study window means Cormac has been up since four-thirty.
Ryan catches my eye across the pad. Just for a second. He doesn't say anything. He looks at me the way he's been looking at me all day—not the two-years look, not the apologizing look, just: I'm here. I'm working. And then he goes back to reading his phone.
Killian puts his phone in his pocket. "Yield's seven percent above projection," he says. To Cormac. To the air.
"Good," Cormac says.
The estate settles into its own silence.
The crew gone, the machines quiet, the rows stripped and waiting for next year's growth.
I came here fourteen days ago with labeled boxes in my car and a plan to pick them up and leave.
What grew between those days and this one is at the crush pad with me now, in these three men and the warmth that may or may not have taken in my body.
I don't know whose it is. Same as I don't know which vine produced the first cluster Cormac picked this morning, which root in which row. The estate doesn't sort it that way. The yield belongs to all of it.
Cormac holds the door.
Dinner is late and easy. Cormac makes something with the lamb he's had going since morning.
Killian opens a bottle of the '19—not the '22, that's years away still—and pours all four glasses.
Ryan sets the table without being asked, the way he sets it now, the fourth place already in its spot before I've come downstairs.
We eat. The four of us. The table full.
Afterward I dry the dishes while Ryan washes and Killian reads the yield report and Cormac goes through the ledger. The kitchen is warm. The north slope dark beyond the window. I think: this is what every night is going to look like.
I'm not afraid of that.
I go up when the kitchen's done.
I lie in the guest room—my room—and I look at the ceiling.
My shoulders ache. My hands have the stiffness that comes from a full day of grip-and-cut and I know from the way it's settled that it will be worse in the morning. The soles of my feet. The back of my neck. I came here for two labeled boxes and I've been working a harvest.
I put my hand flat on my stomach. Low. The way Killian put his—the night of the pill, his palm staying there, the warmth of it through my skin.
I don't know anything yet. My body isn't telling me anything different than it told me yesterday.
The low warmth is just the warmth of the day, the work, the lamb dinner, Killian's shoulder touching mine all morning in the row.
I'll know when I know. Some part of me thought that being here, being all the way inside this instead of standing outside it, would make the waiting easier.
It doesn't make it easier. It just makes it feel like exactly the right thing to be waiting for.
Below me the kitchen light goes off. The study light stays on—Cormac with the yield numbers, the ledger, the closing record of a day that produced what he planted it to produce.
In the morning he'll be at that desk before dawn.
In the morning the east rows will be stripped and the juice will be sitting in the tanks at sixty-two degrees.
Whatever is or isn't in my body right now: the estate will be there either way. The table will be set for four. Cormac will pour my coffee in the order he's decided to pour it and the work will go on and the rows will come around again in spring.
I close my eyes.
I sleep.