37. Jade
JADE
Iknow before I buy the test.
I've known for four days in the way your body tells you things before you're ready to deal with them—the tiredness that isn't tiredness, the way certain smells have gone wrong, the low pull of something happening that has nothing to do with the barrel room or the south slope or anything I can name on the estate ledger.
I've been noting it and not noting it, the way you don't look directly at things you're not ready to see.
I buy the test two towns over, at the pharmacy where nobody knows my face, and I keep it in the bottom of my bag for a full day before I do anything with it.
Not because it's a secret. Because I want one morning that's just mine and the knowing, before it becomes the thing that belongs to the whole table.
I take the test in the guest bathroom at six in the morning while the house is still sleeping.
I sit on the tile floor afterward.
The tile is cold through the cotton of my sleep pants. The house is completely quiet—no boots on the stairs yet, no coffee starting below, just the early-morning silence of this estate that I've been waking up inside for months now and still find every morning. I look at the result in my hand.
My body already knew. That's the thing I keep coming back to.
Not the test—the four days before it. The smell of the barrel room going slightly wrong.
Cormac's coffee smelling different last Thursday.
The low-grade persistent warmth I couldn't account for.
My body has been telling me since before I was ready; I just needed the confirmation to let myself feel the full weight of it.
I feel it now.
I keep waiting for the fear to arrive. The old reflex—the one that ran every number when I was with Ryan, that lay awake doing the math of whether I was wanted, whether I'd be left, what I'd do if I was.
It doesn't come. I sit on the cold tile in a house full of men who set a place for me before I knocked, and the thing in my chest isn't fear.
It's steadier than that. It's the feeling of sitting somewhere that isn't going to move out from under me.
One hand goes flat to my stomach. Just resting.
The warmth of it. The quiet of the house around me, the house still dark, and me on this tile with the test and everything it means.
I think about the boxes still half-unpacked in the guest room, labeled in my own crying handwriting from March—Jade—kitchen, Jade—books—and how I never finished them because as long as they were sealed I could still tell myself I might leave.
I think I'll unpack them today. I think I'm done telling myself that.
Six weeks ago. The competition night. All three of them, the window open, my body holding all of it the way it was asked to. I'm staying. The fourth place that was set before I arrived.
I look at the result for a long time.
The house stays quiet.
I get up.
Cormac is in the study with his coffee and the winter ledger, where he always is at six in the morning. He looks up when I come through the door. He reads my face before he reads anything else—the way he reads me, all the way, in the first second.
I close the door behind me.
I set the test on the desk.
He looks at it. He looks at my face. Something moves in his expression—not surprise, not quite—the look of a man who has been tending something patiently and is watching it come to fruit.
He sets his pen down. He doesn't reach for the test. He's not interested in confirming what he already read off me at the door—the test is a formality, and I'm the actual news.
He comes around the desk.
He takes my face in both hands—those hands, warm and certain, the familiar roughness of them against my jaw—and holds me. Completely. Nothing tentative in it. I close my eyes and for a moment there's nothing in the world but his palms and the cold tile still in my feet and the test on his desk.
My eyes sting. Not because I'm sad. Because being held like this—like something certain, like something he expected and wanted and made room for—is the opposite of every quiet way I taught myself to brace.
Two years of a man who poured my water and washed my sheets and never once held my face like it was the most settled thing in his hands.
He doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to.
After a while he presses his mouth to my forehead.
"Go make coffee," he says. "I'll be in."
I almost laugh. The normalcy of it—go make coffee—like it's any Tuesday, like the world is the same shape it was an hour ago. Which it is, I suppose. The table was always going to be the table. I breathe in once. I nod. I go.
At the door I look back, because I want to see him with the news and no one watching.
He's still by the desk, one hand flat on the wood, the test beside it, looking out the window at the north slope going gray-to-gold.
He's smiling. Small, private, entirely to himself.
The smile of a man whose long patience just came in.
I let him have it. I don't think he knows I saw.
Ryan has already put the coffee on. He's at the counter, mug in hand, hair still carrying the night. Killian is at the table with his eggs and his phone, scrolling through something.
They both look up when I come in.
I put the test on the table.
Ryan goes completely still. His mug is halfway to his mouth.
He doesn't set it down and he doesn't finish the movement—he just stops, his whole body arrested mid-motion, his eyes on the test. Something moves across his face that I don't have a word for.
The expression of a man receiving news that is enormous and is also, somehow, exactly the thing he's been waiting for.
The mug comes down to the counter slow, like he's not sure his hands can be trusted with it.
He doesn't pick anything else up. He just stands there with his hands empty, looking at the small plastic thing on the table like it might change shape if he stops watching it.
Killian looks at it.
He's very quiet for a moment—the kind of quiet he gets when he's adding things up and not letting me see him do it.
I know what he's counting. The six weeks.
The night. The three of them. The window.
He knows all the same arithmetic I do. His fork goes down.
He stands. He goes to the shelf where Cormac keeps the bottles they've been working through and he opens the '22 from the east row—the one Cormac said was getting there—and he pours three glasses without looking at me.
Sets them on the table. Waits. It's six in the morning and we're about to drink wine the color of garnet in gray light, and nobody says a word about the hour.
The hour stopped mattering the second I set the test down.
Cormac comes in from the study.
He doesn't hurry. He moves through the kitchen the way he moves through everything—at his own pace, certain of the destination. He sits at the head of the table. He looks at Killian's three glasses. He looks at Ryan, still standing. He looks at me.
"Get another glass," he says.
I know what he means.
I've known what he means since the first morning, before I knew I knew it.
Since the fourth place was already set before I knocked on the door.
Since guest room's made up and stay through harvest and that's not up for discussion—all of it the same sentence, every time, in the same register: you are at this table. You have been. That doesn't change.
I get a glass. I sit in the fourth place.
Killian pours the fourth. Ryan sits, finally, lowering himself carefully into his chair, and his hand comes flat to the table near mine. Not touching. Just there.
We look at each other.
"Mine," Killian says. Low and flat and certain, like he's decided it and that's the end of the matter.
I look at him. "You don't know that."
"I know," he says. And then the certainty shifts—just slightly—and it's the version of him I've seen twice before, the version that lives underneath the scorekeeping. His jaw works. He looks at the table. "I hope," he says, quieter.
I sit with that. Killian stripped down to wanting something he can't control.
Killian saying I hope instead of I know.
I think I love him more for it than I would for all his certainty.
He spent his whole life sure of things, because being unsure in this family got you nothing.
And here he is at the breakfast table, laying the certainty down like a hand of cards he's decided not to play, telling the truth instead.
I reach over and put my hand on his forearm.
The muscle there is tight. It eases under my palm, slow.
I look at Ryan.
He's looking at my hand near his on the table.
His throat moves. When his eyes come up they're wet—not crying, just at the edge of it, holding it back with the effortful stillness he applies to everything he's trying not to show me—and he swallows once.
And then what comes out is: "Are you—is everything okay? "
Not is it mine. Not what happens now. Not any of the questions this situation could generate in a man who still has something to prove. Just: are you okay.
Two years of him not asking. Two years of Hey in the voice he used on bartenders, two years of me learning the difference between a man who's present and a man who's performing presence. And this is what he has now. The first real question, on the morning it matters most.
"Yes," I say. "More than."
Something releases in his face. His hand moves across the table and covers mine.
Cormac has been watching his sons. He watches them the way he watches his rows—reading what they're doing, what they need, patient the way he is with everything that takes time.
Now he looks at me. His face is the face he wears when the estate does what he built it to do—when the pressing temperature holds and the yield comes in, when the rows produce exactly what they were always going to produce if you tended them right.
He lifts his glass.
"Congratulations," he says. To the table. To all of us.
Killian laughs—short and sharp and surprised out of him, like he didn't expect the word to land that way and then it did.
Ryan presses my hand and lets go and wipes his eye with his sleeve, quick, like I didn't see it.
I don't say anything about it. The morning light is coming in across the kitchen, across the table, across the fourth place that was set before I arrived.
I lift my glass.
We drink.
All four of us know it. Nobody says it. Nobody needs to.
The question of whose was answered before it was asked: all of them, same as everything else on this estate.
Paternity irrelevant. The table is the table.
The chair is the chair. What grows here belongs to all of us—same as the rows, same as the fruit, same as the '22 we're drinking right now that Cormac planted before I was born and that tastes, this morning, like exactly what it was always becoming.