Epilogue Jade
The vineyard is coming back.
I can see it from the kitchen window—the new green along the canes, the south slope doing what it does every April whether we deserve it or not.
Everything returning. The estate smells different in spring: earth and sap and something green and alive that I've been waking up to for six months now and still find every morning.
I'm five months. My back aches in the late afternoon.
My sparkling water has replaced the wine I miss but not desperately.
The roundness arrived sometime in February and is now simply part of how I exist in the world—the new shape of me, which Killian has been watching with the fixated attention of a man who is deeply, irritatingly invested in whether I am eating enough.
He made me a spreadsheet. An actual spreadsheet. I didn't ask for it. It tracks protein and iron. He explained it to me at breakfast last Tuesday like I hadn't previously been managing my own nutrition for twenty-five years. I ate my eggs without pointing this out.
Ryan drove three hours last Saturday because I mentioned, once, in passing, that I was craving the dumpling soup from the place in the city.
He didn't tell me he was coming. He just appeared at noon with two containers and the look of a man who is aware he's done something slightly unhinged and is not sorry about it.
He stayed through dinner. He helped with the dishes. Killian let him.
This morning, before either of us was fully awake, Cormac put his hand on my belly.
Not dramatic. Not announced. We were lying in the early light and he was still mostly asleep and his hand simply moved—across the bed, settling flat against the roundness of me, warm and certain and completely without deliberation.
Like a man whose hand knows where it's supposed to be.
I lay still and felt his palm there and thought: this.
This is what I always wanted. The embarrassing thing—the family, the table, the permanence of belonging somewhere and being kept.
I wanted it and I thought wanting it that badly was a flaw in me, something I should apologize for or hide or at least not name out loud.
I told myself I'd find a smaller version of it. Something reasonable.
It isn't embarrassing. It's just my life.
At breakfast Killian argues with Ryan about the east row drainage reroute—whether it can wait until May or needs to go in now.
Ryan says wait. Killian says now. Cormac says nothing, which means he's already decided and will tell them when he's ready and not a moment before.
These are the same three men who spent an entire fistfight settling something that could have been said over coffee. They have not become more efficient.
I drink my sparkling water. I eat the eggs Killian made—extra protein, I assume, though I don't ask—and I watch the north slope in the morning light and I think about the fourth chair.
Cormac set it the morning he saw Ryan's text on the desk and went to the kitchen and started the braise and called Killian in from the south slope. He set a place at his table and he kept it empty until I arrived and then quietly, without announcement, he made it mine.
I walked through the door thinking I was there for two boxes.
I sat down.
Everything else followed from that.
Killian wins the drainage argument. Ryan concedes with bad grace.
Cormac sets his mug down and says now, not May without looking up from the ledger, and that's the end of it.
Killian looks at Ryan with the expression of a man who has just been vindicated and is being very restrained about it, which for Killian means a single raised eyebrow and a return to his coffee.
I don't look up from my water.
But I'm smiling.
The south slope is going green through the window. The barrel room is doing its slow work. The pressing schedule is filed and the '22 rack is sitting in the dark getting older, becoming what it's becoming, taking all the time it needs.
I put my hand on my belly, under the table where no one can see.
Whoever's in there: the estate is yours.
The rows, the barrel room, the table, the fourth chair that was always yours before you existed, set by a man who builds things he means to keep.
You have three people who will argue about drainage reroutes and drive three hours for soup and make spreadsheets about your mother's iron levels. You have all of this.
We all do.
Three men, one table, one arrangement that nobody has revisited since October because nobody needed to. That's not going to change. Cormac built things he means to keep.
I always was going to stay. I just needed to walk through the door.