HARPER
Itake a settling breath as my red bottoms click alongside Mallory’s through the tasting room.
We weave through guests with pleasant smiles and simple greetings, the kind of fluid two-person choreography Mallory and I have gotten very good at over the last few months.
It’s like a living game of Tetris and I’m grateful my baby bump isn’t super noticeable yet, or at least not noticeable enough that strangers are asking questions I don’t have rehearsed answers for.
Mallory hasn’t mentioned anything since I started showing and I’m not upset about it.
She’s one of those people who waits for news to be shared and doesn’t peek behind the curtain.
Still, she’s noticeably lightened my day-to-day, quietly rerouting the heavier vendor walkthroughs to the junior coordinator without making a thing of it.
I asked Killian about it and he said it wasn’t him, so it’s just Mallory being Mallory, observant and decent in the way that makes you feel seen without feeling managed.
Sophia, on the other hand, has been hopped up on Mountain Dew or something whenever she’s within twenty feet of me, grinning like a maniac, wiggling her eyebrows, finding any excuse to hover.
She hasn’t said anything outright and neither have I, which is technically a dumb move on both our parts, but between three boyfriends, a full event calendar, dodging my parents who for some truly baffling reason have been frequenting the vineyard two and a half months later like they received a standing invitation nobody told me about, it’s been a lot.
Plus I think I’ve started nesting and it’s a little weird to do when your home for the past few months has been a suite in a private residence building on a vineyard in France.
My brain keeps wanting to reorganize things I don’t own.
Last Thursday I rearranged Killian’s bookshelf while he was on a call and he came out and looked at it for a long moment and then looked at me and then back at it and said nothing, which I’m choosing to interpret as approval.
Mallory peels off to take a call from the florist supplier and I take the long way back toward the events suite to check the new lighting installation in the east corridor before I send final approval to the electrician.
Five minutes, quick loop, and also I’ve been taking the long way a lot lately because September has done something to this property that makes me want to actually look at it instead of just move through it.
The air has dropped below that specific summer heat that never quite stops feeling aggressive, and the whole estate smells like earth and grape must and something faintly sweet that Asher says means the sugar content is exactly where Killian wants it for harvest. He said it at breakfast with the easy authority of a man who has watched forty-six harvests and knows what each one smells like, and I sat across from him with my decaf and felt something settle in my chest that doesn’t have a clean name yet.
I pass the long window that looks out over the south terrace and slow down because the vineyard is doing that early-autumn thing where everything looks lit from inside, rows going gold at the edges against a sky that’s just starting to consider the idea of clouds, and I press one hand to my stomach without thinking about it, automatic now, something I do dozens of times a day.
Hi, I think at whoever’s in there. Look at where we live.
I’ve started saying we without planning to, in my head mostly but sometimes out loud, and the first time Maddox caught me doing it in a grocery aisle in Bordeaux he went so quiet and so soft so fast that I had to look at the cereal shelf until I got my face back under control.
I hear my mother’s laugh before I see her, which is about how that always goes.
That sound has a physiological effect on me I’ve never been able to train away, this tightening at the base of my skull that travels down the back of my neck before my brain has even registered what I’m hearing.
My body knows that laugh. My body has been reacting to that laugh since I was eight years old and she uses it to charm whoever needs charming before telling me on the car ride home that I embarrassed her.
I stop in the corridor doorway and look through the half-open door of one of the smaller meeting rooms, the kind used for board sub-committees and vendor presentations, and I see a table with printed materials, a laptop, a projector screen, and three people seated around it like they’ve been there long enough to have opinions about the coffee.
My father. My mother. Evelyn.
My father has the posture of a man mid-pitch, shoulders back, hands open on the table, running that particular performance of earnest sincerity I’ve watched him deploy my whole life at school fundraisers and bank appointments and kitchen tables where he’s explaining why the last thing didn’t work out but the next thing is going to be different, trust him.
My mother’s beside him nodding at intervals with the practiced warmth of a woman who has spent thirty years being his most effective prop.
Evelyn’s at the head of the table with a wine glass and the composed interest of someone who has already decided she’s going to enjoy this, which she definitely has been, because she orchestrated it.
On the projector screen behind them are the words Thorne Curated Collection, and underneath it in smaller text, In partnership with Thorne Estates, and I read both of those twice and then I find the line in the corner of the slide, smaller still, a list of team members and their roles, and there’s my name.
Hospitality and Talent Liaison: Harper Brooks, sitting in the corner of a pitch deck for a business I’ve never heard of, have never been consulted on, have never in any capacity agreed to be attached to.
The feeling that moves through me isn’t quite anger yet, it’s something quieter and older than that, the feeling of a thing you’ve been bracing for without admitting it finally arriving right on schedule, and I stand there in the doorway and I breathe through my nose and I remind myself that I’m at work, that there are guests twenty feet away, that I am a professional who does not cause scenes in corridors even when the scene is extremely warranted.
My mother looks up and sees me and her whole face does that thing, opens up warm and delighted, the expression she’s been perfecting since I was a child and she needed something from a room she hadn’t won over yet.
“Oh, Harper!” she says, half-rising from her seat like I’m the guest of honor at a party I wasn’t invited to. “Talk about perfect timing. Come in, come in, we were just going through the materials. Your employer is very excited about the direction this is taking.”
“My employer,” I say back, because I need her to keep talking, and she obliges.
“Mr. Thorne,” my father says, leaning back like he has opinions about the furniture and has been here long enough to voice them. “Very forward-thinking man. We’ve had several productive conversations this week. He speaks incredibly highly of your work here, Harper.”
Evelyn’s eyes find mine across the table and she doesn’t smile exactly, but something in her expression does, some small private satisfaction she’s been sitting on and is only now getting to unwrap.
I keep my voice in the register I use for difficult vendors, smooth and giving nothing away, and I say, “I wasn’t aware there were ongoing partnership discussions involving the estate.”
“Oh, it’s early days,” my mother says with the casual authority she’s deployed to dismiss concerns since 1997. “Nothing’s finalized. But with your name already attached to the hospitality side, it gives the whole thing such credibility.”
Your name already attached, she says, like it’s a compliment, like it would never occur to her that attaching my name to something without asking might be exactly the problem, because it’s never occurred to her before and it’s not occurring to her now.
My father launches into the subscription tier structure, Premier level, Reserve level, Grand Cru, each one with its own access and price point, and I can tell he’s rehearsed this because his sentences are too smooth, rounded at the edges, the verbal equivalent of a suit he only wears when he needs someone to believe him, and I look at the slide one more time, at my name in the corner of it, at the Thorne Estates branding, at the whole careful expensive-looking structure built around something that doesn’t exist yet using names that aren’t his, and then he stops talking.
“How wonderful,” I say, and I smile, because I know how to smile, and I turn and walk out of the doorway at the exact pace of a woman who has somewhere to be.
The corridor feels longer than it actually is.
I walk it with my tablet against my chest and the fury sitting somewhere behind my sternum trying to decide which direction to travel first, because there are a few valid options and I’m a fair woman.
My parents, obviously, who are exactly who they have always been, who are going to keep being exactly who they have always been regardless of how many times I’ve quietly hoped otherwise.
Evelyn, who engineered this and is sitting in there enjoying the results with a wine glass like she’s won something.
And then there’s Killian, sitting underneath both of those like the question I really don’t want to be asking right now.
Several productive conversations this week, my father said.
Your employer is very excited. Killian who told me there wouldn’t be a third visit.
Killian who has a documented, Maddox-confronted, me-okayed-in-an-exam-room-wearing-a-hospital-gown habit of running plans quietly and calling it protection while the people he loves spend eleven days or two and a half months thinking they’ve done something wrong.
My name is on that slide and I didn’t put it there and I wasn’t asked, and the last time something like this happened I ended up with a reference letter that felt like a consolation prize and a one-way ticket to a different continent.
I am not doing that again.
I spot him coming from the direction of the main offices, jacket on, tablet in hand, heading toward the corridor with that stride he uses when he’s running slightly behind schedule and has decided to make up the time by moving like he owns the building, which he does, but still.
I intercept him, my hand closing around his wrist before I’ve fully committed to the decision, and I pull him away from the corridor and say, “We need to talk.”
He glances down at my hand, then at my face, and his expression does that shift into careful stillness, and he says, “Miss Brooks, this isn’t the time,” in the voice he uses on people he’s managing, smooth and final, and he pulls his wrist free and moves to step past me like that’s settled.
I step sideways and plant myself between him and the corridor entrance and I look up at him, because I always have to look up at him, six-foot-four of tailored charcoal suit and salt-and-pepper authority, and today that’s not doing what he thinks it’s doing.
“Now, Killian,” I say.
He looks down at me and says, “Harper,” low and careful, like that’s supposed to be enough, like I’m going to hear that voice and remember who he is and fall back into line, and I hold his gaze for one more second because I want him to understand that I see exactly what he’s doing and I’m choosing not to respond to it today, and then I turn and walk toward the offices.
I pull out my phone.
Harper: Us or them.