KILLIAN
I’m shutting my laptop and reaching for my jacket to get the hell out of here when someone knocks on my door.
“Come in,” I say, hoping it’s not some last minute meeting, but instead I turn and see the one person I haven’t seen in weeks. “Evelyn.”
“Not even a ‘hello’? Or ‘how have you been’?” She steps into the office with her bag over one arm, dressed for something other than the vineyard, which tells me this wasn’t an impromptu visit.
She planned this. “Considering I’ve lost my seat and every shred of administrative standing I had here, I thought you might at least manage a greeting. ”
I take an internal breath and let it out slow. I have somewhere to be. Harper’s appointment is in forty minutes and I told Maddox I’d be downstairs by ten. “You and I both know you never really wanted that seat or the duties that came with it. So say what you have to say.”
She goes quiet.
That’s the first sign that this is different.
Evelyn doesn’t go quiet. Evelyn navigates silences, deploys them, controls the air of a room when it suits her, but she doesn’t sit in discomfort.
She’s sitting in it now, looking at the corner of my desk like she’s working something out that she didn’t fully work out before she walked in, and I stay where I am and wait.
She takes a breath and says, “I’m sorry.”
I genuinely stare at her for a second.
Did I hear that right?
“You’re right,” she continues, and each word sounds like it costs something, not in a performative way, in the way of a person who has had very little practice saying things like this and is doing it anyway.
“I hated it. The seat. The responsibilities. All of it. Aside from, I suppose, the prestige of having it, I never wanted any of the actual work that came with it. And this place.” She stops.
Starts again. “It wasn’t me that made this vineyard what it grew into.
It was,” she looks like she’s internally struggling, as if whatever she’s about to say could be the death of her.
She grips her hands into little fists…I guess she’s losing the fight and she finally says, “…you. There. I said it.”
I don’t say anything. I’m trying to determine whether I’m awake.
“And,” she keeps going, not looking at me, “you seem happy with her. You and Sophia both seem happier. I saw that she and Enzo got engaged.” A short, shallow laugh.
“On her Instagram. My daughter, who I’ve seen in passing practically every day since she and Harper arrived, and I found out about her engagement through social media. ”
Shit, that’s sad as hell.
She finally looks at me. “I wasn’t the best wife. Or the best mother. Obviously.”
Obviously.
“Or the best person, especially when it came to inviting Harper’s parents here. That was wrong of me and I knew it was wrong when I did it and I did it anyway, which was—” she shakes her head slightly.
“Bitchy,” I finished for her, “because if anyone can understand toxic parents it’s you.”
She nods, slowly, because she knows I’m right.
I don’t have to lay out how fucked up her parents were for her to feel like shit, if she does feel like shit.
She may have carried on their aristocracy in society, but she’d unfortunately inherited their ability to poison everything for personal gain, but maybe, just maybe, she’s realizing what she allowed herself to become after all these years.
“I can’t fix what happened. I know that. And I know that you and I are done, and I know we’ve been done for longer than we were actually together, so that’s not news to either of us. But I’m going to be in Sophia’s life. And that means being around you and—,” She pauses, “—and Harper.”
I look at her for a long moment. This is a woman I’ve known for thirty years, who I’ve watched be brilliant and ruthless and deliberately withholding with the people who needed her most, and I’m looking at her right now standing in my office telling me she’s going to try. Worse? I think I believe her.
“May I ask what brought this on?”
“Your girlfriend, for one.”
“Harper.”
“She was in Vine with Asher a few weeks ago. You know the day you had me and Monica officially dismissed from the board. Monica and I had just found out about the board vote and we were—bitchy. And Harper sat there with Asher beside her and she didn’t fight back, didn’t cry, didn’t try to win anything.
She just…” Evelyn’s expression does something I haven’t seen it do in years.
“But she was honest. The fact that this pregnant woman had the nerve to talk rather than, I don’t know, be a bitch to either of us…
Well, you remember me when I was pregnant with Sophia. ”
“I do and honestly you were a practically a born again Catholic compared to the version of you that you became after becoming a mother.”
“Well, she meant every word of it, and I knew she meant it, and I still don’t entirely know what to do with that.”
I don’t say anything for a moment.
Neither Harper nor Asher said a word to me about this.
Not one word. I come home from a day of legal briefings and meetings with the police liaison and Harper’s sitting in my kitchen eating the dinner Asher made and asking me if I’m tired, and apparently earlier that same day she sat across from my ex-wife in a restaurant and said things to her that Evelyn is still thinking about weeks later.
God, I love her.
I really, genuinely love her, and that sentence still hits me somewhere unexpected every time I think it, which is often.
“We can be cordial,” I say. “For Sophia. And because it’s the right thing.”
Evelyn nods. Something loosens slightly in how she’s holding herself. “That’s all I’m asking.”
The door opens behind her.
Maddox leans against the frame with his hands in the pockets of his jeans and takes in the room with the expression he has when he’s already assessed a situation and decided whether he needs to intervene. His eyes go from Evelyn to me and back.
“Everything okay in here?”
“Yes,” I say. “Are we ready?”
He nods, and Harper appears at his shoulder in the doorway, and I watch Evelyn turn to leave and register the moment she sees Harper, and I watch Harper register Evelyn, and there’s a half-second where I genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen.
Evelyn gives Harper a small nod. Soft. Not a performance, just a gesture, the kind that means something without requiring a speech around it.
Harper returns it, exactly the same, and Evelyn walks out.
I come around the desk and reach for Harper and she steps into me without hesitating, and I hold her face in my hands and kiss her the way I’ve wanted to since I sat through thirty minutes of Evelyn being more honest than I’ve heard her be in thirty years.
“I love you,” I tell her, against her mouth.
She smiles up at me and her eyes are warm and she doesn’t make me wait for it.
“I love you too,” she says.
From behind us Maddox says, “Very touching. We’re going to be late.”
Harper laughs, and I take her hand, and we go.