Chapter 13
FINN
By Thursday, the tango video has more than twelve thousand views.
Evan has checked twice in the last hour while Colton and I work in the north vineyard, and each time the view tally climbs he acts like it's a personal accomplishment.
He's sitting on the quad runner with his cast propped on the handlebars, holding his phone in one hand, grinning like each new view is paying him royalties.
"Twelve thousand, two hundred and fifteen!
" He flashes the phone in my direction. "You're trending locally.
And the comments are outstanding. Here's my favorite so far: 'Check his face during the dip.
Rich City Dude is NOT okay.'" He scrolls, delighted.
"They're really savaging your form, bro. Justified."
I roll my eyes. "I'm glad my misery can amuse you, Evan."
He chuckles while I consider tying his bum leg to one of the grape vines I'm working on.
"Oh, there's a whole thread debating whether the dip was choreographed."
"It wasn't."
"Obviously it wasn't. You can't choreograph panic." He grins. "Though I have to say, for a man who has jumped off most of the major cliffs in the Southern Hemisphere, one AP English teacher really put you through it."
I should have a sharp comeback for this. Normally I'd have several. But the bit stalls, because the image in my head isn't Darcy putting me through it. It's Darcy in a parking lot with wet eyes and her arms around herself, saying I didn't know. That one doesn't come with a capper.
"She was thorough," I say, and clip the supply pouch shut.
Thorough. That's what I went with. The real word is somewhere in the neighborhood of devastating, but I am not handing Evan that ammunition.
"Thorough." Evan looks at Colton, who is racking a pruning saw and minding his own business in a way that is never actually minding his own business. "He called the woman who made him tango, scrub kennels, and express a bulldog's anal glands 'thorough.' Note the tone, Col."
I glare at him. "There's no tone."
"There's absolutely a tone. There's a whole fucking symphony. You've been out here all week doing vineyard work you don't know how to do—"
"I know how to do vineyard work."
"You retensioned wire that was already tensioned, Finn. You restaked posts that Colton staked in March. Yesterday you asked me what varietal we're growing on the east block, and the answer is the same one we've been growing since Dad planted it. You are not out here because you love agriculture."
I almost have a line. Something about how at least I'm being productive, unlike the man watching TikTok from a quad runner with a broken leg. The setup is there, the angle is there, and then it's not. The joke dies somewhere between my head and my mouth, same as it's been dying all week.
Evan has been watching this act his whole life. He knows when I'm phoning it in, and right now I'm not even dialing.
"Aren’t you supposed to be back in Manhattan by now?
" Evan says, still scrolling. "Col and I figured we’d be watching your taillights retreat up the drive on Tuesday, tops.
It's Thursday. You're still here. You haven't mentioned Colorado once.
And you've retensioned every trellis wire on the south block. "
"They needed it."
"Colton. Did they need it?"
"They did not," Colton says, hanging the saw on its hook.
Evan's grin shifts from playful to forensic. "So what's keeping the great Finn Bardot in Mattichogue when he could be wingsuiting a tax write-off somewhere?"
I could answer that. I've got a whole roster of answers. Evan's leg, the vineyard, the release party. Every one of them is true and none of them is the reason.
The temptation to call or text her is one I’ve been battling since Sunday night.
But what would I say? I voice-memoed several messages in the middle of the night earlier this week.
Couldn't sleep, couldn't stop composing, couldn't figure out how to make honest sound different from desperate.
I killed every draft before I was stupid enough to send them.
Each version was either a punchline or a confession, and I don't have the margin to guess wrong about which one she'd be willing to hear.
So the math is simple. She's a teacher. She saw a struggling reader and she was kind, because that's what teachers do.
Then they go home. The hand on my arm was compassion, not interest. I'm reading it as something else because I want it to be something else, and wanting has never once changed the math.
I've known Darcy Gable since we were kids. Half my life. She's the one name that never quite went away, the face that showed up uninvited on the drive back to Mattichogue last week.
I told a poker table full of men I'd die for that I've never met a woman I couldn't leave by Tuesday. Meant it. That’s still me, but now there’s a space inside me where Darcy has slipped between those defenses.
She put her hand on my arm and the whole system quit.
She looked at the thing I've hidden from every investor, every date, every friend at that table.
She saw it. She didn't flinch. She moved closer.
And I almost stayed. I almost turned my hand over and caught hers and said something true with no exit built into it.
Instead I panicked, said I had a phone call and drove away, because leaving is the only play I've ever run that works every time.
"Earth to Finn." Evan waves his phone. "You just went somewhere for about ten seconds. Where'd you go?"
"Nowhere."
"Does Nowhere have big hazel eyes and headful of thick brown hair?"
"Shut up, Evan."
"That's a yes." He says it to Colton, satisfied, like he's just closed a case. "Note for the record: the defendant has no comeback. The defendant always has a comeback. The prosecution rests."
Colton catches my eye. Same look he had Sunday night when I walked in late and ate my plate of Mom’s food without talking. He glances at my phone on the fence post, then back at me, and doesn't say a word.
"Here's the plan," Evan says, pocketing his phone. "We're going to the pub tonight."
I shake my head. "Nah, I'm good."
"You’re going. Not just for your sake, but for the rest of us. Even Mom said, and I quote, 'Please get your brother out of my vineyard before I have to tie him up and drag him out of it behind the tour wagon.'"
"I'm having a quiet night in tonight." Words I literally have never uttered in my life.
Evan stares at me like I’ve grown three heads. "You've had enough quiet nights this week. Quiet nights are over. We're going tonight. Colton's driving. You're sitting in a room with other human beings and you're going to act like a person whose favorite hobby isn't staring at fence posts."
"I don't stare at fence posts."
"You stare at your phone on a fence post. That's worse." He turns to Colton. "Back me up."
"You have been staring at it most of the day," Colton says, not looking up from the blade.
"Mutiny." I look between them. "This is a coordinated mutiny."
"It's an intervention," Evan says. "A loving one. You're welcome."
I look at Colton. Colton has found something deeply compelling about a pruning blade.
"Fine. One beer," I say.
"One beer." Evan fires up the quad. "Colton drives the truck. You shower. And wear the blue shirt."
"Why does it matter what I wear to the pub?"
Evan grins, wide and badly concealed. "It doesn't. I just think you should look human for once this week." He swings the quad around one-handed, cast bouncing on the running board. "See you at the house."
The quad rattles off down the row. Colton tosses his tools into the truck bed and climbs behind the wheel. I grab my phone off the fence post and get in beside him.
We bump along the access road in silence. Colton drives the way he does everything—steady, unhurried, not asking questions he already knows the answers to. At the house he parks and kills the engine, and we sit there for a second in the quiet.
"If someone means something to you, you should let them know, Finn," he says. Eyes on the windshield. Then he gets out and goes inside.
I sit in the cab alone with my phone in hand, knowing that Darcy is somewhere in this town right now. Grading papers, probably. Living her life, the one that ran just fine before I showed up after a decade and reminded her why she stopped liking me in the first place.
What she's definitely not doing is waiting around for a call or message from me.
I know that the way I know the wind direction when I'm hanging from a cliff's edge with nothing but my fingers and a carabiner holding me in place.
I tap the screen and start composing a text to her anyway. But what the hell should I say? I'm sorry. I was an asshole. Still am, at least as far as she's concerned.
"Shit." I stare at the blinking cursor for a minute before closing the text window.
Then I go inside. I shower. I put on the blue shirt like Evan told me to do, and I get ready for a night in town that I'm not feeling at all.