Chapter 5
FIVE
The Ridge House
Bennett McCrae
Bennett still remembered the first morning he’d seen Blackwood Estate through the fog.
He’d been in Sylva less than a week then, alone in the small cabin tucked onto the ten wooded acres he’d bought along the back ridge. He hadn’t known his property line brushed Blackwood’s.
Hadn’t cared.
Nothing had mattered much back then.
Not after Napa. Not after Claire.
He’d spent months moving through the world like a man hauling a load he couldn’t ever set down. People mistook grief for sadness, but sadness still left room for wanting things; grief simply hollowed you out.
Claire’s fight with breast cancer had been a slow theft.
He had watched the vibrant, brilliant woman he’d built a life with fade cell by cell, until the wine programs they’d designed together in Napa felt less like an achievement and more like a graveyard.
When she died, the sun-drenched valleys of California stopped feeling warm.
They felt empty.
So he ran.
And somehow landed beside another vineyard.
He remembered standing on the back porch of that cabin that first morning, a cup of coffee gone cold in his hand while the fog lifted slowly off the mountain. Rows of dormant vines rolled down the hillside beneath the gray dawn.
A winery. Of all damn things.
At first, he’d almost laughed. The universe had a twisted sense of humor.
Only Blackwood wasn’t Napa. It wasn’t polished or expensive or built for tourists with private drivers and curated tasting flights. Blackwood back then had been struggling—smaller production, aging equipment, uneven distribution. Too much pride and not enough money.
But the land… Jesus, the land was extraordinary. Even neglected, his eyes—honed by fifteen years in high-end viticulture—had seen it immediately. The elevation. The mineral content. The slope. The cooler mountain nights. The soil alone should’ve made the place famous.
And somehow Mabel Blackwood had known exactly what he was seeing the first time he wandered too close to the vineyard rows.
“You’ve been standing out here staring at my vines for three mornings now,” she’d called from the porch, amusement tucked into her voice. “You planning to trespass or help?”
It had been the first real conversation he’d had with anyone in weeks. Maybe months. He remembered trying not to like her.
Didn’t work.
Mabel had recognized grief because she carried her own. She didn’t offer pity; she offered friction. She dragged him back into the world relentlessly—sometimes with questions, sometimes with wine, sometimes by pretending not to know how to do things he was fully aware she already knew how to do.
She’d stand in the doorway of the production room with paperwork in one hand and a bottle in the other. “Well?” she’d say. “You gonna stand there brooding or tell me why this merlot tastes like regret?”
Another time she’d shown up at his cabin with a busted inventory sheet she absolutely could’ve fixed herself. “I’m old,” she’d announced. “You’re unemployed and miserable. Seems fair.”
Against his will, he’d laughed. The sound had shocked both of them.
After that, she stopped giving him room to disappear. Little by little, Blackwood pulled him back into motion—harvest schedules, soil testing, replanting sections, distribution plans, late nights in the barrel room arguing over blends while jazz drifted low from Mabel’s ancient radio.
Purpose returned quietly.
And somewhere along the way, breathing stopped feeling quite so hard.
Years later, the house sitting above the vineyard still looked a little out of place against the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Clean white stucco. Black-framed windows. Long horizontal lines. Warm cedar accents. Wide glass facing the valley.
California modern dropped into Appalachia.
Locals had definitely talked when he built it.
Probably still did. Didn’t matter. He’d designed every inch himself after selling the cabin, carving out a space that felt like him—clean, deliberate, spare.
Mabel had stood in the raw doorway during construction, hands on her hips, and declared it “pretentious as hell and entirely perfect for him.” Then she’d demanded the biggest window seat overlook her vines.
Back then, dense woods had separated his land from Blackwood Estate. In summer, you could barely glimpse the old Victorian through the trees. Now the vineyard stretched between them in clean, rolling rows.
From his back porch, Bennett could see almost the entire operation: the tasting barn lights that would glow gold at dusk, the production building, the lower vines curling down the hillside, and farther off—the old Blackwood house itself standing watch beneath the mountains.
The Blue Ridge Mountains had rooted themselves inside him somewhere along the way. He’d stopped pretending years ago that he would ever leave.
And now Mabel was gone.
The funeral was in a few hours. The thought of that sanctuary—the lilies, the casket, the soft talk of “peaceful passing”—made his stomach knot. He’d said goodbye to one life in a church already.
He wasn’t sure he had it in him to sit through another.
He could still see that morning if he let himself.
Moose’s frantic barking rattling the old mudroom door. The ruined hinge hanging crooked where the dog had finally broken through. Mabel in her bed upstairs, too still, skin already cooling beneath his fingers.
He’d poured bourbon into a coffee mug after the ambulance left and hadn’t wanted to stop since.
God, get me through this one.
Bennett stood now at the kitchen windows, one hand braced against the dark stone counter while rain streaked the glass beyond him.
He was already in his funeral suit, the jacket discarded, the top buttons of his white shirt undone, his dark tie hanging loose around his neck.
The black suit fit him perfectly, its crisp lines at odds with the exhaustion in his eyes.
He looked dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with malice—the heavy gravity of a man who didn’t care who was looking.
The vineyard blurred beneath the storm.
Mabel was gone. The woman who’d dragged him back toward life with wine and sheer stubbornness. The woman who’d seen straight through his grief and refused to let him disappear into it.
He would always love her for that.
Always miss her for it.
And somehow the entire valley felt quieter without her in it.
Even with Aubrey there.
Bennett tightened his grip on the counter, his knuckles whitening as his mind betrayed him, sliding backward in time.
Not to Napa. Not to the funeral pews.
To the patio at Drift Bar.
He hadn’t expected to feel what he felt. Not even close.
When he’d backed Aubrey Langford against the dark wood of that patio, it had started as pure aggravation.
She had arrived in town looking like an untouchable corporate blueprint, entirely convinced she could manage, litigate, and control a world she didn’t understand.
She’d looked at him like she already had him filed and sorted, but up close, beneath the sharp words and the defensive posture, there had been heat.
So he’d kissed her.
Because she’d challenged him. Because he had wanted to shatter that perfect, rigid composure and see what was hiding underneath.
He remembered the exact second her sharp defenses crumbled. The way her breath caught in a soft, jagged gasp against his mouth before she went entirely weak in his arms. He’d intended to teach her a lesson, but the moment his mouth claimed hers, the lesson had been his.
He’d walked away from that kiss trying to feel smug, but his own blood had been roaring in his ears. Underneath the petty satisfaction of proving a point, something else had dug its claws in.
He hadn’t dated the first four years after Claire died. He couldn’t. The thought of it felt like a betrayal, a mechanical exercise he had no stomach for.
Mabel and the book club ladies had treated his isolation like a town emergency. They’d pushed widows, cousins, teachers, realtors, and one terrifying dental hygienist at him for years. He’d sat through a few dinners out of guilt.
Nothing ever happened after dessert.
No spark. No shift in gravity. No sense that the floor might quietly vanish beneath his boots.
He’d assumed that part of him had died in a hospital room in California, alongside his wife.
He’d been fine with that. He’d accepted the quiet.
Until Aubrey.
Bennett let out a slow breath, his forehead dropping against the cool window glass. He could still feel the ghost of her hands against his chest, the fierce lift of her chin right before he’d leaned in.
She was a headache wrapped in a tailored suit, a Philadelphia interloper who didn’t belong in his valley, let alone in Mabel’s house.
He didn’t want to think about her. He didn’t want to think about the manila envelope waiting on his coffee table—the one she had handed him, the one he’d taken to put some distance between them.
The valley was quieter now that Mabel was gone, but the air was humming with something new.
Somewhere down in that valley, a dog that wasn’t his lay guarding a stranger in a house that no longer belonged to either of them.
Bennett closed his eyes briefly.
Then he straightened, reached for his suit jacket, and prepared to bury another person he loved.