Chapter 18
Charlie
Sunny already has the restaurant pulled up on her phone by the time I finish buttoning my shirt. I told her she could pick, and from the look on her face while she scrolls, she's been planning this particular choice for longer than the last twenty minutes.
"Harvest and Ember," she announces, showing me the screen. "I walked past it every Saturday on my way to the dress shop. It was way out of my price range."
"A dress shop?"
"Don't look so surprised. I had student loans and rent and exactly four hundred dollars a month left over after both. I worked at the shop in my downtime." She tucks her phone into her small bag.
I finish the buttons and reach for my jacket. "I'm just picturing you folding silk skirts."
"I was excellent at it." She tilts her chin. "I was also fantastic at upselling shoes and scarves. It's not that different from talking customers into a case instead of a bottle."
"You're good at persuading people to spend money."
She smirks at me. "That’s a skill, Hayden."
"No argument from me, Sunshine." I hold the door open, waving her through, and follow her out.
The walk to Harvest and Ember takes ten minutes along streets that wind between boutiques and galleries already lit against the darkening sky.
Sonoma in the evening is beautiful, softer than Austin, older than Fredericksburg, and it carries the faint smell of damp earth and crushed grapes.
I watch Sunny's face as we walk, the way her expression shifts from the sweet openness she wore in the hotel room back into something more composed.
She squeezes my hand, and I press back.
Harvest and Ember sits in a converted farmhouse on the edge of the plaza, stone-faced and low-lit, with a wisteria-covered trellis arching over the entrance and a hand-lettered chalkboard menu in the window.
Inside, the space is exactly what the name promises—rough-hewn timber, candlelight on iron fixtures, long communal tables alongside intimate corner booths.
The air smells of wood smoke and roasting herbs, and every surface looks deliberately imperfect.
"I've wanted to come here for so long," she comments wistfully. "I used to tell my roommate that one day I’d be able to afford a meal here every day of the week. And Bethany would tell me that one day she'd be rich enough to pay for both of us."
The hostess seats us in a corner booth with enough candles between us that I can watch every shift in Sunny's expression. She takes the wine list with both hands and digs into it, her brow furrowed and her lower lip caught between her teeth.
"Tell me about the internship," I say while she works.
She doesn't glance up, but one side of her mouth curves. "Where should I start?"
"Wherever you want."
She sets the list down and folds her hands on top of it.
"I was twenty-one when I was accepted at Beaumont Crest. Evan picked me out of forty applications because I'd sent him a three-page analysis of his latest chardonnay vintage along with my resume.
He told me later he almost didn't read it because it was so presumptuous.
" She pauses. "He offered me the position the same afternoon. "
I chuckle. "Presumptuous and right."
"That was Evan's exact phrase, actually.
" The warmth in her smile is unmistakable.
"The first week, I was convinced he hated me.
He made me re-barrel three tanks because my technique was sloppy—his words, not mine—and then made me write up a full explanation of every decision I'd made and where I'd gone wrong.
" She shakes her head. "I cried myself to sleep that night, decided he was a tyrant, and showed up the next morning an hour early with corrected notes. "
"He didn’t scare you off, though."
"No. He had this way of looking at you over the rim of his glasses when you'd done something well and then going straight back to whatever he was doing. The first time I got that look, I drove home grinning so hard my face hurt."
I smile as the image of a younger Sunny hits me. Early in her career, chasing the approval from a mentor who doled it out in glances. I can picture her driving away with that grin, and I want to know more.
"Where did you live?"
"About two miles outside of town. Bethany and I found a place that was generously described by the landlord as a cottage and was in practice a converted storage unit with a hot plate and one window that faced a fence.
" She glances at the candle between us. "We loved it, actually.
We'd sit on the little concrete step out front after our shifts and eat whatever we'd scraped together and argue about wine and terrible movies. "
Sunny says it like it was nothing, but the warmth in her voice tells me it was everything. These are the parts of her that nobody at the winery gets to see.
"Was Bethany in the same program as you?"
"Yeah. She was my best friend." Past tense, and she says it without drama but with the particular flatness that means the ending was sharp enough that time hasn't softened the edges.
"We came to Sonoma together. She got a harvest internship at a different property.
We were both trying to break into the industry at the same time, which meant we were both broke, terrified, and absolutely sure we were going to make it. "
She stops, and the silence that follows is full enough that I wait it out.
"When I ended things with Derek, it wasn't just that he'd been unfaithful." She meets my eyes, her expression matter-of-fact. "He'd been sleeping with Bethany. I walked in on them at a graduation party and that was the end of it."
"I packed my things that night and left for Stone Creek." She shrugs. "I've always figured that was the universe's messy way of pushing me onto my path."
She picks up the wine list again, her way of marking the subject closed, and I let it go.
When the sommelier appears, she asks about the wine list, keeping the language at a register the man clearly appreciates. The look he gives her when she finishes is the one professionals give when they recognize another's fluency. He departs with a satisfied nod, and Sunny turns back to me.
The candlelight turns her eyes into a mesmerizing shade of quicksilver blue, and I can't look away. "Evan used to say I was the only intern he'd ever had who set a timer on conversations so I could get back to the barrels."
I huff. "Is that what you had planned for me when I started working to the winery?"
She snickers. "I was going to. But you took everything so seriously that I didn't have the heart."
"So, your grand plan was to time me out of your production room like a misbehaving child."
"It was a perfectly reasonable quality control measure."
"You're diabolical," I tease.
"I prefer thorough." Her eyes give her away, bright with mischief.
The food and wine arrive in waves, each course plated with care. We eat without rushing, and Sunny narrates more stories. Evan Reynolds, it turns out, was exactly the kind of hard-ass mentor who makes someone great.
"You became what he’d hoped," I tell her.
"He said something like that today." Her voice goes soft. "It matters more than I can explain."
"You don't have to say it. It's written all over your face."
She absorbs this without deflecting and tops off my glass without being asked.
By the time I settle the check and we step out into the Sonoma night, there’s a quiet, easy contentment in the air.
The plaza is alive with the Saturday crowd, music filtering from somewhere down the block, couples moving in and out of the galleries and wine bars with the ease of people who have nowhere to be.
"I want to show you the dress shop," Sunny announces, tugging me by the hand across the plaza.
She recounts stories as we walk, and I drink it all in.
The bakery on the corner that sold her breakfast most mornings because it was three dollars cheaper than the café.
The alley shortcut she discovered in her second week that cut the drive into town when she was running late.
The bookshop that was always open slightly later than advertised because the owner couldn't bear to lock up while anyone was still reading.
We stop in front of a boutique with a hand-painted sign above the door and a few items arranged in the window display.
"Right here," Sunny says, peering in. "I folded things on that table in the back right corner."
"And upsold scarves and shoes," I tease.
"More than I could count," she answers with unmistakable pride. "The owner was a woman named Donna who wore her hair in a braid down to her waist and could talk anyone into anything. She taught me more about reading people than I ever expected to learn folding clothes."
Sunny glances at the boutique one last time. "I always knew California was temporary. Evan used to say that every winemaker belongs to a piece of land and spends their career either finding it or refusing to look." She glances at me, nothing in her expression but the truth. "I found mine."
We walk another half-block before she slows and turns to face me. "Charlie, do you want to stay tomorrow? Or go home?"
"What do you want to do?"
"I want to go home. I've missed the winery, and my little house, and I want to sleep in my own bed, and I want to see the ducks and Pearl and—" She cuts herself off, and the flush that crosses her face is sheepish. "And I want to be where you are."
I press a soft kiss to her lips. "We’ll fly home in the morning."
"Good." She doesn't move from where she's tucked herself against my side. "I love you, Hayden. I know I said it before. But I'm saying it again so you know it wasn't just the endorphins."
"I never doubted it for a second, Sunshine."
"Yes, you did."
I chuckle. "I wondered if I was hallucinating for maybe three seconds."
She laughs against my shoulder, and I hold her like I just got lucky.
A shout cuts across the plaza, breaking the peace.