16. Hugo #2
“I made you coq au vin, you know,” she says. “For our anniversary. My mother’s recipe. You never got to taste it.”
“Then make it again,” I say. “At the vineyard. Let me actually be there this time.”
Lucille doesn’t answer, but her face softens, and I count that as a yes. She’s okay. She’s going to be okay. We’re going to be okay.
“We need to stop by Alice’s,” she says. “I need clothes. And my phone charger. And probably some of the chocolate she keeps in her freezer for emergencies.”
“Done.”
The stop at Alice’s is quick. Lucille runs inside while I wait in the car, and she emerges ten minutes later with an overnight bag and a grocery sack that clinks suspiciously.
“Is that wine?” I ask as she gets back in.
“Alice insisted. She said if I’m going to a vineyard, I should bring my own supplies in case yours isn’t up to standard.”
“My family’s vineyard produces award-winning Pinot Noir.”
“Alice doesn’t trust awards. She trusts her own palate.”
I shake my head, but I’m smiling. “Where’s your phone?”
She pulls it out of her bag and holds it up. The screen is a chaos of notifications, news alerts, social media mentions, missed calls from numbers she doesn’t recognize.
“I don’t know if I can handle looking at that right now,” she admits.
“Then don’t.”
She stares at the phone for a long moment. Then, deliberately, she holds down the power button until the screen goes dark.
“There,” she says, dropping it into her bag. “No more noise.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.” She settles back in her seat. “If the world burns down while I’m gone, Alice will send a carrier pigeon.”
“Does Alice have access to carrier pigeons?”
“Alice has access to everything. It’s terrifying.”
I pull onto the freeway heading north, and the city lights begin to fall away behind us. The tension in my shoulders starts to ease after a very long while. Days, maybe. Weeks.
“Thank you,” Lucille says quietly.
“For what?”
“For coming to get me. For knowing I needed to escape before I knew it myself.” She’s looking out the window, but I can see her reflection in the glass. “For not making this about you.”
“It’s not about me. It’s never been about me.”
“That’s new.”
The observation stings, but it’s fair.
“I know,” I say. “I’m working on it.”
She turns to look at me, really look, and her expression softens.
“I think you might actually mean that.”
“I do. I mean all of it.” I reach across the console and take her hand. “I know I’ve given you every reason to doubt me. I know words don’t mean much coming from someone with my track record. But I’m going to keep showing up, Lucille. I’m going to keep proving it until you believe me.”
She threads her fingers through mine.
“I’m starting to,” she says. “Believe you, I mean. It’s terrifying.”
“Why terrifying?”
“Because the last time I believed you, I ended up sitting alone at a table I spent three days preparing, watching you on television with another woman.” Her voice is steady, but I can hear the old wound underneath. “Believing you means risking that again.”
“I know.” I squeeze her hand. “But this time is different.”
“How do I know that?”
“You don’t. Not yet. That’s what the vineyard is for.” I glance at her. “That’s what all of this is for. I’m going to show you, day by day, that I can be trusted. And if it takes a week or a month or a year, I’ll keep showing you until you know it in your bones.”
She’s quiet for a long moment.
Then: “A year is a long time.”
“You’re worth it.”
“Hugo…”
“I mean it. You’re worth a year. You’re worth ten years.
You’re worth every day I have left.” I bring her hand to my lips and kiss her knuckles, the way I did in her studio with the handkerchief.
“I should have told you that from the beginning. I should have made you feel it every single day of our marriage. I didn’t, and I can’t take that back. But I can start now.”
The highway stretches out ahead of us, dark and empty, and the city shrinks to a glow in the rearview mirror.
“Tell me about the vineyard,” Lucille says.
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything. What it looks like, how long your family has owned it, whether there are actually grapes or if it’s just a fancy name for a house in the hills.”
I laugh. “There are actually grapes. About fifty acres of them. The property’s been in my family for three generations. My great-grandfather bought it during Prohibition, believe it or not. He used it as a cover for other business activities.”
“Your great-grandfather was a bootlegger?”
“My great-grandfather was a pragmatist.” I grin. “The wine business came later, after repeal. My grandmother turned it into a legitimate operation.”
“And now?”
“Now it’s mostly a retreat. We have a vineyard manager who handles the actual production. The house is just… a place to get away. I used to spend summers there as a kid, when my parents’ marriage was falling apart and they needed somewhere to send me that wasn’t a therapist’s office.”
“That’s sad.”
“It wasn’t, actually. Those were some of my happiest memories.
” I watch the road ahead, letting the memories surface.
“I learned to play piano there. My grandmother had an old upright in the living room, completely out of tune, and she taught me ‘Heart and Soul’ when I was seven. I thought I was a virtuoso.”
Lucille laughs softly. “I can picture it. Little Hugo, banging away on an out-of-tune piano, convinced he was the next Mozart.”
“More like the next Jerry Lee Lewis. I was very into dramatic key-smashing.”
“Were you always musical?”
“My grandmother says I came out humming.” I glance at her. “What about you? When did you know you wanted to design?”
“When my mother taught me to use her sewing machine. I was nine. She let me make a dress for my Barbie, and it was objectively terrible, the seams were crooked and I forgot to leave room for the arms, but when I finished, I felt like I’d created a whole world.
A thing that existed because I existed.”
“I know that feeling.”
“I think that’s why I loved your music, even before I loved you.” She says it quietly, like a confession. “Because I could hear that feeling in it. That sense of creating what’s real.”
My chest tightens.
“You loved my music?”
“Don’t let it go to your head.” She’s smiling, though. “I downloaded your first album before we even met. I used to listen to it while I worked on my thesis collection. It helped me focus.”
“You never told me that.”
“You never asked.”
The words land gently, without accusation, but I feel them anyway. All the things I never asked. All the parts of her I never learned because I was too busy not-seeing her.
“Tell me more,” I say. “Tell me everything I should have asked about.”
“That’s a lot of ground to cover.”
“We have three hours.”
She shifts in her seat, tucking her legs beneath her, settling in for a long drive.
“Okay,” she says. “But you have to tell me things too. It’s only fair.”
“Deal.”
The miles unspool beneath us, and we talk. About her childhood, her mother’s illness, her father’s emotional distance. About my grandmother, my fear of vulnerability, the semester with Ginny that left me so walled-off I didn’t know how to let anyone in again.
We talk about our wedding, how she felt standing at the altar next to a stranger, how I felt signing papers for a marriage I didn’t think I wanted. We talk about the first year, the awkward dinners and the careful distances and the moments when a spark almost caught before we both pulled back.
We talk about the things we noticed in each other and never mentioned. The things we wanted and never asked for. The things we wish we’d done differently.
By the time we turn off the highway onto the winding road that leads to the vineyard, I know my wife better than I ever have. And she knows me.
It’s terrifying.
It’s also the most hopeful I’ve felt in months.
“There,” I say, pointing through the windshield. “See those lights?”
Through the darkness, a house emerges, all stone and glass and warm amber glow, nestled into a hillside surrounded by neat rows of vines.
“Hugo.” Her voice is soft with wonder. “It’s beautiful.”
“Wait until you see it in daylight. The view of the valley is incredible.”
I pull up to the entrance and park, and for a moment we just sit there, looking at the house, at the darkness beyond it, at the stars that are somehow brighter here than they ever are in the city.
“Thank you,” she says again.
“You already thanked me.”
“I’m thanking you again.” She turns to face me, and in the dim light of the dashboard, her eyes are luminous. “For not giving up on me. On us. Even when I gave you every reason to.”
“You didn’t give me reasons to give up. You gave me reasons to try harder.”
“That’s a very generous interpretation of me filing for divorce.”
“I’m a generous guy.”
She laughs, and the sound fills the car like music.
“Come on,” I say, opening my door. “Let me show you around.”
We walk into the house together, and it’s the first time in two years that I let myself believe that we might actually make it.
That I might not lose her after all.