Chapter 2
AS HUNGOVER AS IT GETS
Ginny Rhodes, aka a woman who survived her sister’s wedding…barely
The answer to my mother putting a disastrous end to my sister’s wedding shouldn’t have been drowning myself in alcohol, but that’s exactly what I did last night after the firefighters left.
I hit the wine.
And the whiskey.
And the tequila.
And now I don’t know what time it is, but I know the sunlight streaking through my curtains is trying to murder me through my eyeballs.
Water.
I need water.
And bread.
And to shave my head, because even my hair hurts.
My fingernails itch beneath my nail polish.
And did I do something to my thigh? It feels bruised.
I slap around on my bedstand for my sunglasses, which I know are in the pile of essentials here somewhere, squeezing my eyes shut until I’ve found them and put them on, the lingering scent of burned polyester still stuck in my nose.
And then I very, very slowly, so slowly that I’m not sure that I’m moving, crawl out of my bed and slide to the floor.
Have to pee.
Have to drink water.
Want coffee.
Want bread.
Want industrial-strength painkillers.
And a new mother.
And maybe a complete alternate history to my life.
I inch across my rug on my hands and knees, crawling around piles of clothes and shoes and empty chip bags and discarded professional magazines and art supplies I’ll never use and water glasses that I need to return to the kitchen, eventually making my way to the jack-and-jill bathroom that I share with Mabel, my bestie here at Makepeace Cellars, the shuttered vineyard and family homestead of Mabel’s great-aunt Pip’s long-departed husband whose ashes she kept threatening to scatter at the wedding yesterday.
No sounds from Mabel’s bedroom, which is good, since I think I forgot to close both doors to our bedrooms.
Not that it would be the first time.
She and I have been through things since I arrived here several years ago.
After a lot of deep breaths, I flush, wash my hands, and tackle the stairs.
One at a time, Ginny. One at a time.
Time has no meaning when your head is full of wet sand and the tide between your ears keeps making your nausea worse, so I have no idea how long it takes me to go downstairs.
I think I’m going down.
I haven’t been this hungover since—well.
Since.
When I was a different person in a different season of my life.
I finally reach the bottom of the stairs in the Victorian mansion that currently houses six of us, all of whom have touched the worst kind of fame in adulthood thanks to social media and the court of public opinion.
Mabel has built a family and a home for us here, all of us first invited as a step to recovering from our viral moments of hell, then invited to stay longer because we fit.
Voices drift down the hallway from the kitchen.
Mabel.
I hear Mabel.
And a guy.
Not Ten.
Not Heath, the resident handyman who’s raising his daughter across the vineyard from our main house and dating Cricket, another friend who came to live here when she went viral several months back.
Not Walter, the elderly neighbor who dates Pip.
Not Mike, who better not be here, since he and Caro are supposed to be off on their honeymoon.
He did enough last night, being the person to finally convince my mother to leave with part of his security team so that she could recover from her ordeal in the ridiculously expensive suite he booked for her at the most exclusive hotel across the pass in Napa.
I love my new brother-in-law.
He knows what he’s gotten himself into—he was friends with Ten long before he dated Caro—and after all of his success in Hollywood, he has the means to solve nearly any problem.
I wander toward the voices because they’re in the same direction as the coffee, when they start making sense.
“Why would we not capitalize on Declan saving the entire barn after a…sparkler…mishap?” a voice I don’t recognize says.
If I thought I wanted to throw up before, I want to even more now.
“Documentaries aren’t reality shows,” Mabel says. “It’s a firm no. The agreement is for you to film the restarting of winery operations, not to make more drama than will undoubtedly come naturally as we get rolling.”
My sludgy brain registers that Mabel must be talking to the producer of Declan’s documentary series about us.
They approached Mabel after the producer got an invitation to Caro’s wedding and heard that we were planning to rebrand and reopen.
I could’ve said no.
Could’ve refused on behalf of all of us, and none of my friends here would’ve blinked. We all get veto power over anything that would make us uncomfortable in our home.
But Mabel and Pip saved my life by inviting me here after I tried to stop my ex’s wedding. They’ve helped me not only find where I belong but learn to embrace who I am and who I want to be.
And the winery’s in financial trouble, so we’re coming out of post-viral hiding to reopen things around here.
To save our home.
If we could keep living here privately and quietly forever, we would, but we need money to pay off loans that Pip’s husband took out before he died to build the event space where we hosted Caro’s wedding yesterday.
“We could pay more,” the woman says.
“And I could find a different documentary crew to record what’s happening here,” Mabel replies.
“If Freida’s willing—”
“You talked to Freida? Freida Rhodes?” Mabel’s voice has gone cold as ice.
Defensive.
Protective.
She knows about my mother’s favoritism and the ways Mom’s reality show destroyed my childhood and how dear ol’ mom mismanaged what should’ve been my paychecks from the show.
I suck in a deep breath and stumble into the kitchen.
Thanks to my hangover, the chairs around the table fuzz at the edges and shift up and down like they’re on an ancient black-and-white TV having reception troubles instead of actually here in person.
The black-and-white tiles on the floor resemble those puzzles I did as a kid when I’d have to cross my eyes to see the image beneath, and the coffee maker on the counter beneath the antique cabinets is laughing at me.
I breathe and hold myself steady, gripping the wooden doorframe until the room quits moving.
“Freida’s a star,” the producer’s saying. She has short-cropped white hair and is wearing a business blazer over jeans. She’s in a kitchen chair across from Mabel. What’s her name again? Stevie? Georgie? Fanny? “The double star power of Declan and Freida together—”
“Absolutely not,” comes from a deep voice to my left.
A deep voice belonging to a dark-haired man dressed in jeans and a blue button-down rolled up his forearms, who’s leaning against the counter beside the fridge, wearing the normal scowl that he always switched to anytime he’d spot me.
The man hated me.
I still don’t know what I did to him, but the entire time I dated my ex, he hated me.
I used to laugh—bitterly—whenever I’d hear someone say it was surprising he was so good as an enforcer on the ice, given how nice he was off it.
The worst part of how much he hated me was that he was nice.
To everyone else.
Hence why my plans while he’s here are to avoid him entirely.
But the minute my mother’s brought into discussions of this documentary—that’s when I have to be involved too.
Hungover or not.
“Hang on, let’s not be hasty in saying no,” the producer says. The hell is her name? Charlie? Frankie? Viper?
Mabel crosses her arms. “Freida Rhodes was here as a wedding guest. She has no place in the winery operations, so it makes no sense for her to be involved in the documentary.”
“We can find a role for her.”
“I said no,” Declan says. “You bring Freida in, I’m out.”
“You have a contract,” the producer says without looking at him.
“A contract for me to do a documentary. Not a reality show.”
“Conflict sells.”
Mabel’s foot taps under the table. “We’re three women with limited experience in the wine industry letting a retired hockey player help us. We’ll have plenty of conflict already.”
“You’re rebranding,” the producer says. Eddie. That’s her name, Eddie. “She’s a marketing genius. She could—”
“You’ve already been told no multiple times,” I say. “Drop it.”
Mabel glances sharply my way, her head moving so fast that it makes the slush of my brains shift as if I moved my head that quickly.
She’s my age, but she has the air of a fifty-year-old woman who’s run out of fucks.
She’s in her usual all-black outfit and cat’s-eye glasses.
Her dark hair is tied up in a ponytail, and she’s silently asking me all of the normal questions a best friend would ask.
You okay?
How much of that did you hear?
Do you need coffee and bread?
“Ginny Rhodes,” Eddie says softly. “I didn’t realize you were still here.”
Right.
Right.
They don’t know I live here.
They’re not supposed to know.
The plan was for me to disappear during filming. Take my work laptop to some tropical but affordable location, and be gone while Declan and film crews invade my sanctuary.
I would’ve declined to be on camera no matter what, but when I heard it was Declan who’d be the documentarian?
That’s when I decided I needed to leave.
I didn’t expect him to be at the wedding yesterday. I’d been told the producer was coming solo and would be staying to work out logistics. But she wasn’t supposed to be here today.
Was she?
No.
Definitely not.
But we’ve already harvested the pinot noir fields.
Even my snail’s-pace brain can process that they need to start filming imminently.
Dammit.
I have to get out of here faster.
“I’m not here,” I say.
Declan’s brows furrow as his gaze sweeps over me. “You okay?”
I snort, which makes something stabby in the very center of my brain try to poke through my eyeballs. “As if you care.”
One of his eyes briefly pinches, and then he goes as straight-faced as Mabel usually is.
Then the bastard takes a sip of what I assume is coffee.
Right out of my mug.
My mug.
My favorite mug.
The one I made for myself when I got here.
“We could give you a spot in the documentary too if you’re willing to stick around,” Eddie says to me. “Would that work for you, Declan?”