Chapter 10
GUARDIANS OF THE WINERY
Ginny
The taste of vulnerability and regrets sits heavy on my tongue as I hide in my bedroom, texting with my siblings, making sure Caro’s still enjoying her honeymoon and that Ten’s not planning to do anything stupid to take the attention off of me.
Samantha knocked a few minutes ago and insisted I take a plate of lunch from her, and now Mabel’s strolling across the threshold, breaking the do not enter without knocking rule to join me in the disaster that is my bedroom, wading around all of my junk to climb onto my unmade bed with me.
“We’ve got you,” she tells me as she grabs me in a firm hug. “No matter what anyone does or says, we’ve got you.”
I lean into her, feeling the weight of the world lessen with her next to me now.
There’s nothing like a best friend to solve problems, even if she can’t solve all of them.
“My mother was the leak, wasn’t she?” I whisper.
Caro and Ten both think she was.
I wanted to believe she wasn’t—I wanted to blame Declan—but I think it was her.
As Caro said, she craves attention, and she’s been out of the spotlight for too long.
“I don’t know who it was,” Mabel says. “We might never know definitively.”
“She can’t get to Caro because she’s intimidated by Mike. And Ten—he stands up to her. I’m the weak link with a viral moment that she can capitalize on.”
Mabel strokes my hair. “Not so long as I have breath in my body, she can’t.”
This is helping.
It’s helping far more than Declan chasing after me and insisting he wasn’t the leak.
I breathe in the comforting scent of Mabel’s favorite apricot body wash and let myself lean on her more while I shiver harder.
“I can’t believe she said that to Cricket,” I say.
“Of all of us, Cricket has the healthiest attitude about how she went viral. She’ll be okay.”
Maybe so, but I still owe her for what my mother said.
Dish duty for a year.
Washing all of her laundry forever.
Watching Lavender, Heath’s daughter, as often as they want so that they can have private time.
Their cat too.
“Scale of one to when you got here, how are you?” Mabel asks.
No one arrives at Makepeace in good shape.
I arrived with two broken teeth, double black eyes, swollen lips, and all of the shame and guilt and regret to ever exist in the entire universe sitting on my chest like a garbage truck.
“At least I can eat and my face doesn’t hurt,” I whisper.
She hugs me again. “We’ll get her out of here.”
I squeeze her back. “I love you.”
“Love you too. And we will get you through this.”
She doesn’t tell me it’s not that bad.
She doesn’t tell me I’ve been through worse.
She doesn’t tell me I should be grateful that I’m already here.
She doesn’t tell me to clean my room.
Just we’ve got you and you’re not facing this alone.
And that—that’s exactly what I need.
She’s right. I’ll get through this. My friends and I—we have been through worse.
But never while my ex’s best friend watched.
And freaking took the fall for what my mother most likely did.
His I didn’t do it—I believe him.
And I hate that I believe him, because it makes him look so perfect, so heroic, again, when he was such an ass to me for all of those years.
But I’m the sucker who believes him.
And the sponge for any positive-attention-soaking-up that I mattered enough that he cared to tell me he didn’t do it.
To let me goad him into popping off insults that he clearly didn’t mean.
But that—that’s not my most immediate problem.
I pull out of Mabel’s hug and press my palms into my eye sockets. “We can take charge of the attention and start talking about reopening the winery. Use the press to our advantage.”
“No.”
“Mabel—”
“We’ll get the attention back.”
“How? We just had a secret celebrity wedding here. We can’t pull that off again. Not with the same degree of surprise. And we don’t have any other events booked yet, do we?”
“We will.”
“I know you can work miracles, but you can’t pull this kind of publicity out of thin air.”
“Manifestation has kept us going this long. Don’t discount it.”
I huff. “Can you manifest me a new mother and a different documentary host and the world losing interest in me?”
She grabs me and squeezes me in a hug again.
I close my eyes, mentally take myself back to the pottery wheel, and I start to breathe a little easier.
We will get through this.
Good things will happen.
But my brain is still spinning. “We need to decide our new branding—”
“We have time. We don’t have to do it today.”
“We can open more or less immediately as an adult toy store, like Cricket suggested we do when we start selling wine, and—”
“Not until the wall and door are built. It’s one thing to have a winery that sells adult products, and it’s something else to become known as an adult toy store that tries to sell wine later.”
“What if we license the right to sell other wines here while we wait for ours?”
“It takes time, Gin. We still need to get our licenses in order.”
She’s right.
Of course she’s right.
Desperation and fear are speaking for me, not logic and strategy.
I suck in a heavy breath that feels more like I’m inhaling all of the sand in the desert than it feels like real air.
“And we have to let Declan and the crew record us having this discussion. It’ll be good for ratings for the world to see what we did when—when we got unwanted attention before we were ready. ”
She doesn’t answer.
“You and Dori and Cricket and Declan. I’ll—I’ll get my head on right for—for a real meeting with all of us except Declan before you—before you let him in for the filmed meeting.”
If Mabel were a police detective, her suspects would crack every time. She has this way of looking at you like she’s a human lie detector. “You don’t want to kick him out?”
“Do you think he did it?” I reply.
She shakes her head without hesitation. “Do you?”
I wince. “I want to believe it was him, but I—I don’t.”
“I can look into the leak.”
“It wasn’t him.” Another shiver makes my entire body quake. “If he and Alex are still friends—”
“They seem to be.”
“—then I doubt he’d do anything to remind Alex of what—what I did.”
For Alex’s sake.
Not for mine.
Mabel studies me. “If we’re going to pull the plug on this production, now’s the time to do it. Last chance.”
I want to pull the plug.
I want so badly to tell her to kick them all out.
But it’s for selfish reasons, and I’m done doing things for selfish reasons.
“I should be on camera,” I force out. “I should—I should take advantage of the attention and I should—”
“No.”
“But—”
“No. That’s final.” She grabs the plate that’s balancing precariously on my pile of essentials on my nightstand. “And you need to eat.”
I eye the chicken salad, and I find a small smile. “Who let the chickens out?”
“Probably Lav or Pip. They’re both getting ice cream after dinner.”
“It was funny to watch them attack her.”
“It was hilarious.” She glances at her phone. “Heath and Cricket have your mother at their house for Benadryl.”
I blow out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “Does my mom know about the documentary?”
“She was apparently told that Declan knew how to fix tractors and he was having the instructions filmed in case we forget when it breaks again.”
“Thank the stars.”
“We’ve got this, Ginny. Promise. We’ve got you.
We’ve got the winery. And we’re going to do what we always do, and we’ll make everything work.
” She hands me the plate with Samantha’s chicken salad and carrot sticks and a homemade dinner roll.
“Eat. And then we’ll have a family meeting without the crew—”
“And Cricket and Heath?”
My mother could keep them occupied for hours if she wants to make a fuss about the chickens attacking her.
Mabel forks up a bite of chicken salad and holds it to my mouth. “Eat. If they make it to the meeting, they make it, and if they don’t, they’ll be okay. They know convincing Freida to leave is important.”
She’s right about that too.
While Heath’s always been overprotective of us, I’ve never met anyone more willing to roll with practically anything than Cricket is.
Once she got through the immediate aftermath of her own viral moment and her nervous system reregulated, she settled in here as if she’d always been here. She’s the first to volunteer for everything and she has boundless energy and an unstoppable positive attitude.
I adore her.
And I’m so glad she and Heath have each other.
I chew the bite Mabel makes me take, then pick up a carrot stick voluntarily myself and crunch into it while I let my own nervous system attempt to regulate.
Today isn’t the worst day of my life.
Pretty far from it, in fact.
But it’s not an easy day either.
“We’re going to propose that Declan and Shade use Heath’s basement and the mother-in-law cottage, aren’t we?” I say.
The townsfolk of Foxwood, the closest town here in Sonoma Valley, won’t make a fuss if they find out we’re recording a documentary here.
But we have a healthy tourist business, and harvest has actively started in the area, which means festivals and more tourists.
Tourists that we’ll want to come to the tasting room a year from now, but today—today, we still want our privacy.
I still want my privacy.
“Only if we’re all in complete agreement that we want them on the property that much.”
I stare at my next carrot stick. “Having them here is better than having them in town.”
“We won’t do it unless everyone agrees,” she repeats.
I suck in a big breath. “Okay then. Let’s talk to the family about it. I’m ready.”
“Are you?”
I snort softly. “No. But I need to be.”
About everything.
I hope Cricket can convince my mother to leave.
I hope Declan and his crew have some vacation rental that’s super secluded but nearby that they’re using so that they don’t have to stay on the property.
And I hope that the internet magically forgets I exist.
None of which are likely.
Can’t solve reality by hiding from it, so it’s time to face it.