Chapter 1: Four Months Later, Four Months Ago

The crush pad smelled like crushed blackberries and diesel, and Wren Halloway had flecks of Syrah skin drying on her forearms like a bruise that hadn't decided what color to be yet. "You're doing it wrong," she said, not looking up from the sorting table. "I'm doing it exactly the way your foreman showed me on Tuesday." Théo Marchetti didn't look up either. He had a rhythm going, picking stems and raisins and the occasional determined spider out of the tumbling fruit, fast enough that she'd stopped double-checking behind him two weeks ago, not that she'd admit that out loud. "You just don't like watching someone else be right." "I like watching someone else be right the way I like watching paint dry." "Riveting." "Fascinating, even." He huffed something that was almost a laugh, and the sound of it did something unhelpful low in her chest, the way it had been doing for weeks now, an ambush she kept walking into with her eyes open. Six a.m., and the valley was still blue-dark at the edges, the crusher-destemmer groaning its patient mechanical hymn, and Théo's sleeves were pushed up past his elbows, and there was a smear of purple along his jaw he didn't know about, and Wren had the sudden, dangerous thought that she could get used to this. Not the harvest. The this. She reached over without asking and swiped her thumb along his jaw to get the juice before it dried into a stain, an entirely practical gesture, the kind she told herself she'd have made for any of her cellar hands. Théo went still under her hand in a way none of her cellar hands ever had. "You had —" she started. "I know what I had." His voice had dropped half a register. He was looking at her now, actually looking, the sorting table forgotten, a bin of Syrah rattling past his elbow that he didn't reach for. "Wren." "Don't," she said, except she didn't move her hand. "I'm not doing anything." "You're doing the voice." "I don't have a voice." "You have several voices, Théo Marchetti, and that one is a problem." Somewhere behind them Dax Marchetti was yelling something about a stuck valve on the second press, and one of the dogs was barking at a delivery truck, and forty tons of Halloway-Marchetti fruit were coming in off the vines they'd both grown up staring at from opposite sides of a property line, and none of it mattered as much, in that particular suspended second, as the fact that Théo's hand had come up to cover hers against his jaw, and neither of them had signed a clause that covered this. It would be so easy, she thought, to let this be real. The thought scared her enough that she stepped back first, wiped her hand on her apron like it had touched something ordinary, and said, "Bin four's backing up," in a voice that came out steadier than she felt. Théo held her gaze one beat too long before he let her have the retreat. "Bin four," he agreed, and went. She watched him go — tall, unfairly competent in rubber boots, moving through her family's crush pad like he'd been born to it, which, infuriatingly, in some sixty-years-buried way, he had — and thought, not for the first time, how strange it was that four months ago she hadn't known this man well enough to guess his coffee order, and now she knew the exact sound he made when he was trying not to laugh at a joke he thought was beneath him to find funny. Four months. It felt like four months and also like no time had passed at all, the way real things do when you're not looking directly at them. Four months earlier, there had been no crush pad, no shared boots by the mudroom door, no dog that had adopted both of them without asking permission from either family. Four months earlier, there had been a will, and a lawyer with sympathetic eyebrows, and the worst afternoon of Wren Halloway's adult life, which — given her divorce — was saying something. Four months earlier, she hadn't spoken more than ten words to Théo Marchetti since she was seventeen. It had started, as these things so often do, in a room that smelled like old paper and expensive coffee, with a dead man's voice coming out of a screen. * The reading was held in the Halloway Cellars tasting room because nobody could agree on neutral ground, and because Alden Halloway's attorney, a mild, precise woman named Odette Brennan who had clearly done this exact kind of family reckoning before, had insisted the will's specific terms required both families present at once. Wren sat in the front row between her father, Gordon, whose color still hadn't fully come back since his heart attack eighteen months prior, and her mother, who was gripping a tissue she hadn't used yet like a rosary. Across the aisle — an actual aisle, someone had arranged the folding chairs like a wedding, which in retrospect Wren would find darkly funny — sat the Marchettis: Camille, elegant and drawn thin with grief for a father-in-law she'd loved more than she'd ever loved her own father; Théo's father, Renzo, arms crossed, jaw set in the particular way of a man bracing for a fight he'd already lost several times before; and, three minutes late, smelling like an airport and looking like he'd rather be anywhere else on the planet, Théo. Wren hadn't seen him in almost a decade. He'd left for good the summer after graduation, the way you'd expect the golden child of a bitter, striving family to leave — fast, and without a note. She remembered him vaguely from harvest festivals when they were kids, before the feud calcified into something neither of their families would name out loud: a gangly boy who'd once helped her free a barn cat from a fence and then acted, immediately, like it hadn't happened, because his grandfather was watching. She hadn't thought about that cat in fifteen years. She thought about it now, watching him fold himself into a chair like he resented every inch of space he took up in this town. "Thank you all for being here," Odette said, and pulled up a video file on the projector, and Wren's stomach dropped before her grandfather's face even filled the screen, because she recognized the room he'd recorded it in — his study, the one with the photograph of the original vineyard from 1966, one bottling house, one label, before it split into two like a bad marriage. "If you're watching this," Alden Halloway said, looking directly into the camera the way he'd looked at everyone his whole life, like he could see straight through their excuses, "I'm dead, and you're all in one room together for the first time in longer than any of you would like to admit. Camille. Renzo. Gordon. And the kids, if they're old enough now — Wren, Théo — I hope you're old enough now." Wren heard Renzo Marchetti exhale through his nose like a bull. "I'm not going to waste your time pretending this is a simple will," Alden went on. "You all know the land is split. You all know it shouldn't be. I spent sixty years watching two good families bleed slow because Nico Marchetti and I were too proud, for reasons half of you don't even know anymore, to sit down at one table and say we were sorry. I'm not going to let that be the last word." On the screen, he leaned forward. "The Halloway half of the original vineyard passes to Wren, outright, no conditions, effective on my death — she's earned every inch of it and nobody should ever tell her otherwise. But the water rights, the crush facility, and the right-of-way easement that both operations need to survive — those go into a trust. And the trust has one condition attached to it, and I want you all to hear it plainly, because I know exactly how it's going to sound." A pause. Wren would remember, later, that she'd actually held her breath. "Wren Halloway and Théo Marchetti have one harvest season to marry, and one full year after that to run the reunified estate together, jointly, as equal partners — or the trust dissolves, the easement and water rights revert to open sale, and Calloway Hospitality Group's standing offer becomes the only viable buyer for either property within six months. I've seen their offer. It's generous. It's also the end of everything my father and Nico's father built with their bare hands, turned into a wine-tasting backdrop for a boutique hotel chain. I would rather see two stubborn families finally talk to each other than watch that happen. I love you all too much to let pride be the last thing standing between you and the only thing that ever really mattered out here, which is the land, and each other." The video ended. The tasting room was silent except for the hum of the projector fan. Then everyone started talking at once. Wren didn't remember much of the next ten minutes in order — her mother's hand gripping her wrist hard enough to leave marks, Renzo Marchetti on his feet shouting something about a dead man's spite reaching from the grave, Odette Brennan repeating, with saintly patience, that the terms were binding and specific and yes, she was aware how unusual they were, no, there was no appeal process, yes, she understood this was upsetting. What Wren did remember, with total clarity, was turning her head at some point in the chaos and finding Théo Marchetti already looking at her across the aisle — not with anger, not even really with panic, but with something flatter and more exhausted, the look of a man doing math he already knew the answer to and hating it. "Well," he said, to her, quietly, under the noise, the first words he'd spoken to her in ten years. "This is going to be a hell of a wedding." She should have laughed. She didn't. She just stared back at him, feeling the floor of her carefully managed life tilt under her, and thought: *I don't even know this man.* She didn't know yet that in four months she'd know the sound of him trying not to laugh. She didn't know about the crush pad, or the jaw, or the hand over her hand. She knew only that her grandfather, damn him, dead and loving and stubborn to the absolute last, had just handed her the one thing she'd sworn after her divorce she would never again let herself want badly enough to lose. A future she hadn't chosen. And a man she was about to marry for reasons that had, so far, absolutely nothing to do with love.

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