Chapter 2: The Halloway Kitchen

The Halloway kitchen had been the site of every serious family conversation for three generations, which Wren supposed was fitting, because this one qualified as the most serious yet. Her mother, Ines, had put the kettle on out of pure reflex and then forgotten about it twice, so that by the time anyone thought to pour, the water had gone from boiling to merely warm. Her father sat at the head of the table with his hands folded in front of him, looking older than he had that morning, which felt unfair, given that the day had barely started. "He can't do this," Ines said, for the fourth time. "There has to be a way around it. People contest wills." "Odette already told us," Wren said. "The trust is airtight. Dad checked with our own lawyer on the drive home. It's not a loophole kind of document. It's a — it's a *specific* kind of document." "Specific." Gordon said the word like it tasted bad. "Your grandfather spent forty years not speaking to Nico Marchetti's name in this house, and his last act on earth is ordering you to marry the man's grandson." "I don't think it was spite," Wren said, surprising herself, because she hadn't decided that until the words were out of her mouth. "I think it was the opposite of spite. I think it was the only lever big enough to move either family, and he knew it, and he used it because he was dying and he was out of time to try anything gentler." Her mother made a small, wet sound and reached for the tissue she'd been holding since the reading. "You're defending him," Gordon said. "I'm not defending him. I'm furious at him. I just also think he wasn't wrong that we've been bleeding out here for sixty years over something none of us even understand anymore." Wren pressed her palms flat against the table, grounding herself in the old scarred wood, the same table she'd done her homework at, the same table her ex-husband had sat at exactly twice before deciding vineyard Sundays weren't for him. "Do either of you actually know why they split? Grandpa and Nico?" Silence. Her parents looked at each other in the specific way of two people confirming, without speaking, that neither of them had a good answer. "Something about money," Gordon said finally. "A deal gone bad. Your grandfather never talked about it. Neither did Nico, as far as I know." "So we're sixty years into a feud nobody alive can explain, and now I'm supposed to marry into it to save the family business." Wren laughed, short and not remotely amused. "That's insane. Say it with me. It's insane." "It's insane," her mother echoed obediently, then immediately added, "but Wren — the alternative is losing the land. All of it. Not just the trust portion. If Calloway buys the Marchetti side and we can't buy them out and they can't buy us out, we're an island in the middle of a resort. You know what that does to the water rights. You know what that does to *everything*." Wren knew. She'd run the operations long enough to know exactly what it did to everything — the shared well the two families had fought over and shared anyway because neither could survive without it, the single road in and out that ran through what was legally Marchetti land now, the crush facility that had been built for one estate and never fully duplicated because duplicating it would have cost more than either family had ever had. Sixty years of spite, and neither side had ever managed to fully sever the cord, because the cord was the only thing keeping either of them alive. That, more than anything, told her everything she needed to know about how this all started: two men who hated each other and still couldn't quite let each other drown. "I'm not marrying a stranger to save a business," she said, but even as she said it she heard how thin it sounded, because it wasn't really about the business, not entirely. It was about the land her great-grandfather had cleared by hand. It was about her father's face right now, gray and frightened in a way she'd only seen once before, in a hospital waiting room. It was about every August of her whole life, the smell of must and diesel and hope, the one constant in a life that had otherwise rearranged itself around her more than once without asking permission. Her phone buzzed. Priya. **Priya:** I heard. Entire town has heard. I am coming over with wine and I am not asking permission. Wren almost smiled, for the first time since the reading. "I need some air," she said, and let herself out the kitchen door into the yard, phone in hand, the September evening gold and unbothered by any of it. Priya arrived twenty minutes later in her truck, took one look at Wren sitting on the porch steps, and didn't say a word — just handed over a bottle of something that wasn't even Halloway or Marchetti fruit, some negociant Pinot from three valleys over, and sat down beside her with two glasses she'd apparently also brought, because Priya Osei planned ahead for emotional collapse the way other people planned for weather. "So," Priya said, once they were both several sips in. "Théo Marchetti." "Don't." "I'm not doing anything. I'm saying a name." "You're saying it in a voice." "I have several voices, and this is the appropriate one for the words *you're marrying the hot Marchetti grandson to save the family vineyard*, which, if I'd pitched that as a Solvane Hollow Harvest Festival theme, they'd have fired me for being too on the nose." Wren pressed the cold glass to her forehead. "He's not — I haven't seen him since we were teenagers. I don't know him. I don't know anything about him except he left the second he could and apparently made a whole career out of being charming to strangers for money." "Sommelier," Priya said. "Very charming to strangers for money, yes. I looked him up the second I heard, obviously, because I love you and I do my research." "I'm not marrying him because he's charming." "No," Priya agreed, quieter now, setting her glass down and actually looking at her friend. "You're thinking about marrying him because your dad's heart is held together with tape and a prayer, and because this land is the only thing that's never once left you, and because your grandfather — who I loved, and who I will never forgive for putting this on you three weeks after his own funeral — clearly believed you were the only person stubborn enough in either family to actually pull it off." "That's not a compliment." "It's absolutely a compliment. It's just also terrifying." Priya bumped her shoulder gently. "You don't have to decide tonight." "I have a harvest season. Which is, generously, about ten weeks." "Then you don't have to decide *tonight*," Priya repeated, unbothered. "You get to have one more night of being furious at a dead man before you have to be an adult about it. That's allowed." Wren looked out at the vines, dark rows running down toward the property line, toward land that had been Halloway land her whole life and Marchetti land right next to it, close enough that as a child she used to be able to see the lights of the other house from her bedroom window and wonder, in the uncomplicated way of children, why they never went over to play. She thought of the boy who'd freed a barn cat from a fence and then acted like it never happened. She wondered, with a dread that had a strange thread of something else woven through it she wasn't ready to name, what kind of man he'd grown into. She'd find out soon enough. Ten weeks, her grandfather's ghost had given her. Ten weeks to decide whether to marry a stranger, or lose everything that had ever made her feel like she belonged anywhere at all. Gordon came out onto the porch a while later, moving slower than he used to, and lowered himself into the chair beside her without asking if she wanted company, the way fathers of a certain generation did — assuming, correctly, that she did, even if she'd never say so out loud. "Your mother's gone up to bed," he said. "She'll be better in the morning. She always is." "Are you?" Wren asked. "Better in the morning, I mean. Because you don't look like a man who's going to be better in the morning, Dad. You look like a man who's about to lose the thing he built his whole life around, and I don't know how to fix that for you." "You're not supposed to fix it for me." Gordon's voice was quiet, worn thin by the day. "I built this operation thinking I was building something for you to inherit free and clear, no strings, no ultimatums. Instead your grandfather's left you a knot I don't know how to untie, and I hate that more than I've hated anything in a long while — watching my own father put that weight on my daughter's shoulders from beyond the grave, like he didn't trust the rest of us to solve it honestly while he was still alive to help." "Maybe he didn't trust any of us to solve it honestly," Wren said. "Maybe that's the whole point. Sixty years, and nobody's tried anything except silence." Her father was quiet a long moment, looking out at the dark rows of vines running down toward the boundary line, toward land he'd spent forty years farming right up against without ever once setting foot across it socially. "I used to see Nico Marchetti at the co-op meetings," he said finally. "Years ago, before he passed. We'd nod. Polite, distant, the way you'd greet a stranger you happened to share a fence with. I used to wonder what it would take to actually sit down with him, have a real conversation, see if the old grudge even meant anything to either of us anymore by then. I never did it. Told myself it wasn't my place to undo something my father built so carefully. I think that was cowardice, if I'm honest with myself tonight. I think I let the silence be easier than the work of ending it, and now it's fallen to you to do the ending, and I'm sorry for that, Wren. I really am." Wren reached over and took her father's hand, calloused and familiar, the same hand that had taught her to prune a vine when she was six years old, standing on an overturned bucket to reach the canes. "I'm not doing this because I forgive Grandpa for putting me in this position," she said. "I'm furious at him, still, probably will be for a while yet. But I think I might do it anyway. Not for him. For this." She gestured out at the dark vineyard, at the whole shape of the only life she'd ever really wanted. "Because I don't know how to be a person who isn't tied to this land, and I'm not ready to find out." Gordon squeezed her hand, and didn't say anything else for a long moment, and when he finally spoke again his voice had gone rough in a way she rarely heard from him. "For what it's worth — and I know it isn't worth much, coming from the man whose father started this whole mess — I don't think you're the one who has to earn this family's forgiveness for anything. Whatever you decide, Wren, you've already given this place more than it had any right to ask of a twenty-eight-year-old woman who should've been out living her own life instead of holding mine together after my heart tried to quit on me." "This is my life, Dad. This land. I chose it." "I know you did. I just want you choosing whatever comes next for the same reason — because you want it, not because you're scared of what happens if you don't." He looked at her steadily, some of his old sharpness returning to his eyes despite the exhaustion in the rest of him. "Can you tell the difference yet? Between those two things?" Wren considered the question honestly, turning it over in the dark. "Not yet," she admitted. "But I think I will, by the time I have to decide. I think that's what the ten weeks are actually for." They sat together a long while on the porch in the cooling dark, two Halloways facing down a legacy neither of them had asked for, until the night finally grew too cold to bear and they went inside together, leaving the vines to keep their old secrets a little while longer, and leaving Wren, alone in her childhood bedroom an hour later, staring up at a ceiling she'd stared at for thirty years, to begin the private, unglamorous work of deciding what she actually wanted, underneath every reason she'd already rehearsed for why she might say yes.

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