Remy drove home after fleeing Seth’s office, detouring to the chemist for some cold and flu tablets on the way. The encounter with Seth had distracted her from her sore throat, but the chill evening air outside the winery freshened her cough and it was proving hard to stop.
Lexie was at work, but there was a plate of lasagne in the fridge and all Remy had to do was heat it up. Not that she felt like eating.
She was washing her dinner dishes when the phone rang in her work bag, and such was her rush to get to it before it flipped to message bank she bashed her hip on the table hard enough to send the packet of flu tablets skittering to the floor.
Then the screen lit with Seth’s name and she forgot the pain. Remy picked up. ‘Hi.’
‘Hey. I rang to apologise for my mother.’
‘A wise woman told me once you never should apologise for what someone else does,’ she said.
‘Who was that?’
‘Meryl Streep in some movie.’
‘Meryl is a very wise woman.’
They were quiet, just breathing, until Remy said, ‘Where are you? What time is the flight?’
‘I’m just the other side of Bunbury. It leaves Perth at 11.10 tonight.’
‘When do you get back?’
‘Two weeks. I’m back late on the Tuesday night.’
It felt like forever. Remy gripped the phone as if it might slip through her fingers. Like he might slip through her fingers.
‘Remy?’
‘Yes?’
‘Whatever is going on with this money you owe, or your mum owes? Whatever it is that you think you can’t tell me. I’d help you. I’d be there for you. You know that, right?’
It choked her up. It really, honestly, choked her up and it wasn’t just that her throat was getting worse, or that her head felt thick and foggy. What did you say to that?
‘Thank you.’ It was trite. There were no words that could convey what she felt. In the last few days, Seth had made her feel less alone and Remy didn’t feel like that often. She and her mother had been fighting an uphill battle for such a long time.
‘I mean it, Rem.’
‘I know you do. But we’re fine. Mum and I … we’ll find our way through it. It helps though. Just the thought you care, that’s enough.’
She couldn’t tell him about Doug Mulvraney. Not on the phone. Mulvraney had eyes and ears everywhere and she wouldn’t put it past him to know people who could trace such a call. If she was honest with herself—and she always tried to be—it was more than that. So far Seth didn’t seem to care about her father’s reputation, or her paltry finances, or the fact that she lived in a house that was falling down around her ears. But she’d seen his face when she admitted to the phone sex work: a bloody baby step from prostitution. Would knowing she owed money to scum like Doug Mulvraney be the final straw?
She wasn’t ready to find that out. Not yet.
‘Honestly, we’ll be fine, Seth. It’s just a short-term deficit kind of thing. A hitch in the cashflow. Another couple of months and we’ll be through it.’ She hoped that was true. She hoped she sounded convincing.
Maybe she did, because Seth said, ‘When I get back, I’m going to prove to you that you can trust me, okay? But in the meantime, sweetheart, you sound like you should take it easy. That voice doesn’t sound good.’
Sweetheart. ‘I’m okay. It’s just a sniffle. I think getting soaked on Saturday is catching up with me.’
‘You should take tomorrow off.’
‘Is that the boss speaking?’
‘It’s me, Remy. It’s always me when I’m talking to you.’
***
It took a long time before Remy could fall asleep that night. She woke feeling lousy and she had to drag herself through the next morning, blowing her nose every five minutes.
Her mother said she should call in sick—even offered to phone in for her—but Remy didn’t want to give anyone at Lasrey any reason to question her work ethic. Not after Ailsa burst in on them last night. Not with Seth away.
Greg Trimble rostered her to spray the cabernet for powdery mildew. It was a job she normally enjoyed, but today the noise of the quad-bike made her head ache, and time and again her mind turned to Seth—how he was, what he was thinking—and frustratingly, maddeningly, how amazing it had felt to be pinned by him to his office wall.
Seth wouldn’t have needed Sixty Seconds to prove his point last night. If they’d played the game for real, he’d barely have needed six.
***
‘Canasta.’ Grinning, Allan Dale laid his cards on the lunchroom table. Remy and the other three players sitting with him groaned.
Remy was tallying the values of what she carried in her hand, when Rina Stein burst into the lunchroom like a boxer coming out at the bell. ‘There you are, Greg! There’s something wrong with the vines by the driveway.’
Greg put his cards on the table. He had a broad, leathery face and a sunglasses tan that made him look like a brown panda. He’d been at Lasrey for more than a decade and the staff who’d been there long enough, and dared, called him Pops. Remy hadn’t been there long enough and Rina didn’t dare.
‘Whaddaya mean something’s wrong?’ Greg said.
‘They’re spotty-looking. They’ve got no vigour. They just don’t look happy, dammit.’
Allan collected the cards and wrapped them in an elastic band. Allan, having been around Greg and Rina long enough to know when the shit was about to hit the fan, was first to check the clock on the wall, stretch, and mutter something about the bottling line not running all by itself. Remy would have gone then too, except Greg tipped his chin at her and said: ‘How did the cabernet look to you this morning?’
‘Fine.’ Then she added, ‘Sulphur coverage wouldn’t make the vines spotty?’
‘Shouldn’t do,’ he agreed.
Rina slapped her palm on the lunchroom table. ‘I’ve been in town all morning and I only just got back. I can tell you right now, those vines aren’t fine.
‘Right-oh.’ Greg heaved to his feet, sucked the last of his iced coffee and dumped the carton in the rubbish before he resettled his cap on his head. ‘You come too, Remy.’
Rina trailed them.
Cabernet sauvignon was the first variety planted at Lasrey in the early seventies, in the original vineyard now bisected by the gravel driveway that took tourists to cellar door. It wasn’t far to walk and it wasn’t long before they could see Rina was right. Something was very wrong with the vines.
Greg put a hand on the timber fence bordering the staff car park, vaulting his legs over. Remy ducked through the fence and trotted behind him across the mown grass verge into the vineyard.
‘See,’ Rina said.
‘Yeah, I see.’
Instead of sitting crisp and alert, some leaves had begun to curl. There were leaves with oily brown/black spots, now spreading in irregular shapes, like a mole or freckle turned cancerous by the sun.
Greg’s attention narrowed on Remy, and through the flu ache and the fog in her head she did her best to answer his rapid-fire questions.
Yes, she’d sprayed here this morning. Yes, for powdery. Yes, she’d checked the concentrations and spray calculations against their spray charts.
‘You’re sure about that?’ His watery-blue eyes held hers.
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
But was she? Had she calculated the spray properly? Had she been paying attention? Her head had been so filled with Seth.
Sixty Seconds … Stand against the wall.
She hugged herself hard, and the day seemed suddenly grey and cold.
‘Where’s the quad-bike now, Remy, and the spray gear? We need to check it all out.’ Greg rubbed a leaf between his fingers and grimaced when he didn’t like the feel.
‘I told you—’ Remy began, before the flare in Greg’s nostrils told her to leave out the attitude. Lasrey’s vineyards were his responsibility. She was his responsibility too. He had every right to grill her about what she’d done to his vines.
‘Maybe you got a bad batch of copper sulphate. We can get it tested.’ Greg headed back to the winery, his walk morphing into a jog.
Remy had to run to catch him. ‘I don’t know what there’ll be to see, I washed the tank out when I finished the last pass.’
‘Something must have got fucked up in the sprayer. It’s all I can think of.’
‘You mean she fucked up,’ Rina shouted at them from further behind. ‘Seth will hit the roof.’
Greg muttered something Remy was glad she didn’t hear.
Lasrey had a full complement of sheds forming an industrial wedge at the winery’s rear, separated from the polished veneer of the stone and timber façade the public saw when they visited cellar door.
The largest shed housed the tractor and the truck. Greg’s work ute was in there too, plus the two quad-bikes and all the spraying gear. Chemicals and fertilisers were kept in a locked room accessed through the rear corner of the main shed. By the time Remy caught up with Greg, he was flicking through the pages of the spray diary and pages of stapled checklists Remy had signed off earlier that day.
‘You filled this out properly, yeah?’ he said, without looking up.
‘I think so.’
Greg shot her a look, but it was Rina who pressed: ‘What does “think so” mean? Did you? Or didn’t you?’
‘I’m sure I did.’ But was she? Tick the same checklist one hundred times and you got to ticking on auto.
Greg sniffed the spray wand, checked for residue in the tank. ‘All I can smell is water.’
‘Don’t ask me. My nose is so stuffed up, I can’t smell a thing,’ Remy said.
He snatched the key from the security board and unlocked the chemical room, snapping on the overhead lights. Remy followed him, moving further into the room, while Rina propped herself against the doorframe.
‘Here’s the copper sulphate,’ Remy tapped the container.
It all looked normal.
Greg’s eyes narrowed as he thought it through. ‘What about adjuvant?’
‘Alkylaryl,’ Remy said. Mixing adjuvants or wetting agents was a standard part of the process at Lasrey. It improved how the sprays stuck to the leaves.
‘So where’s that?’ Rina asked.
Remy waved her hand at the shelf, but she did it distractedly, thinking every bit as hard as Greg. What could have happened here? How had she got this wrong?
Rina moved toward where Remy pointed. ‘This?’ She laid her hand on a pack.
‘That’s oxfluorofen, Rina,’ Greg said, like he was talking to a silly kid. ‘Total opposite of what you’re looking for. That stuff’s a herbicide. Weedkiller.’
‘Well I don’t see anything here that says alky-whatsit,’ Rina snapped back. ‘Maybe someone didn’t reorder it.’
That made Greg and Remy pay more attention. By now, both of them were in the corner with Rina, peering through the shelves. Greg examined the pack. Beside it there were telltale rings in the dust on the shelf that showed it had been recently moved. They all saw it.
‘Oxfluorofen could do that to the vines, couldn’t it,’ Remy said, meeting Greg’s unwavering gaze. ‘I mean, if …’ Her voice cracked just thinking about it and she couldn’t get her mouth to close.
‘My oath it could,’ Greg said, rubbing at his chin like he might twist it clean off. ‘But you wouldn’t have mixed the two up, Rem? I mean, that’s just not a mistake you’d make. I’d bet my left nut on it.’
Normally, Remy would bet Greg’s left nut too, but she’d been so thickheaded this morning. Sick with the flu, lovesick. Try as she night, she couldn’t rule it out, and she honestly couldn’t see any other way.
‘I’m so sorry.’ She was. Desperately sorry. Cabernet was Lasrey’s flagship and she might have killed the company’s oldest vines. ‘I’m the only one who’s been in here. I can’t think of any other possible explanation. I mean … there’s no other explanation? Is there?’
Rina snorted. ‘You bloody idiot.’
‘Rina, you’re not helping,’ Greg snarled back.
‘Well, someone has to let the executive know what’s happened. Seth won’t be happy if I give him half the damn story. He’ll want to know all the details. Maybe you’d like to be the one who tells him that your direct report poisoned his best vines?’
‘Seth’s in the air,’ Remy said woodenly, cutting their argument short. ‘He’s on his way to France.’ Greg’s brow furrowed and Rina shot her a withering look. Neither of them asked how she knew the CEO’s personal movements and Remy didn’t care, she was beyond worrying about hiding things or saving face. This was too huge.
‘Ailsa’s at the winery. She’ll want to know. One of us will have to fill Seth in when he lands. What a fucking balls-up.’ Rina took off, boots churning through the gravel.
‘I’m so sorry, Greg,’ Remy said. The flu came with a crushing headache, but this new guilt made her want to throw up.
‘Yeah, so am I. You didn’t do it on purpose. Accidents happen, so let’s see if we can fix this one up.’ Greg started rifling through his pockets. Digging out his mobile phone, he dialled then spoke: ‘Hey, Ed. Yeah. Good … Hey, mate, we got a problem. My assistant sprayed oxfluorofen on the cabernet this mornin’ … Yeah. Dunno. Brain-fade I guess. Yeah.’
Remy watched Greg’s face for any glimmer of good news, wishing more and more that she could rewind the day and start over. Finally, after a few more yeahs and yeps, he hung up the phone.
‘Right, let’s go. If the active agent hasn’t sat on the leaves too long, we might come out of it okay.’ He grabbed two nutrient packs from the shelves. ‘You find the powdered kelp.’
Relief must have shown on her face because Greg quickly cautioned: ‘Don’t get your hopes up.’
‘I won’t.’ Tonight she could bawl like a baby, not now. Not while there was a chance to try to make this right.
She followed Greg from the storage room with the kelp pack under her arm. Remy locked the door and slipped the key back on its peg. From the front shed they could see Rina striding up the hill toward them, elbows punching a path through the air like an Olympic walker.
As Greg measured product into the tank, Rina steamed up to them and without drawing breath, told Remy: ‘Ailsa wants to see you.’
‘Remy’s gotta drive. We’re doing a double foliar feed spray,’ Greg said, adding out of the corner of his mouth for Remy’s ears only, ‘Mrs Lasrey can wait in line. I’m first to tear you a new arsehole.’
Remy knew Greg was making light of it, trying to make her feel better. It didn’t work, she still felt like shit.
‘I’ll drive,’ Rina snapped, crossing to the security board to pick out the keys. ‘Ailsa said now. Given the way things are, I’d get a wriggle on if I were you. She’s in the boardroom.’
Greg glanced at Rina, then at Remy. ‘Go on, Rem. At the end of the day the buck stops with me. I’m your manager. I should have been supervising you better, obviously. I’ll tell them that later.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ she tried to assure him, but the sound of the quad-bike as Greg started the engine drowned her out. Rina climbed into the truck, reversed, and spun a turn that threatened to tear strips in the gravel before she gunned the truck after him.
As the engine noise faded, Remy trudged across the lot. It was the second time in twenty-four hours she’d had cause to enter the admin area at Lasrey, only this time it was via the back entrance and this time, there was no Seth.
***
Sally Deering, Seth’s assistant, made her wait. Remy sat in the same green chairs where salespeople sweated before an appointment with Seth or Rina, or whichever decision-maker they’d come to schmooze.
Word of the morning’s monumental stuff-up must have spread because the reception area had all the cheer of a funeral parlour. Even Sally, who had seen just about everything a wine business could toss at her, looked grim.
It felt like an age before Sally’s phone buzzed and she picked it up, glanced across her desk at Remy and said: ‘They’re ready for you.’
Remy pushed to her feet, wishing her body didn’t ache so much. The adrenalin that had driven her since lunch had faded with all the sitting still. She felt sharp as a sloth.
‘Good luck, Remy.’ Sally said it so low, anyone waiting in the boardroom would have needed bionic ears to hear. It wasn’t a glowing endorsement of how she thought the interview might go.
Remy straightened her shoulders, knocked twice. A voice called her to come in.
Ailsa Lasrey sat on the long side of a timber table even more polished than she was. Diane Laurie, the HR manager, sat on Ailsa’s right with her laptop cracked open. Both women glanced up as Remy closed the door, but only Diane’s smile held any hint of warmth.
Remy had to stop herself from smoothing the creases in her khaki pants. She didn’t own an iron on principle and these women wore clothes that screamed freshly pressed.
‘Take a seat,’ Ailsa waved her in.
Remy pulled out a chair and folded her legs into it. She’d picked a seat right by one of the ornate table supports and it took her a couple of tries to sit. First the chair legs, then her boots kept getting stuck.
‘You know why you’re here?’ Ailsa said.
Remy nodded, drawing breath to launch into her version of the day’s events.
Diane interrupted. ‘Before you say anything, Remy, I should let you know I’m typing this up in an incident report because we may need to get insurers involved, and I’ll print it for you when we’re finished and get you to sign that you’re happy it’s all accurate. Do you want to have anyone here with you?’
‘Do you think it’s necessary?’
The HR manager shrugged. ‘It’s up to you. You can ask someone to come in with you if you like.’
Remy thought about that for a second. Greg was the obvious choice, but he had about six hectares of cabernet to save from weedkiller. Perhaps Blake—
‘Blake isn’t here,’ Ailsa said, like she’d read her thoughts, lowering her chin to stare at Remy over her glasses. Thick, navy and black-rimmed, they were, with over-sized gold hinges that winked in the lights. With her almost white hair and eyes the colour of rain on ice, Ailsa looked like the fairy godmother in Shrek. The nasty one.
‘It’s fine. I don’t need anyone,’ Remy said. ‘I take full responsibility for my actions today. I’m so sorry, Mrs Lasrey. I don’t know what I was thinking this morning. I’ve done routine sprays almost every week since I started here. This is the first time anything like this has happened.’
‘Why don’t you tell us in your own words what you think went wrong, and we’ll go from there,’ Diane said, pulling the laptop closer.
So Remy did. She kept it direct and honest and tried to make sure Greg Trimble didn’t cop any blame. When she’d finished, it took a lot of typing before Diane’s fingers clicked their final clack.
Remy tried not to fidget. It was warm in the boardroom and stuffy with the door closed. Floral perfume permeated the air, adding its weight to the headache Remy had been fighting all day.
Ailsa scribbled notes in a personnel file on which Remy could see her name handwritten in black marker. Eventually, Ailsa put the pen down but it was Diane who spoke first. ‘I don’t like to be the one to say this, but I have to put it to you, Remy. Are you sure what happened today was really an accident?’
‘Pardon?’ Remy sat bolt upright and smothered her bark of nervous laughter. The suggestion was ridiculous. ‘I would never deliberately set out to poison anything … I mean, you can’t think …’ Yet it was clear from the two expressions opposite, ‘vineyard murderess’ was what they’d like to scrawl across the pages of her personnel file, in ink dripping blood.
‘You seemed … upset when I saw you in the CEO’s office last night,’ Ailsa prompted. ‘I overheard you say Mr Lasrey clarified a company policy to you, and I can only assume that policy was our workplace relationships memo.’ She ran a nail on the margin of Remy’s file, slowly, as if cutting it with a dull knife. ‘There have been rumours about you and Blake. I see here a complaint was made. I had discussed that with Mr Lasrey previously and there’s a note in your file. It’s possible that you were feeling aggrieved with the suggestions Mr Lasrey put to you last night, Remy, and so you might have acted rashly this morning …’
‘Even if you’ve since regretted it,’ Diane finished, let the words hang over the table like sour mist.
That she would ever deliberately set out to poison the Lasrey vines was so far from the truth it took a good ten seconds before Remy could frame more than a stunned syllable in response. How did she defend herself without making things worse? How would Ailsa react if she told her the only dressing down the CEO had given her in his office last night had been with his eyes?
Placing both hands on the table, curling her fingernails to hide the dirt, she leaned forward. This was a witch-hunt and it had gone on long enough. ‘I would never deliberately set out to kill a vineyard. Ever. I love nature. I love plants. Viticulture is my career.’
‘Is it?’ Ailsa said, bringing her hand to her cheek so the sparkle of rings vied for attention with the sparkle of gold hinge in her glasses. ‘I’m not convinced.’
‘I love my job, Mrs Lasrey.’
Ailsa’s lips pursed. ‘You’ve been with us, what now … five months?’
‘Six,’ Diane interjected, shifting in her seat, not looking up.
‘Six months. In that time you’ve poisoned my vineyard and complaints have been made regarding the nature of your relationship with my youngest son—it’s hardly an auspicious start. Let me be very clear here, Remy. We can’t afford to have employees with us who cannot give us one hundred per cent focus on the job. A winery is a dangerous workplace when people let themselves get distracted by workplace relationships that are anything other than professionally conducted. I think you’ve let yourself get distracted that way today, and this is the result.’
She’s going to tell me not to bother coming in tomorrow. She’s going to sack my stupid arse. It was there in the way Diane Laurie wouldn’t lift her eyes from her keyboard, and how the keys clacking beneath her fingers sounded like they, too, didn’t give a damn.
Remy gave a damn. She gave a bloody great big damn.
If she lost this job she’d have to front Doug Mulvraney and tell him she couldn’t make a repayment for a few weeks. Mulvraney said he liked her. He said she had ‘spunk’. She was pretty sure that wouldn’t stop him cutting off her finger if he thought she was welching on what her father had owed him when he died.
‘Rina says there are operating procedures in the storeroom for safe-handling of chemicals and a checklist to sign off, and that you signed against the checklist this morning,’ Ailsa said.
‘That’s correct.’
‘And would you say we’ve given you the training you need to complete a simple spraying task without supervision?’
‘Yes,’ she said miserably. It was true. Greg Trimble had been patient and thorough. As well as all the big stuff, he’d run her through the small: how you had to kick the bottom sliding door of the pump shed with your toe to get it to shut flush.
‘I’m not trying to be horrible about all this, Remy. Truly I’m not. This is business and tough decisions have to be made.’
Yes. You. Are. Horrible. ‘I understand.’
‘You’re a second-year university graduate, not a junior fresh out of school, and we pay you as such,’ Ailsa said. ‘Greg is a busy man. Your position is supposed to support him, not require his supervision of every basic task.’
‘I know that, Mrs Lasrey. I’ll do anything to make this right. If I could take the morning back and start again, I would. I’m asking you to give me another chance. Please.’ And I’ll start looking for a new job tomorrow because if you think for a minute that I want to work here any longer than I absolutely have to, you’ve got another think coming. But I need a new job to go to first.
Ailsa sighed as if she was being asked to give up a kidney. ‘It’s not a decision I can make on my own. Diane, can I see you outside for a minute?’
Diane Laurie finished typing and scanned the laptop screen. ‘I’ll send this out to the printer in reception, Remy. I’ll get a copy for you to read and sign.’
‘Okay.’
Although, as the two women left the room in a rustle of perfume and pressed shirts, Remy knew it wasn’t okay at all.
***
Five minutes later, Ailsa re-entered the boardroom with a sheath of typewritten pages in her hand. These she passed to Remy. ‘Have a read through. You can make any notes and discuss them with me. Sign on the last page that it’s accurate.’
Ailsa sat again and stayed as Remy read. Occasionally the older woman shuffled a page in Remy’s file or wrote a note in the margins, but for the most part she was spectacularly unobtrusive, except for her rings. One of those rocks caught in the lights and every time Ailsa twitched her fingers, the shine danced at the edge of Remy’s vision.
Reading the report only reinforced Remy’s view that she’d been a first-class ditz. Hell and Tommy, anyone would think she was a complete moron who couldn’t find a bunch of grapes in a vineyard without a map. Ailsa Lasrey could have been nicer about it but Remy could understand the woman’s frustration.
‘Happy?’ Ailsa said eventually, tapping the file with her pen, which translated to hurry up and sign.
‘No. Not happy. I can’t believe I was so careless. But I’ll sign it. It’s the truth.’ So she did, and pushed the pages across the table.
‘No questions?’ Ailsa said, opening the three pages to check Remy’s signature on the last.
‘No. Can I just say again how sorry I am for all this? What I really want to do is get out there and help Greg fix my stuff-up.’ And get out of this room so I can blow my nose and breathe fresh air again.
She was pushing up from her chair when Ailsa said: ‘I’m not finished yet,’ in a tone that glued Remy’s backside to the seat.
Ailsa took a flimsy rectangle of paper from Remy’s personnel file then folded the incident report inside the file. She closed it, lacing her hands over the smooth beige.
‘Diane—’ Ailsa waved a hand dismissively in the direction of the door ‘—says I have to give you two written warnings before I terminate your employment. I’m a bit more old-school. The way I see it someone is accountable and if it’s not you, then it’s Greg. You’re his responsibility.’
‘It’s not Greg, Mrs Lasrey. This is all on me.’
Ailsa tipped her head in acknowledgement. ‘Commendable. And I must say it’s refreshing to come across an employee with that perspective. Most staff would have been covering their backsides from the moment Rina discovered there was a problem. They’d be telling me they haven’t been trained properly or they haven’t been shown, or they only did what their supervisor told them to do.’
‘I’ve never had any problem with taking responsibility, Mrs Lasrey,’ Remy said, fighting a mix of frustration, panic, and the growing urge to have a damn good cry. She didn’t cry often, but it had been a shitty, shitty day—the queen of shitty days—and it wasn’t getting any better.
‘Good.’ Ailsa smiled a smile so cold, it burned. ‘You weren’t concentrating on your job this morning and you mixed up the wrong chemical because you were a million miles away—caught up in some fool’s dream involving my son. And this time, I don’t mean Blake.’
The words were like a scalpel laying the truth bare, all Remy could do was blink.
Ailsa inhaled: long, deliberate. Then she exhaled, hard and fast. ‘In my opinion you should never have been employed here in the first place, but I let Greg Trimble recommend you, and the board chose you against my better judgement. I want your resignation. I’ll even say please.’
An image of Doug Mulvraney’s weasel face filled Remy’s mind. Her crappy rental house. That ugly hulking hedge. Lexie hefting supermarket boxes late on Sunday nights. Bills on the fridge.
Resigning wasn’t an option. Not without something to go to. And what winery would employ her now, after this?
‘I need this job. Please. I have financial obligations.’ Debts to a man who makes you look like a cuddly toy.
‘You think you’re out of pocket,’ Ailsa said, voice rising. ‘You poison my flagship vines. Cost me a small fortune in man-hours trying to fix-up your error. If we can’t fix it then my insurance excess and premiums all go up—not to mention the wine we can’t make for years from the cabernet block.’ Ailsa fingered the rectangle of paper she’d pulled from the file. It was upside-down on the table and she pushed it back and forth.
‘The vines might not be that bad, Mrs Lasrey. Greg has a plan—’
‘For a smart girl you’re being very stupid.’ Ailsa’s finger stabbed the table once, diamonds flashing beneath the overhead lights. ‘No winery in Margaret River will employ you after this. There’s no happy ending here, Remy. I saw you in Seth’s office last night. I saw the look on your face. I’ve seen it before. Girls have been throwing themselves at him since he was in high school. You do know he’s about to get engaged, don’t you?’
‘I didn’t throw myself at anyone …’ and then the last word snagged in her head. Engaged?
Suddenly, Remy felt very, very tired and she just wanted this finished. All the emotions she’d weathered since Seth shielded her from the storm on Saturday imploded and fell flat, like fallout from a mushroom cloud. She’d been an idiot, quite obviously, in more ways than one.
‘Everyone who works here knows about Helene, except you,’ Ailsa said. ‘That’s why Seth’s gone to France. Helene Bouchard is the daughter of our oak supplier. Bouchard is the most prestigious barrel manufacturer in France. She and Seth have been lovers for years. Helene understands him. Hers is a great wine legacy, too. Such a wonderful family …’
‘He said he was going to an exhibition. Vinitech.’
‘Oh, he is. That’s first. He’ll be finished with that in a few days. The rest of the time he’ll be at the Bouchard Cooperage with Helene.’
Adieu, Helene. Remy remembered his farewell on the phone yesterday as clearly as if Seth had been in the room. She pushed up from her seat, not wanting Ailsa to see how much she hurt. This time, she made it to her feet. ‘I won’t waste any more of your time, Mrs Lasrey. I assume I shouldn’t bother coming in for work tomorrow?’
‘There’s just one final matter.’ Ailsa pushed the slip of paper across the table.
Remy hadn’t been able to see it clearly before. Now she could see it was a cheque. ‘Why did we bother with the charade about my job when you’ve already calculated my final pay?’
‘Due process,’ Ailsa said, tapping the cheque. ‘Go on, take it. No hard feelings.’
Except Remy had plenty of hard feelings. Peer into her soul right now, she was iron.
She shimmied her thumbnail beneath the cheque, twisted it up, took a cursory glance, and stopped dead in her tracks. ‘What the hell is this?’