Fifty-four

Vivian, alone in the bedroom, heard something loud thumping down the stairs.

In the days since she confessed to Leonard about the baron, he’d moved into one of the guest rooms on the third floor. She didn’t know what to do about it. She wished she had someone to talk to, someone to offer some advice.

Her mother had been gone for twenty years, and before that, they’d had a distant relationship at best. Lillian had never forgiven her for running off to a “godforsaken potato farm.” But for the first time in a long time, Vivian wished she could talk to her.

Maybe that was why she’d found such joy in the novels she read. The voices of women writers filled the hole in her life where her mother’s used to be.

The thumping noise continued. She pulled on her robe and stepped into the hallway to find Bridget dragging a suitcase down the stairs.

“Bridget, for heaven’s sake, don’t let that bump into the side of the banister; it will damage the wood. Get Asher to help you.”

Bridget turned around, and her face was red and puffy, her eyes teary.

“What’s wrong?” Vivian said, taking the steps down to her.

“Asher broke off our engagement,” she sniffed.

“Why?”

Bridget started sobbing. Oh, this wouldn’t do at all.

“Bridget, leave that suitcase there and come with me.” She led her back to her bedroom and closed the door. She handed her a box of tissues and had her take a seat in one of the Georgian armchairs while she folded herself onto the other, just as she’d sat with Leonard when she told him about her indiscretion. She wondered if Bridget had a similar story, if she’d betrayed Asher. Vivian couldn’t imagine any other reason why he would break off the engagement.

“Now, what’s going on?” Vivian said.

Bridget pulled a lock of hair loose from her ponytail holder and began twirling it. “He said he can’t marry me . . . under the circumstances.”

“What circumstances?” Vivian said impatiently.

“Losing the winery.”

Apparently, Asher wasn’t fooled by Leonard’s show of bravado at the production meeting, either. He anticipated the worst. Only Leah was under the illusion that the winery could be saved, but how long could that last? More urgently, she wondered why Asher broke up with his fiancée over it.

“What does the winery have to do with your engagement?”

“He said, quote, he has nothing to offer me and it’s not fair to drag me down into these problems.”

Vivian was surprised that her spoiled, self-centered son would make such a selfless gesture. But she was upset thinking that Asher believed his only value was tied to the fortune—or misfortune—of his family. As if he had no inherent value and Bridget was just with him for money. Was his self-esteem that low? And if it was, did it explain why he seemed to not even try to keep up with Leonard in the business?

Vivian realized she was guilty of this thinking herself. She’d stewed for months over her belief that Bridget was just a gold digger until, well, until the night of the book club, when she saw another dimension to the young woman.

“I told him that I was totally supportive of him—like, literally supportive. I’m making money from my influencer sponsorships,” Bridget said.

Vivian still didn’t understand what that meant, but nonetheless she got the spirit of it.

“I’m sure he appreciates that,” Vivian said.

“No, he doesn’t. Just the opposite. He said he could never live with the idea of his wife making the money.”

“What?”

Where would Asher get such an outdated, sexist, ridiculous attitude? Looking around the room as Bridget dabbed at her face with more tissues, she found her answer in the family photos arranged on the sideboard. In frame after frame, Leonard stared back at her. Leonard.

Vivian shook her head and turned to Bridget, whose pale eyes were shadowed with smudges of makeup.

“I’ll talk to him,” Vivian said.

She might not have her own mother to go to for advice, but she was a mother herself. And it was time to give it. She never imagined she would willingly be in a position to try to save Asher’s relationship with Bridget Muldoon, but that was exactly what she was going to do.

---

Leah sat propped up in bed, leafing through the pages of Scruples. She’d gone back to reread the part where Billy realized her store was failing and had to accept an entire new direction from an outsider. At first, Billy thought she’d rather just shutter the whole thing than change course. But ultimately, Billy was her father’s daughter:

Billy began to exercise her father’s Winthrop characteristics: total dedication to a cause, stern self-discipline, the willingness to struggle toward achievement at all costs . . .

Leah was nervous to tell her father her ultimate strategy for the winery. But while he might be determined to say no, she was just as determined to change his mind.

She would ease into her ideas. First, she’d get him used to the idea of producing a rosé. Then, only after he was totally on board with that, she’d drop the real bombshell: All rosé. Only rosé. A vineyard catering to women.

The only question was timing. When to drop the bombshell?

“Sooner is better than later,” Steven said, climbing into bed next to her.

“How soon?”

Steven pulled the book from her hands and leaned in to kiss her on the cheek. “He seemed receptive at the meeting today. And you said he’ll be making plans with Chris about tank space soon.”

He was right. Any delay was just stalling. There was no room for fear in this situation. Or, rather, there was no room to act or not act out of fear.

“I’m going to find him right now,” she said, getting out of bed.

“Now? I didn’t mean now . . .”

Leah tied her robe around her waist as she headed down the hall. She reached her parents’ bedroom only to hear her mother deep in conversation with Bridget. Ordinarily, that would have given her pause, but she was completely focused on finding Leonard.

She checked all around the house and only noticed the pool deck light was on when she walked through the kitchen and saw it through the window.

Leonard sat in a lounge chair, a blanket over his lap, staring out into the distance. He held a tumbler of amber liquid in his hand. He looked ten years older than the man who had held court at the production meeting that morning.

“Dad,” Leah said quietly, so as not to startle him. He turned to her slowly, seeming dazed. “Got a minute?”

He made a sweeping gesture with his arm, either indicating endless time or infinite space—it was tough to tell. Either way, she took it as an opening.

“Good meeting today,” she said, sitting in the chair next to him. The pool water rippled in the breeze, the color taking on a silvery cast in the moonlight. Leonard didn’t say anything. He just looked at her, his dark eyes sunken and shrouded by the deep creases in his face.

Her father had always seemed indomitable, and even as she prepared to seize the chance to change the direction of the vineyard, a part of her still wanted to believe that he was.

“Dad, I have to be honest with you: we need to make a bold move. And that move should be all-in on rosé.” So much for easing into the idea!

“Is that right?” he said, rubbing his jaw. Her father was always meticulously clean-shaven, but the past few days she’d noticed stubble, his face in perpetual white shadow.

“Yes,” she said. “And that means producing only rosé, catering directly to the women—and increasingly large groups of women—who have been our primary customers all summer.”

“Is that all?” he said. She couldn’t tell if he was amused or aggravated. He sat straighter in the lounge chair and placed his glass on the ground by his feet.

She took a breath. “We need to sell our whites to bring in cash—and, Dad, this is the hard part—we need to buy reds to increase our production. I know that means we won’t be an estates winery, but what we gain—”

“Enough.” Leonard held up his hand.

She sank back in her chair, her heart pounding. At least she’d said it. She’d put it out there. Of course he wasn’t going to agree right away. But she believed in her position, and she was willing and able to defend it, no matter how many tense conversations it took.

“I appreciate your candor,” Leonard said. “And your thoughts—as misguided as they are. But now I must be honest with you.”

“Okay,” she said, frustrated but not surprised that his immediate response was to tell her how wrong she was.

“Even if you have the right strategy, which I doubt, we can’t make it to the spring to find out.”

“What do you mean?”

“The soonest we can sell the new vintage is roughly March. There’s not enough money to get us there. Even if I sell the house, it could take months and we have no operational funds. Or anything else we might sell, we can’t put our last dollars into a winery that can’t sustain itself. As they say, you can’t throw good money after bad.”

“But . . . the meeting . . .”

He nodded, a pained expression on his face. “I wanted to believe differently. Up until this morning I still thought there was a way out. But the numbers tell me otherwise. And so I put on a show. For the staff. Maybe for myself.”

She couldn’t believe it. She was too late.

Maybe Steven was right: she should have asserted herself twenty-five years earlier. But unlike in the books she’d been reading, in real life, women let themselves be pushed aside. They acted like good girls. They didn’t make waves.

That was why she loved those old novels so much: the heroines had balls. They didn’t ask permission, and they didn’t beg forgiveness. They were bosses. Fine, it was fiction. But why couldn’t it also be a playbook?

Leah knew she should be sad. A part of her wished she could cry.

But she was too angry.