At Wits' End - Kenzie Reed Page 0,32
me a lifetime of devotion. I was sold. He quit working for the Witlockes and, since he was dating me, my aunt hired him to work at her winery. Big mistake. It turned out that he hadn’t actually quit working for the Witlockes – they’d fired him after he hit on both Jamie and Toni, repeatedly, while dating a yoga teacher in town, and also money had kept disappearing from the till at their winery.
And none of those A-hole Witlockes warned us. I can’t blame Donovan for that one, because he was in L.A., but his parents knew and didn’t say a word. They just let a lech and a suspected thief work for us, date me, and propose to me. Then the police came looking for him one day because of an out-of-state warrant that he’d also neglected to mention. I tried to call him, sure it was a misunderstanding. Nope. He never answered, because he’d skipped town – along with my aunt and uncle’s pickup truck and a hundred cases of our best vintage of Syrah ever, and approximately ten thousand dollars from the safe. He’d left with the yoga teacher.
It was mortifying. It was devastating. Everyone in town knew within days, and I looked like an absolute fool. Cops located Simon in New Jersey a few weeks later, in a hotel room with two hookers. The money was gone, the wine was gone, the yoga teacher was gone. He had overdosed on cocaine but they revived him. He went to jail, but the damage was done.
The one bright spot in all of that was that my mother, for once, came through for us. She had received a big cash settlement from one of her husbands. She replaced the stolen ten grand, and she paid for me to start over in Seattle, giving me the funds to go back to college and major in accounting.
And for years now, numbers have been my happy place.
Today I’m finding no solace in numbers. Looking through my aunt’s books is giving me a full-fledged anxiety attack. I guess it’s because it’s personal. For once I wish I could make the figures on the page tell me some pretty lies, but the fact is, there is more money going out than coming in. Sales are good, but they’re down from last year. We need to hire several new employees. We need a cellar rat of our own to help the winemaker who’s worked with Aunt Fernanda the last several years, we desperately need more people to operate the winery, we need a marketing director…the list goes on. The property sale won’t be going through until September first. How the hell are we going to survive until then?
This vineyard is everything to Aunt Fernanda. Originally she’d hoped to leave it to me, but since the whole Simon disaster, there’s been talk of her leaving it to Sara. Either way, it’s the vineyard that she and Nuccio built together with their own hands fifty years ago, it was their pride and their passion, and I believe, as she does, it’s a legacy worth preserving.
The problem is, she’s won’t modernize. She sees any change as an insult to Nuccio’s legacy, and she’s also just an old-fashioned grump. She’s refused to embrace anything beyond the most minimal marketing. She pretty much expects people to show up at her doorstep and buy her wine without any promotion whatsoever. That worked for decades, but Oregon has become a world-class destination for wine, and the winemaking business has turned ferociously competitive. The town of Greenvale grows ever more crowded, more vineyards spring up every year, and what used to work just doesn’t anymore.
We can’t survive the season like this.
My pity party is interrupted when the office door swings open and Donovan walks in. He’s changed from his jogging shorts and T-shirt into khaki slacks and a blue button-down shirt and loafers. He’s always so perfectly, effortlessly put together. Annoys the bejeepers out of me.
I quickly swipe at my eyes with the back of my hand.
“Hey. What’s up?” I sniffle, ducking my head in an attempt to hide it.
“I’m going to the grocery store to buy some food that doesn’t need refrigeration, to tide us over until next week. Are you crying?” he asks.
I sniffle agajn and hide my nose with my hand. “Dust. Allergies.”
“Lies. Bullshit.” He pulls up a chair and sits down. “Talk to me.”
Great. Mr. Success wants to dine on my misery. I already know that his family’s