Blush - Jamie Brenner Page 0,118

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.

Fifty-five

When Asher didn’t show up for breakfast, not even at his typical late hour, Vivian went up to his room. There, she found another unhappy person wrestling with a suitcase. Asher was messily unpacking a bag that still had clothes in it from a previous trip. A different suitcase, empty, was open on the bed.

Bridget, she understood. But where on earth did he think he was going?

“What are you doing?” she said, closing the door behind her.

“Mother, I need some space,” he said.

When Vivian gave birth to a son, her firstborn, she had assumed he would be just like his father. She had been twenty-two years old, without any grasp of the reality that children are their own people from the moment they take their first breath.

To be fair, she wasn’t alone in this. Leonard had clearly believed that all he would need to do was set his son loose in the fields, and the winemaking that was in his blood would do the rest to ensure that he grew up to be Leonard’s right hand and heir apparent. But Vivian realized early on that Asher was much more like herself; his beauty made it tempting to be more decorative than productive. He