eyes and let him see in mine the betrayal I felt. “Why are you making me promise this? It’s not going to work. I need someone who can do all the physical—”

“Yes or no? Give her one year. If it doesn’t go well, then let her go.”

“One year?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” I said dully. “She has one year.”

“You won’t regret it, Lucita.” He grasped my hand.

I already did. But I just held his tightly and said nothing.

It did not go down well when I told Quinn.

“So now I’ve got to take care of her, too?” He sounded disgusted as we left the hospital, heading for the parking lot. “Come on, Lucie. I can’t believe you agreed to do this.”

I ignored the “too.” “I didn’t have any choice. He and Sera ambushed me when I walked into his hospital room,” I said. “He was lying there on oxygen with tubes coming out of him and that damn machine beeping every few seconds. What could I do? Say no and then he’d have another heart attack? Let’s talk about it in the morning, okay? Why don’t we go home? It’s been a horrible day.”

“You go home.” He was curt. “I need a drink.”

“Where are you going?”

“Mom’s. See you tomorrow.”

He wasn’t talking about visiting his mother. Mom’s Place was a nightclub on the way to Bluemont, run by Vinnie Carbone, a guy I’d gone to high school with. Vinnie ran a low-budget, low-life operation, particularly when it came to the nearly nonexistent costumes for his waitresses and the dancers who swung around poles onstage. The joke about that particular strip joint was that all the men who hung out there told their wives or girlfriends they were going to “Mom’s,” which sounded fine. The first time.

A few seconds later the headlights of the El slashed my rearview mirror as he sped out of the parking lot.

I drove home and had my own mad-at-the-world drink.

It didn’t help.

Kit called the next morning as I was leaving the house for the winery. “Want to meet me for lunch?” she asked. “Got a couple of things I want to run by you about Randy Hunter.”

“Has he turned up?”

“Nope. Bobby says he’s now a person of interest in Georgia’s murder investigation.”

“So they’re not focusing on Ross anymore?”

“Ross isn’t off the hook, either, sweetie. Pick me up at my office. How about lunch at Tuskie’s at twelve- thirty?” she said. “And I heard about Hector. I’m so sorry.”

The El Camino was already in the parking lot when I pulled in. Next to it was a black Corvette with a license plate that read “Boneeta.”

Less than twelve hours after Hector twisted my arm to hire his daughter, she showed up ready to start work. How come Hector forgot to mention that she was already back from California?

And what was she doing here so fast? Alone with Quinn, who probably wasn’t giving her the newcomer’s welcome speech, either. I walked as quickly as I could through the courtyard to the barrel room.

If the airy light-filled villa was the yang of the vineyard, then the semi-underground cave where we made wine was the yin. About the length of an Olympic-sized swimming pool, it had thirty-foot ceilings, fieldstone walls, and four deep interconnected bays where most of our oak barrels lay undisturbed in cool darkness. As always, it smelled of the tangy, slightly acrid odor of fermenting wine.

In my mother’s day it had been a somewhat utilitarian place, reserved strictly for the serious business of making wine. But a few months ago I told Quinn I thought we should have a more elegant, atmospheric setting for the place and maybe start using the barrel room to host small private dinners. Quinn was the kind of guy who thought elegant meant you went all out and removed the wrapper from the butter before putting it on the table or actually used a glass when you wanted to drink anything besides wine or Scotch. He didn’t have a problem with pushing together a couple of unused wine casks and setting some folding chairs around them, so finally I told him I’d handle this.

A shop in Middleburg sold me an extra-long rectangular Scandinavian table with twenty matching chairs and our electrician hung swags of pinpoint spotlights so they cast overlapping arcs of white light above each seat. To keep it from looking too stark, Dominique designed centerpieces of gilded grapes and twining silk ivy meant to replicate our logo. Finally I hung my mother’s cross-stitched sampler with a quote from Plato—“No thing more excellent nor more valuable than wine was ever granted mankind by God”—on one of the arches between the bays. Quinn teased me that it looked like an operating room, but I ignored him. If my mother had seen it, I think she would have been happy.

I saw Quinn and Bonita through the large lab window at the far end of the barrel room as I let myself in the side door. Neither glanced up when it shut with a heavy metal clank, but with the hum and whir of fans, air- conditioning, and refrigeration equipment, they wouldn’t have heard Lee’s army arrive.

It had been three years since I last saw Bonita, just before she left for her freshman year of school and a few weeks prior to my accident. Back then she’d been all soft curves and baby fat, dressing in a way that Hector once described to me with some anger and disgust as llamativa. I figured out pretty fast that the loose English translation was “what are you waiting for?” followed by “you bet I will.”

Now, from what I could see, the softness had turned to angles and she looked well muscled as though she worked out regularly. The cocky confidence in the tilt of her head said she’d been around the block with the boys since she left home. Definitely more than once. She sat perched on a barstool, wearing shorts that matched the color of her car and a low-cut white tank top that set off her golden brown skin and glossy black hair. She was leaning toward Quinn, who was holding a beaker—probably more Chardonnay sampling—as he gestured to its contents a little too expansively, the way I’d seen him do when there was an attractive woman around who needed impressing. Judging by their body language, they were hitting it off just fine for a first meeting. In fact, maybe better than fine.

They both turned toward me when I walked through the door. Bonita’s eyes went immediately to my cane.

I cannot bear pity, even when it’s involuntary. She slid off her barstool and stammered hello. “You look great, Lucie. I mean, like, really great. I mean, not that you didn’t look great before and all…” Her eyes never left my cane.

“Thanks.” I cut her off before she could say “great” one more time. “Your father didn’t say you were back from school. Welcome home.”

Bonita brushed her shoulder-length hair off her face and I saw the dark circles under her eyes. She still looked embarrassed, but she was no longer staring at the cane. “I just got in on the red-eye a few hours ago. I’m still, you know, real punchy.”

“Have you been to the hospital yet?” I asked.

She tugged on the hem of her ultra-short shorts. “No. I’m on my way there now. My mom told me to stop by here first and, like, talk to you about work. I hope it’s okay.”

I caught Quinn’s eye. “Why don’t we talk about it some other time? Go see your dad and get some sleep. There’s no rush.”

She blushed. “I know Pop. He, like, probably twisted your arm to give me this job. He’s gonna ask me about it when I show up at the hospital. You know what a cabeza dura he is. So bull- headed.”

I couldn’t help smiling. “Tell him you’re not running the place just yet.”

Her color deepened. “Oh, God. That bad, huh? So, like, what did he ask you to do for me?”

“He wasn’t that specific,” I said.

“Look, honey, here’s the deal,” Quinn said, and I glanced at him warningly. “We’re giving your dad’s job to Manolo. He’ll take care of the equipment and the crew from now on. We haven’t exactly worked out what you’re going to do here.”

Before she could reply, I said, “How much of your studies did you complete at Davis before you dropped

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