He didn’t leave Marlborough for that whole harvest. He spent his days in the vineyard helping to salvage what could be salvaged. He worked the vines until his skin blistered from the cold and his fingers were calloused and until he was too exhausted to think.
Then he stayed up all night thinking, the same questions working their way through his head: How was he going to get Hannah and Bailey out of the mess he was responsible for? How was he going to ensure they were safe?
These weren’t theoretical questions. These were the only questions.
It might seem random that he ended up in New Zealand—that maybe he was just trying to get as far away as he could. But it wasn’t random.
Owen and his mother had lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico, when Owen was a baby—back when his mother was still hoping his father would want to spend time with him—back when she thought that he would come to deserve being a father.
By the time he was two (by the time Owen remembered anything), his mother had given up and had relocated the two of them to Texas. Fredericksburg, Texas—the heart of Texas wine country, lush and historic, and eighty miles outside of Austin.
Shortly after they first moved there, Owen’s mother became friends with a local vintner named Tom. From what Owen remembered about him, he was tall and wiry with a thick mustache. And he was kind. That was the primary thing that Owen remembered. Tom was always nice to Owen, and always so nice to his mother. Which, even as a young boy, he knew was new to her in a way it shouldn’t have been.
Tom wasn’t a huge part of their daily life. His mother didn’t have time for a man to be a huge part of anything. Her primary focus was Owen. Owen always felt that focus in what his mother said, and in what she did. In everything about how she lived her life. She got a job as an assistant teacher at his local elementary school. So her hours matched Owen’s. She supplemented her pay by waiting tables at a bar near UT-Austin on the weekend.
She’d leave Owen in the John M. Kuehne Physics Mathematics Astronomy (PMA) Library during her afternoon shifts. She made friends with the research librarian, who kept an eye on Owen. Owen would sit at a table quietly, drinking an apple juice and working on his math homework and the supplemental math workbooks his mother managed to afford for him. He loved math. It wasn’t a punishment for him, spending his afternoons this way. It was a victory.
But even with both of his mother’s jobs, they couldn’t afford a lot of extras. Certainly, his mother didn’t seem to treat herself to a lot.
Maybe this is why it was notable to Owen—and probably why he remembered—that his mother would get a case of wine after every harvest from a small-batch biodynamic vineyard in Marlborough.
Billow Lake Private Select Wines. A beautiful old barn on the label, a vineyard laid out behind it. A single bottle of their highly rated pinot noir retailing for upward of 280 NZD.
Owen never asked his mother how they could afford such nice wine. He didn’t want her to misunderstand and feel guilty—especially not when he was glad that she was treating herself to anything. But she volunteered it at some point. She volunteered that the wine was a present from the label’s winemaker:Do you remember my friend who used to live nearby? He moved to New Zealand. Do you remember my friend Tom?
The way she saidfriendwas like something he never heard coming out of his mother’s mouth, like a prayer.
More than three decades later, Owen opened the door to Billow Lake Wines’ tasting room.
It was in that old barn. The barn had since been renovated—and was large and clean. There was a long bar for the tastings, a series of two-tops scattered throughout. There was a young guy wiping down the bar top in a flannel shirt and jeans.
He looked up and smiled in Owen’s direction.
“I’m sorry, bro…” he said, his accent thick and warm and friendly. “Tastings are done for the day.”
That was when Tom walked out from the backroom, carrying a box of wine. He saw Owen standing there, and he did a double take. That double take alone brought a strange comfort to Owen—the only real comfort to Owen that he’d had since leaving Bailey. Since leaving Hannah.
“Hey, there,” Tom said to him.
Owen nodded in his direction. “Hello.”
The bartender looked back and forth between them, confused, Tom quickly motioned in Owen’s direction, figuring out a way toturn whatever weirdness the bartender might have felt in the room, moving around in the air.
“Go ahead and introduce yourself to Simon…” he said to Owen. “We’re not formal around here.”
Owen thought of the name on his passport. It was an Irish passport. Lucas Timothy McQuade.
“I’m Lucas,” he said. “But I go by Luke.”
“Luke’s going to be taking on Buckland’s old position,” Tom told Simon. “Set him up at the staff quarters. I’ll finish up here.”
“Fine, then,” Simon said. “I’ll just grab my stuff.”
When Simon disappeared into the back room, Tom turned back to Owen.
“After you freshen up, come back here and find me. I’ll take you to the vineyard, show you around.”
Owen nodded. “Will do.”
