She stared at the phone like it might bite her. Baron’s silence had finally broken, and whatever came next, the peaceful bubble we’d built was about to be tested.
I just had to make sure we were strong enough to survive it.
11
KICK
Isabel didn’t respond to Baron’s message that night, or the next day, or the day after that.
She threw herself into work instead. We had meetings with Thomas about the 1934 Society proposal, spent hours in the vineyard with the crew—albeit on a golf cart—and researching sustainable wine tourism kept her up past midnight. I recognized the pattern because I’d seen it before. When something scared her, she outran it.
I let her run, at least for a few days.
I understood the impulse. Baron’s message sat there like a grenade with the pin half pulled. Responding meant dealing with it, and ignoring it meant pretending, for a little while longer, that the outside world couldn’t reach us here.
But the outside world never stayed at bay forever.
On the fourth morning, I found her at the kitchen table before dawn with her laptop open. She’d beenthere for a while—the coffee in her mug had gone cold, and she’d surrounded herself with printouts and sticky notes covered in her neat handwriting.
“You’re not sleeping,” I said.
“I’m fine.”
“That wasn’t a question.” I dumped her coffee out and replaced it with a fresh one, poured one for myself, then took the chair across from hers. “Talk to me.”
She closed the laptop and, for a long stretch, just stared at the steam rising from her mug. The circles under her eyes were darker than I’d realized, and she’d lost weight too—not much, but enough that I noticed the sharper angles of her collarbone above the neckline of the long-sleeve T-shirt she wore.
“I don’t know what he wants,” she finally said. “That’s what’s driving me crazy. With Baron, there’s always an angle, always a transaction. He doesn’t just want tomeet. He wants something.”
“What do you think it is?”
“Control.” She wrapped her hands around the mug like she was cold, even though the cottage was warm. “Maybe he wants to see if I’ve learned my lesson. Maybe he wants to remind me what I’m givingup by staying here. Maybe he wants to parade his disappointment in front of me one more time so I really understand how badly I’ve failed him.”
Her bitterness stunned me.
“Or maybe—” She stopped.
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe he knows about the baby.”
The thought had crossed my mind too. Baron had resources, connections, and a network of people who owed him favors or feared his displeasure. If he’d wanted to find out what Isabel was doing at Whitmore, he could have, and he probably already had.
“Would that change anything for you?” I asked. “If he knows?”
“I don’t know.” She murmured. “That’s the problem, Kick. I don’t know what I want from him anymore. I used to think if I just did the right thing, said the right thing, proved I was worthy somehow—he’d finally…” She shook her head, leaving the sentence unfinished. “It doesn’t matter. It never mattered. Nothing I did was ever enough.”
I reached across the table and took her hand.
“What if we went to Paso Robles?” I suggested.
She looked up, startled. “What?”
“A long weekend. You could take some time to think about whether you want to meet with him—and if you do, where. Because him coming here doesn’t make sense.”
“No.” She almost laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Baron Van Orr walking onto Thomas Whitmore’s estate would be a disaster. Although I doubt he’d be permitted entry.”
“So if you decide to see him, it should be on neutral ground. Or at least somewhere that isn’t enemy territory for everyone involved.”
