Isabel came out before I cut the engine, carrying an expensive black suitcase with her initials embossed in gold. She looked exhausted. Her face was pale in the winter light, and her movements were slow and deliberate, as though everything hurt. The cashmere sweater and jeans she wore hung looser than I remembered, and the dark circles under her eyes made her look fragile in ways that made my chest ache.
I got out and moved to take her bag. “You feeling okay?”
“I’m fine.” She wouldn’t look at me, her gaze fixed somewhere over my left shoulder.
I loaded her bag into the rear seat, but before I could go around and open her door, she was already in the passenger seat.
“So—”
“Kick.” She turned to face me. “I really don’t want to talk. I’m just not up to it.”
I nodded, put the truck in gear, and headed toward the highway. The quiet between us felt oppressive, but she didn’t want to talk. I doubted that meant she’d want to listen instead.
I glanced over at her and how her hands were folded on her lap as though she was holding herself together through sheer will.
As we continued in painful silence, I got lost in thought, remembering earlier this month in her father’s cellar. We’d gone to retrieve the private family reserve bottles needed to complete the Christmas Blessing Wine, only to discover they were gone. Isabel had taken them.
Facing her father, Snapper, Saffron, and me, she’d broken down and confessed everything. How I’d told her about the auction—about Snapper paying Saffron to bid against her for years just to avoid taking her on a date. How hurt and angry she’d been. How she’dcome to the cellar that night, intending to smash every bottle, to destroy any chance they’d have of finishing the wine.
But she hadn’t been able to go through with it.
I’d watched it all unfold, knowing I caused it. Knowing my big mouth had nearly cost Saffron’s family everything.
I’d tried talking to Isabel afterward. Tried to apologize for the things I said to her, to explain that I was wrong, that I’d lashed out because I knew what was at stake.
She looked right through me as though I were made of glass.
I glanced at her now. She was staring out the window, her profile sharp against the gray sky. The Isabel I’d known—the one who’d sat with me in that bar a year ago and let her walls down—felt distant. Unreachable.
Things between her and me had changed after last year’s Wicked Winemakers’ Ball. I’d gone to a bar after the annual fundraising event, needing a drink and some distance from the circus. The bachelor auction my sister—the ball’s chairperson—forced me to participate in always left me tense. I hated watching my brothers and friends paraded around while women bidridiculous amounts of money for the privilege of one date. More, I hated having to do it myself.
A half hour later, I was on my second beer when Isabel walked in. The red gown she’d had on earlier was gone, traded for jeans and a sweater. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders instead of being pinned up in the elaborate style it had been in. We’d sat on opposite ends of the bar at first, both pretending the other didn’t exist.
But she didn’t leave. And eventually, I gave in and moved to the stool beside her.
At first, we bickered with the same rhythm we always did—sharp and cutting. Then she ordered another glass of wine, and I made some comment concerning her bidding on Snapper again. Instead of the snippy comeback I expected, her shoulders dropped like the fight went out of her.
“You want to know the real reason I do it?” She turned to look at me, and her eyes were different. Vulnerable in ways I’d never witnessed. “It’s not about Snapper. It’s never been about Snapper.”
I waited, unsure where this was going.
“It’s aboutwinning.” She laughed, but the sound was hollow, empty of humor. “Pathetic, right? I havemoney, status, all of it, and I’m spending thousands of dollars a year just to feel as though I’m not invisible.”
The admission hit me hard. Because I’d seen it then—her loneliness and the practiced smile she showed everyone while connecting with no one. The daughter raised by boarding schools and absent parents, shipped off so they could travel the world without the burden of a child.
She tucked a strand of blonde hair behind her ear, and the gesture was so unguarded, so unlike the polished princess everyone else saw, that my entire perception of her shifted in that moment.
“You’re not invisible,” I said.
She met my eyes and held my gaze. “Yes, I am. Why do you think I’m sitting alone in a bar?”
That night had started something neither of us understood. Over the next year, we’d stayed in occasional contact. A text when one of us thought of the other. A conversation when I was in town between rodeos. Nothing serious or complicated, just an unexpected connection neither of us wanted to let go.
Until the day after the same event this year, when I’d destroyed it by saying things I couldn’t take back.
“How long will you be in Italy?” I asked when we were halfway to the airport.
“I don’t know. A while,” she said quietly.
