The SUV stopped, and the man beside me opened my door.
“Your father is inside,” he said. “He’s looking forward to seeing you.”
I climbed out on legs that didn’t feel steady. I stood there for a moment, staring at the house that should have been mine, and felt something crack open in my chest.
Not grief. Not anymore.
Rage.
Baron was waitingin the room I remembered my mother referring to as the parlor.
He stood by the fireplace, one hand resting on the mantle, the other holding a glass of what looked like whiskey. He was dressed immaculately, as always—dark suit, silk tie, shoes polished to a mirror shine. He looked like a man receiving guests for brunch, not one who’d just had his pregnant daughter kidnapped.
“Isabel.” He set the glass down and crossed to me, arms open as if expecting an embrace.
I stepped back before he could touch me. “You told me you sold it,” I spat at him.
“I said what needed to be said at the time.” He lowered his arms, his expression smoothing into something patient. Paternal. The face he wore when he was about to explain why he knew better than everyone else. “You were twenty-two. You’d just lost your mother. You were in no state to manage a property of this size.”
“So you lied to me.”
“I protected you.”
“From what?”My tone hardened. I couldn’t stop it. “From my own inheritance? From the one thing my mother left me—the one thing that was supposed to bemine?”
“From yourself.” Baron’s tone hardened. “You would have run this place into the ground within a year. You had no experience, no discipline, no understanding of what it takes to manage a working vineyard. Your mother’s family made the mistake of leaving it to you without conditions. I corrected that mistake.”
“Youstoleit from me.”
“I held it in trust for you, Isabel. You can cease these dramatics.”
“In trust for me?You watched me grieve this place—watched me cry after you told me it was gone—and you said nothing. You let me believe the last piece of my mother’s family had been sold to strangers, and the whole time, it was sitting here. Empty. Abandoned. Because you’d rather let it rot than let me have something that was mine.”
“The property required significant investment. You weren’t capable?—”
“I wasn’t capable because you neverletme be capable.” As I spoke, it felt like a dam breaking after years of pressure. “Every time I tried to do something on my own, you undermined me. You kept me dependent on you, and then you used that dependence as proof that I couldn’t survive without you.”
Baron’s expression flickered. Just for a second. “Everything I did was for your own good.”
“No. Everything you did was so you could control me. You made me into the spoiled princess everyone sees—and then you punished me for being her. You created the very thing you claim to despise.”
I gestured at the room around us. The dusty furniture. The faded wallpaper. The portraits of my mother’s family hanging on walls that should have been mine to care for.
“How could you?”
“I did what I always do—saved you from the embarrassment of failing publicly, the way you’ve failed at everything else.”
He might as well have slapped me. I’d heard this same rhetoric my entire life. You’re not ready. You’re not capable. You’re not good enough. Hearing it all again now felt different. Sharper. More brutal.
Because I wasn’t the same woman I’d been a year ago. Six months ago. Even six weeks ago.
“I’ve been working,” I said. “At Whitmore. Actually working. In the vineyard. With the crew.” I held up my hands, showing him the calluses on my palms. “For the first time in my life, I have proof that I can do something other than spend your money. And you know what? I’m good at it. Thomas says I have excellent instincts. The crew respects me. I’ve earned something real, something that has nothing to do with you.”
Baron’s gaze flicked to my hands, then back to my face. His expression didn’t change. “Playing in the dirtdoesn’t make you a vintner, Isabel. It makes you a dilettante. A rich girl pretending to be something she’s not.”
“I’m not pretending anymore. That’s what scares you, isn’t it? That I might actually become someone who doesn’t need you. Someone who can stand on her own.”
“You got yourself pregnant.” He sounded bitter, cold. “By a rodeo cowboy with no ambition and no future. You ran away from your family, your responsibilities, your life—and you think playing farmhand for a few weeks makes you independent?”
