1
LOUISA
Daddy had been in the ground eleven days, and Forrest was already talking market strategy.
I wasn't surprised.
I wasn't even angry. Not exactly. Anger required something to still be unexpected.
The conference room at Fentress & Sons had been repurposed for the meeting—the long oak table cleared of the usual tasting flights, the glencairns pushed to one end, a stack of reports taking their place. The exposed brick caught the pale spring light through the tall windows, and the smell was what it always was in this building: char and grain and the faint sweetness of new make spirit soaking into the wood of the walls over decades.
I had grown up breathing that smell. It lived in my clothes, my hair, the back of my throat.
I loved it the way you love something that has also cost you a great deal.
"The spring release is on track," Forrest said, not looking up from the report in front of him. "We stay aggressive with thesingle barrel program through summer. I want to get ahead of the festival season. If we're going to make noise this year, it starts now."
He said it the way he said most things—like it had already been decided, and this meeting was simply the formality of letting the room know.
I had my own copy of the report. Had written most of it, actually. Compiled the yield data, ran the projections, cross-referenced barrel inventory against our aging schedule. Twelve pages. My name wasn't on it.
It never was.
"Louisville Magazine wants to do a feature," Wade added. He had his phone out, scrolling with one thumb the way he always did in meetings — half-present, fully confident that whatever he missed would get handled. It always had been. "Human interest angle. Family carrying on after losing Reg. Brothers keeping the legacy alive."
Brothers.
I looked down at my coffee.
It was a good cup. I'd made it myself from the beans I kept in my desk drawer, because the shared pot in the breakroom tasted like motor oil and nobody but me seemed to notice or care. Small rebellions. I had a collection of them.
"Get Hayden on the phone," Forrest said. "She does good work."
"Already texted her," Wade said.
I turned a page. "The Covington account is going to push back on the new pricing. I've been tracking their order patterns for six months. They're price-sensitive on the mid-tier and they'll walk if we go up more than four percent."
Forrest looked at me then. He had Daddy's eyes—pale gray, steady, the kind that made people feel heard even when they weren't actually listening.
"I think they'll hold," he said. Not dismissively. Just certainly. The way you speak when you've already decided the other person is probably wrong but you're too well-raised to say so directly.
"I have the data," I said.
"Lou." He said my name gently. That was somehow worse than if he'd been sharp about it. "You always do great work on this stuff."
This stuff.
Twelve pages of analysis. Three years of market trend data. The pricing model I'd built from scratch after our last consultant charged us forty thousand dollars for a spreadsheet I could have produced in a weekend.
This stuff.
"The Covington account represents eleven percent of our mid-tier volume," I said, keeping my voice even. Measured. The way I had learned to keep it in rooms like this one. "If they walk, we absorb that loss going into summer. I'm not saying don't raise prices. I'm saying four percent, not six."
Wade looked up from his phone. "Didn't their buyer change? New guy?"
"Terrell Miller. He came over from Wilderness Trail. He's aggressive on margin and he doesn't have the relationship history with us that Dave Kowalski had. Which is exactly why I flagged it."
A beat of silence. Outside, a forklift moved through the barrel yard, the low mechanical groan of it carrying through the glass. Beyond the rick houses, the Kentucky hills were going green—that sharp, almost electric green that only happened for about three weeks before it deepened and settled into summer. I'd always loved it.
