‘Wow,’ Fiona breathed.
She had practically stuck her whole face into the glass, alternately sniffing and sipping. ‘It’s amazing. Notes of cherry, notes of chocolate… it reminds me of black forest cake.’
‘Oh, I like that,’ Satoshi said. ‘I’m going to pinch that for the tasting notes.’
‘Not too sweet, though. It feels like it could really tip over, in the wrong hands, but it’s perfectly balanced.’
Fiona and Satoshi started talking – something about skins and residual sugars – but I tuned them out. Something was niggling at the corner of my brain; an irritating, persistent itch.
Then it clicked. ‘Bibliophile?’
‘That’s the name of our wine label,’ Satoshi said. ‘Tsundoku is the bar. Bibliophile is the wine.’
He showed me the bottle.Bibliophilewas written on the label in the same elegant script as the window engraving and the chalk-board, underneath a picture of a messy stack of books.
‘Are you familiar with it?’ he asked.
‘A little.’ I traced my thumb over the stack of books, that same stack Chess had said reminded her of me. ‘My sister is a big fan. She’s in your wine club.’
I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. What were the fucking chances?
I was not a superstitious person. Devoting my life to studying stories had hammered home to me how much people used them to make sense of their lives. There was some innate tendency in humans that made us read our lives like they were books, scripted by some higher power.A tall, dark, handsome stranger will enter your life,we might hear, and off we’d go, reading too much into an innocent conversation with the man behind us in the coffee line.
I knew, intellectually, that it was just a bottle of wine. No higher power had guided me here. It was just a coincidence. Iknewthis.
And yet all I could perceive it as was a symbol. A reminder of the sister who loved me so, so dearly – and whose love I had flung back in her face like it was garbage.
‘Sadie?’ Fiona asked. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, yes.’ I could not fall apart here,I could not. If there was one thing I owed this woman it was not to dump more emotional labour on her. ‘I’m fine. I just… my sister is my only family, and I miss her, you know?’
‘Oh, of course you do!’ Fiona put her hand on her heart. ‘She’ll have to come visit. You can bring her here!’
‘Name the date and I’ll lay on the full Tsundoku experience,’ Satoshi said. ‘I could even make Isamu come and run one of our meet-the-winemaker nights, if she likes his wines that much. Or you could go out to the vineyard for a weekend. We have a restaurant and a cellar door there and our mother manages a little B&B.’
‘Maybe,’ I said faintly.
He rapped his knuckles gently against the table. ‘I’ll leave you ladies to it. Enjoy.’
‘Thank you, Satoshi,’ Fiona said. ‘It’s so lovely to be back.’
He smiled fondly at her. ‘It’s so lovely to have you back.’
Then he was gone and I was alone with Fiona, who was beaming at me again from the other side of the table.
‘This place is so nice,’ I said, because if she asked me about Chess I was going to cry, and if she asked me about Jonah I might turn into the Hulk. ‘How did you discover it?’
‘Oh, it’s not a very interesting story.’ She flapped a hand dismissively. ‘Hobart’s small. The eastern shore is even smaller. It would have been hardernotto discover it. I can’t even remember the first time I came here, to be honest. Matt and I come here for date nights all the time – well,camehere, anyway, before… you know.’
Nice work, Shaw. Remind the abandoned woman of her shithead husband. 10/10, perfect, no notes.
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be, don’t be.’ Fiona made the dismissive hand-flapping gesture again. ‘Matt didn’t ruin it for me, that’s the important thing.He might have taken just about everything else, but Tsundoku is still mine.’
Well, that was bleak as hell.
‘Cheers to that,’ I said, holding up my glass.
