‘Mostly. My dad is a big-time professor at Eastern Sydney University. My mum dropped out of her PhD to marry him. Both my brothers have PhDs – Elias is a historian, Jonah did English like my dad – and I was expected to do one too.’
‘Bookish,’ I said, remembering that first time we’d met.
‘Very.’ Fiona leaned her chin against her hand. ‘But one of the first things I ever remember knowing – like,knowingin my bones – was that academia wasn’t for me. They were furious when I told them I was dropping out of my undergrad, but I knew I didn’t have the passion for it. Not like they did.’
‘That seems pretty unfair. Did they want you to be miserable?’
‘In their defence, they thought I was dropping out to get married. The one person whose footsteps Iwasn’tsupposed to follow in was my mother.’ She offered me a grin. ‘For all their giant brains, none of my family could get their heads around the fact that correlation wasn’t the same as causation, that I was dropping outandgetting married. And it put this fire in my belly to prove that I could live just as good a life as any of them – better, even – even though they thought I was making a completely idiotic choice.’
She inhaled the bouquet of her wine. ‘So I don’t know what it’s like to have that all-consuming hunger to do something – especially when that something is an extremely difficult qualificationin the family business. But I really do understand wanting to prove a point, even if the people around you think it’s a terrible idea.’
‘It sounds to me,’ I said, ‘like you’re the wisest one in your entire family, Fiona Fisher-Sinclair.’
She laughed, that champagne laugh of hers that had endeared her to me from the start. ‘I’ll drink to that.’
I clinked my glass against hers. ‘Cheers.’
‘Wait, wait, wait.’
I paused, glass to my lips.
‘I can’t believe you’re planning to sit for the ultimate wine exam and you don’t know that you have to look me in the eye when we toast!’ she said. ‘Otherwise it’s seven years of bad sex.’
I chuckled, pulling the turquoise frames of my glasses down my nose so I could exaggeratedly look her in the eye. ‘The whole Kieran breakup is still so fresh that I’m not in a place to worry about that for myself—’ I clinked my glass against hers again ‘—but I wouldn’t want to doom you to a fate like that.’
‘Thank you.’ Fiona winked at me as she drank. ‘Mama’s got needs.’
It was another day on which I did not fall in love with her – but as I closed up that night, mopping the floor and cleaning down, I did idly wonder what needs Fiona had, and whether her husband could possibly be satisfying them.
The time I did
The night it happened, falling in love was the furthest thing from my mind.
Mostly, I was busy worrying about my junior sommelier Birdie. Isamu had insisted on me hiring another qualified somm so I didn’t have to run every single shift myself, freeing up time for me to study. Realistically, though, Birdie was taking up more of my time than she was saving. I didn’t want to fire her – she was a lovelyperson, and she was supporting a sick mother – but she’d worked for me for three months now and I still couldn’t trust her to run the floor alone, because her service skills had a nasty tendency to fall off a cliff when things got busy.
Tuesdays were usually quiet, though, and we didn’t have many bookings – Fiona and Matt were one of the few – so when the other staff member rostered on had called in sick, I’d been confident that Birdie and I would be fine on our own. However, a string of walk-ins had taken us to capacity, and we were run off our feet.
Birdie had been looking increasingly stressed as the bar filled up, so I’d told her to focus on waiting tables while I looked after beverage service. I was trying to keep an eye on her at the same time, but for all my years of hospitality experience, I was, alas, still only human.
‘Mate, come here a second.’ Matt beckoned me over to their table with one finger.
I gave myself a quarter of a second to exhale and adjust the cuffs of my crisp white dress shirt before pasting on my best customer service smile. This was not the first – or the second, or the tenth – time Matt had summoned me like this, the crook of his finger tracing a line between entitlement and condescension. He’d looked me up and down the first time he’d ever come into Tsundoku, eyes passing over my pin-dotted waistcoat and hot pink glasses frames before getting stuck on my hair.Aren’t you a bit old to be bleaching your hair like a surfie teen?he’d asked.
He dropped a ton of money whenever he was here, though, so I had long since resolved to take it on the chin. Forty-something white finance bros were an occupational hazard when you ran a wine bar. Plus, this particular finance bro came as part of a package deal.
Fiona smiled at me as I approached their table, eyes crinkling at the corners, and I couldn’t resist smiling back before I turned my gaze to her husband. ‘What can I do for you, Mr Sinclair?’
‘I appreciate you’re busy,’ Matt said, ‘but we’ve been waiting nearly half an hour for our food, and I’m not convinced your girl has even taken our order to the kitchen.’
‘Let me check on that for you. I’ll pour you another glass of wine in the meantime, on the house. The same again?’
‘That would be lovely,’ Fiona said. ‘Thank you, Satoshi.’
I ducked back behind the bar. Matt had bought them both a glass of the Bibliophile Noriko reserve pinot noir, the most expensive wine Isamu made. They’d finished my open bottle, so I grabbed a fresh one and took my wine knife out of my pocket.
I was just about to open it when there was an incredible crash, a scream, and Birdie burst into tears.
Everyone froze. Including me.
