No amount of my usual rituals had helped. I had drilled myself with flashcard after flashcard. I had done blind tasting after blind tasting, looking, smelling, tasting and spitting like an automaton, scratching black marks into deductive tasting grids. I had polished every glass in Tsundoku several times over. I had reorganised my already rigidly organised office ten times. In the dead of night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d gone downstairs to the bar and painstakingly re-genrefied and alphabetised all the books.
None of it worked, though. All I could think about was Fiona.
The things she’d said to me the other night made perfect sense. Of course she didn’t want to be the subject of any more gossip, not when she’d already been the subject of so much.
What did that mean for me, though?
I might fantasise about a future where I stood beside her in her kitchen and presented the milk to her daughters, but Fiona only saw one where she stood alone and tried, scarlet-faced, to explain whattoyboymeant. She’d jokingly said something about how kissing her at a school function couldn’t be good for my image, but it wasn’t hard to see that it was a polite inversion of what she actually meant: that kissing me wasn’t good for hers.
I’d taken a chance. Even though I knew it was too far, too fast, too soon, I’d told her I’d kiss her in front of the whole world if she wanted – and she’d just ushered me into the back seat, where not a soul could see us.
She was everything to me. But to her, I would only ever be – could only ever be – someone she had to explain away. A shameful secret, someone she’d clandestinely make out with but not hold hands with in public. A guilty pleasure she knew she shouldn’t indulge but couldn’t quite make herself quit.
And I couldn’t quit either. I’d kissed her back, because she’d started rambling about howsurelyI must be getting sick of her, and I’d panicked and pounced on her before she could follow that thought too much further. She’d already run once when she thought I’d kissed her purely for her benefit. I couldn’t let her do it again.
But she was going to. Unless I could miraculously age myself up a decade or so, she was going to, and—
I startled as my mother touched my hand. ‘You’re quiet, Sato. Are you feeling all right?’
I nodded. ‘I’m fine.’
She studied me. ‘No, you’re not.’
‘I am, Okasan, really.’ I made myself smile. ‘Tired, that’s all.’
Isamu put his chopsticks down. ‘And we need to talk about it.’
I resisted the urge to sigh. I’d walked right into that one.
‘I appreciate you stepping in the other night when I had to run out.’ I’d rehearsed this speech several times on the drive out to the vineyard. ‘I was lucky you were there. But that was an isolated incident. I can—’
‘It’s not an isolated incident, though.’ He gave me one of those looks, the ones that made me feel like a teenager again. ‘We have to talk about Birdie.’
I set my chopsticks down too. ‘We have talked about Birdie. Besides, she wasn’t even rostered on the other night. That had nothing to do with her.’
‘I talked to some of your staff.’ His gaze was unwavering. ‘It sounds like she’s absent more than she’s there.’
Of fuckingcoursehe’d snooped around.
‘Sato,’ he said, his tone gentler now, ‘if you can’t bring yourself to fire her, I’ll do it for you.’
‘I’m not going to fire her, Isamu!’ I snapped. ‘We’ve already had this conversation. You know my position.’
‘Why not, though? I get that she’s dealing with family stuff, but there has to be a limit. You can’t have someone on staff who isn’t doing their job. Particularly when it means you –you, who is insisting on studying for the hardest exam in the world – have to do it for her!’
I gritted my teeth.
‘Why?’ he demanded.
Because Fiona Fisher, more than a year ago, had sat across from me and said,Speaking of Birdie, you’re not going to fire her, are you?
‘It’s none of your business,’ I said.
‘It’ll be my business when you work yourself to death like Otosan!’
‘Isamu!’ Okasan said.
‘You are just fucking like him.’ Isamu jabbed a finger at me. ‘So set in your ways you won’t listen to anyone else. So convinced that only you can do things right that you won’t accept help. So fucking obsessive that it’s going to kill you!’
