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“And if he figures it out?” Alana asked.

Otto blinked up at her, that familiar twinkle in his eye. “And what would he figure out?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She placed her fork down and propped her elbows on the table with force to make her point. If Freya was allowed to skip dinner, then she’d break the rules too. “How our vineyard’s soil has magical capabilities that brings luck to anything that grows and anyone who consumes from it?”

That twinkle brightened as Otto shrugged, then focused back on his meal. “That would be a pretty wild conclusion for one person to make.”

Her grandfather was the one to discover the soil’s secrets.

Karl Marienkäfer was one of the thousands who’d fled Germany after the war. He’d loved his country, but he was also deeply unsettled by it. Any person who felt that another person was expendable, no matter the reasoning or the religious high ground they thought they walked on, was never a leader he would get behind. He was an experienced field hand in Rheingau, tending to vines and picking grapes at harvest, producing fine Riesling that was swiftly declining in a crumbling civilization. It was not much effort for him to pick up and decide to leave, to look for a fresh start.

When he arrived in New York, he heard rumblings from other German immigrants about a prospering wine region deeper within the state. They said the climate was cold. They said the lakes felt the same as the Rhine. They said there was a lot of Riesling. It was the only work he knew how to do, so he got on a bus.

At the time the producers had been few and far between, but Friedrich Kasner was the most respected. Karl planted himself at the man’s door two days later. He worked his way up in the fields and became a winemaker. Eventually, with his beautiful wife Ida and a baby boy on the way, he branched out on his own. He found a plot of unmanicured fields along Seneca lake and bought it. He built a house, and he built a vineyard. He worked in the Kasner vineyards in the mornings, and tended to his own in the afternoons.

He expected his freshly planted vines to take a couple of years to produce fruit worthy enough to make wine. Yet that summer, they grew at an unnatural speed. The plump grapes that hung from the young vines should have been overly tart, with too much acidity and not enough sugar. And yet, when Karl popped one in his mouth, it tasted perfect. The exact right balance. He made a small batch of Riesling and anticipated failure. Instead, the wine was exquisite, rivaling the types of dry and semi-sweet Rieslings he was familiar with in the Rheingau. It was impossible to explain, but Karl had an inkling his days in Friedrich Kasner’s fields were coming to an end.

That spring, as they sipped on their first vintage of Riesling and prepared for their next harvest, something else changed. Things at home seemed somehow easier. Dinners of traditional schnitzel or homemade spaetzle turned out perfectly. The house never seemed to have issues, despite its old bones and outdated electrical systems. And harvest consistently went well, no matter the weather or their environmental circumstances. Her father even recalled the first time he experienced the soil’s magic after sneaking a few grapes for a snack. He’d fallen from a tall sugar maple and didn’t break his arm, despite landing in an unnatural way. He was always safe, always laughing.

Alana sat on the porch that evening, replaying the stories she had heard countless times in her life. Her grandfather fled Germany in search of a new life, lost until he was found. Her mother was drawn to Ithaca for the same reasons, escaping her restrictive Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn in search of freedom.

Maybe that’s what she’d needed—to leave and become completely lost. Maybe she’d needed to walk those same paths and return to this place that had afforded her family so much prosperity.

Maybe returning would finally tap some of that luck.

She pushed on her toe to rock back and forth in her mother’s favorite chair, glancing over her shoulder when the screen door creaked, wary that it was Freya. Her sister never showed up at the dinner table, didn’t even bother to come downstairs and grab a plate or help them wash the dishes. Alana braced herself for a chewing out, especially after the way she’d up and left her. But it wasn’t Freya coming to join her.

Otto handed her a cup of steaming lavender tea. She took it with a smile as her father settled into the rocking chair next to her. She sipped her drink, tasting the floral orange blossom honey mixed in. Both products of the soil—a lavender patch close to the water, and a small beehive by the grove next to the guest shed. She wanted the tea to fill her with luck, to make their impending conversation easier, to make things with Freya go as smoothly as they had with Sophie. But the soil failed her when she’d needed it the most. She expected it to fail her now.

“So, where did you go?” Otto asked.

Alana worked her bottom lip. “Everywhere, and nowhere.”

He tilted his head with a frown. “Lana.”

She sighed, curling her fingers around the warm mug. “I started in Chicago, then moved west. Denver. Bozeman. Reno for a brief moment, then California.”

“Did you work?”

“Odd jobs here and there.” She shrugged. “I couldn’t hold anything for too long. I was living on couches, had to keep moving.”

Otto’s exhale was long. “I was worried sick, kid.”

She pinched her lips, then brought her mug to them. “I’m sorry I didn’t call.”

He rubbed his forehead.

“I needed time, Papa.”

“You could have at least told me where you were. That you were alive.”

“No news is good news, right?”

“Lana.”

Exhaling, she set down her tea, tucking her knees inside her sweatshirt. She turned her eyes on the burnt-orange sun as it vanished along the horizon, giving the grape leaves a misty blue glow. “I’m alive, and I’m here.”

“Here for good, or will you be leaving us again?”