Avery grimaced, and he laughed.
Six
ON SUNDAY EVENING, AFTER the tasting room was closed, Margot rummaged through the hall closet at the winery. She should be getting ready for the staff dinner that night, but she wanted to find that old landscaping plan for the winery she was sure she’d seen in Uncle Stan’s office years ago. She knew she didn’t have to do the landscaping just the way he’d wanted, but she wanted to at least see what he’d wanted. And maybe then Elliot would be happier about this work, and her plans, and the party. Or, at least, less unhappy.
She grabbed two big boxes from the back of the closet and brought them into her office to look through. She kept getting sidetracked from her search as she flipped through all of these papers—handwritten notes from Uncle Stan from the early years of the winery, ancient bills for a fraction of what everything cost now, old newspaper clippings about Noble Family Vineyards. She should pull all of this stuff out, get some of it framed to hang on their walls.
Finally, right along the bottom of the second box, she found it. There was his sketch of the winery building, the barn, the vineyards in the distance. Oh wow, he’d wanted paths around the lawn and to and from the winery building just like she did, and he even had a little garden there, next to the winery building, with chairs and tables, like she’d told Elliot she wanted. They’d had a makeshift outdoor seating area in that space for the past year, but she wanted to improve the seating, make it feel like a real part of the winery. Maybe Uncle Stan had wanted it to look like she did.
She could picture the winery like this, see it in her head, just from seeing these plans. The back lawn, green and well taken care of, brand-new paths around it leading to the barn, to the winery building, to the parking lot, to the garden. Flowers everywhere, chairs and benches around, with the vineyard in the distance.
“Why are you all covered in dust?”
She blinked away her daydream and looked up to see Elliot in her doorway.
“I found them!” She beckoned to him. “Those old landscaping plans of Uncle Stan’s.”
She wasn’t sure if Elliot would care about this, but he came right over to her desk.
“Oh wow, you actually found them. I was sure they were lost.”
They stood there and looked down at them together for a few moments.
“He wanted a garden back there, just like you do,” Elliot said finally.
She’d thought he hadn’t been paying attention when she’d told him.
“Yeah,” she said. “He did.”
They smiled at each other for a second. Her eyes were suddenly full of tears. She blinked them back so they wouldn’t drop down onto the plans.
Elliot turned away and walked to the door.
“Granted, we can’t get the garden done by your party, of course. And we can only get the other stuff done if we can find a good landscaper in time.”
Of course he had to say “your party” like that.
“I know,” she said. There was no point in saying more. She didn’t want to fight about it now. “We should get over to the barn, it’s almost time for the staff dinner.”
A staff dinner every six months, where the staff could learn about and taste all of the wines, had been Margot’s brainchild the year before, and it had been one of the few of her new ideas for the winery that Elliot had embraced. But then, if there was one thing Elliot cared about, it was their wine, and he wanted anyone who spoke for the winery to know the wines well.
Elliot sighed. “Oh, is that tonight?”
At least, she’d thought Elliot had embraced it. Apparently not. Why did it still hurt so much, when he did things like this?
“Yeah, it’s tonight,” she said. “The food got here a few minutes ago, Taylor brought it over to the barn.”
Elliot just nodded. “Okay. Meet you over there.”
Margot watched as Elliot walked out of her office. Sometimes, when she let herself, she missed how it used to be with Elliot. Before Uncle Stan died, before they were business partners, when they were just brother and sister. When they’d been able to kid each other and laugh at each other and relax with each other without his resentment and her hurt and their reluctant partnership that overshadowed everything. She sighed, and went to the bathroom to dust herself off.
By the time she got over to the barn, Elliot was all smiles with the staff. Well, as “all smiles” as he ever got, anyway. When she’d come up with this idea, sure, partly it had been because she wanted to make sure that the new employees really knew their wine, but it was more than that. She wanted them to feel like they were part of this place, that she and Elliot valued them, and for them to understand what Noble Family Vineyards was all about. And now that they’d added Luke and Marisol, she wanted them to care about this place the way the rest of their staff did.