He clearly didn’t want to talk about that anymore, okay.
“So is it my turn now?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“No. I mean, yes, of course, if you want, but when I said that I’ll-go-first thing, I didn’t mean you had to go next. I didn’t mean to say all of that, it was just, being around my mom today made me feel . . . Anyway, sorry about that.”
Margot waved that away.
“No apology necessary. I’m just your neighbor Margot, remember? Neighbors talk about stuff like this.” She paused. “Family stuff is hard sometimes,” she said, in a different, quieter voice.
“Yeah,” he said. “It is.”
* * *
LUKE GLANCED OVER AT Margot, who was looking at him with such an open, caring expression that he had to look away. He really hadn’t meant to say all of that. Especially not the stuff about how he was disappointed in himself, how sometimes he felt like he’d really left because he couldn’t hack it, that he wasn’t good enough. Great, now Margot would think he wasn’t good enough—that was the last thing he wanted. It was far too easy to talk to her, that was the problem.
“Speaking of family,” she said. “You’re probably wondering why I was threatening fratricide earlier.”
He laughed, glad that she’d broken into his thoughts.
“I mean I was, but really, you don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.”
“I know,” she said. “But I can’t just throw murder out there on the table and then never finish the story. That sounds like the beginning to every murder mystery I’ve ever read, and I don’t want to be cast as the prime suspect.” She hesitated. “But . . . if this is weird for you, for me to talk about my brother, since . . .”
“I can’t imagine how it would be weird,” he cut in. “I don’t even know your brother. I’m just your neighbor Luke.”
She laughed at that.
“Oh, right. I forgot.”
He could tell she needed someone to listen to her. Maybe even that she wanted him to listen to her?
“When I—when we—inherited Noble Family Vineyards from Uncle Stan, it was a shock,” she said. “To me, and I think to everyone else in the family, Elliot included. We all expected it to go to Elliot. Just Elliot. He’d worked for Uncle Stan for years, everyone knew he was destined to be the winemaker here someday. Everyone knew—or, I guess, thought they knew—that the ‘Family’ in Noble Family Vineyards meant Elliot. No one thought it meant me.” She shook her head. “That’s unfair to Uncle Stan—that makes it sound like he never told me it meant me, too, or that I thought he didn’t love me. That couldn’t be further from the truth. He was wonderful to me, we loved each other a lot. I spent a ton of time with him at the winery. But . . . I just assumed—we all did—that the winery would go to Elliot. Uncle Stan had been sick for a while, but he didn’t tell us he was sick until it was pretty close to the end, and the end came faster than he thought it would. He’d said he had something to talk to me about, but by the time I saw him, he wasn’t . . . he couldn’t really talk about anything.”
Luke kept his eyes on the road as she said all of this. He wanted to give Margot her privacy, but he also wanted to know if she was okay. Should he comfort her in some way? Or at least, attempt to? Her voice was steady, but that meant nothing. Margot was good at masking her emotions, he knew that much about her.
He risked a glance over at her, but she was looking away from him, out the passenger-side window, so he couldn’t see what, if anything, her face would tell him.
“How did you find out?” he asked her. “About the winery, I mean.”
She turned back toward him.
“Elliot told me. The day after Uncle Stan died. He thought I already knew—I think he didn’t realize that Uncle Stan hadn’t told me. He said something about what ‘we’ would do with the winery, and I said ‘we?’ He had a stone face about it, like Elliot does about everything, so I thought he was okay with it. But I was stunned.”
She dug down into her bag and pulled out a water bottle and took a sip.
“It wasn’t until I overheard him talking to one of our cousins. Someone on our mom’s side who’s never really liked me. We were all at the winery, after the funeral, and as I was coming out of the bathroom, I overheard Jimmy saying, ‘I can’t believe Stan left this place to you and Margot. Why would he do something like that?’ I probably shouldn’t have listened, but I’m sure there isn’t a person alive who wouldn’t have done the same thing. Elliot said, ‘Margot and Stan were very close. He loved her very much.’ Which would have been fine. But then Jimmy kept pushing. He said, ‘But come on—Margot? You deserve this place, she doesn’t! She’s not actually going to do anything here. She’ll get bored with it in a heartbeat, and then what are you going to do?’？”