Chapter 9: The Bottle

Judd's POV

I watched her go down to the beach with the brother-in-law-to-be, and I told myself I was only checking the tide.

Her jacket was too thin for the wind.

She walked with her bandaged hand held against her ribs.

Every few steps she looked back at the inn, without seeming to know she did.

I'm thirty-one years old, and I had run a terrace bar for six summers without once losing my place in a sentence.

I had lost it twice in two days, and both times she was standing there.

I could still feel her pulse under my thumb.

It had been going as fast as mine.

I went down to the cellar, because I needed to put my hands on something that wasn't her.

The cellar at the Gull Point is a stone room under the kitchen with sixty bottles and one bare bulb.

My aunt keeps the good white on the left and the house wine on the right.

Anything that arrives by courier goes on the bottom shelf until someone claims it.

That's where I found the box.

It had come in July.

A narrow, padded box with a gift tag, delivered by a courier I'd signed for between lunch and dinner.

I had put it on the bottom shelf and I had not thought about it once.

Now I took it out and cut the tape with my pocketknife.

Inside was a single bottle of white wine, wrapped in tissue.

The label was a good one, from a small vineyard in the Loire that my aunt would have called showing off.

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