Chapter 7: Saturday Morning

On the morning of my wedding, I woke in a stranger's quilt to the smell of coffee.

The sun was already on the floor.

I had slept nine hours, which I hadn't done in a month.

Cillian was on the cottage steps with two mugs and his boots unlaced.

"Happy wedding day," he said.

I took the mug.

"Is that a joke?"

"It's the date," he said. "I figured you'd want someone to say it plainly."

I sat down on the step beside him.

The rows ran down the hill in long green lines, with the pickers already moving along them in straw hats.

"Do you want to work?" Cillian asked. "I'm one hand short on the east block. It's honest work. Nobody lies to you in a vineyard."

"The grapes might."

"The grapes can't write a group chat."

I laughed.

It was the first real laugh I'd had in days, and it surprised both of us.

We went out together.

He showed me how to cut the clusters without bruising the fruit, which I remembered, and then he showed me again, which I pretended not to need.

By noon my hands were sticky and my shoulders ached.

At one, I stood on a ladder at the end of a row to lift a crate onto the cart.

The ladder shifted.

Cillian's hand closed around my wrist before I had even finished feeling it move.

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