The Divorce He Asked For, The Empire I Took Away novel · Chapter 10 of 32
Chapter 10: The Letter
I picked up my phone off the bar.
"No," I said. "But I'm going to ask him tonight. To his face. That's how it's done, Cora."
I looked at the wedding party.
"Sorry about your afternoon. The rosé's fine. The 1904 isn't."
Then I walked out into a hundred and eight degrees.
At nine that night I knocked on Augie's kitchen door.
The Dahl house sat behind the winery barn, a low yellow ranch house with a swing set nobody had painted in a while.
Augie opened the door with a dish towel over his shoulder.
He'd showered.
His hair was still wet.
"Goldie's asleep," he said. "Finally. She told me about the burning potion half a dozen times."
"Can I come in?"
"Then come in and ask it."
His kitchen was small and warm and messy.
A crayon tractor on the fridge, labeled MY TRACTER.
Two plates in the drying rack. One small, one big.
On the windowsill, a photo of a laughing woman with Goldie's freckles, holding a baby on a beach.
I didn't sit down.
"Coralee says you tried to buy the Old Block out from under me. Two years ago."
He didn't flinch.
He put the dish towel down on the counter.
"Not the vines. The grapes."
"Is it true?"
"Yes."
Something dropped in my stomach.
"Why?"
He dug in the junk drawer by the stove and pulled out a folded envelope, soft at the creases.
He handed it to me.
Inside were two pieces of paper.
The first was a copy of a letter in his blunt, square handwriting, dated two years ago in March.
It was addressed to Kessel Ranch, Old Block.
"I'd like to buy the Old Block fruit for one vintage. I'll pay double what Arnott pays. I don't want it for my label. I want to give it to whoever is really making the 1904, so they can make it under their own name. I can taste that it isn't him. Augie Dahl."
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