Forbidden Vines

Chapter Five: Paid in Full

Two days pass and Sebastian doesn't mention the phone again.

He doesn't mention any of it. Not at breakfast, not at dinner, not the one time we end up alone in the hallway long enough for it to feel like he might. He just looks at me the same flat way he's looked at me since the sitting room that first night, like whatever happened in the yard got filed away somewhere and shut in a drawer.

I check my phone obsessively anyway. Nothing. No new number. No new message. I don't know if that's relief or the quiet part before something worse.

It's Marta who tells me, by accident, on the third morning, setting a coffee down in front of me like it's nothing.

"Sebastian was on the phone half the night," she says. "Something about a wire transfer. Very serious about it too, wouldn't even come down for dinner."

"A wire transfer."

"That's all I heard." She shrugs and moves on to the next thing, like she hasn't just handed me the loose thread to an entire unraveling.

I find him in the office off the west wing an hour later, door half open, papers spread across the desk in front of him like a man doing math he already knows the answer to. He doesn't look up when I knock on the frame.

"It's done," he says, before I can ask anything.

"What's done."

"The loan." He finally looks up. "Paid in full. Wired this morning. You won't hear from that number again, and if you do, you tell me immediately."

I stand there a second too long, not sure what to do with my own hands.

"You paid off my dad's loan."

"I paid off a debt that had your name attached to it. There's a difference."

"Is there?"

"Yes." He goes back to the papers like the conversation's already over as far as he's concerned. "One is charity. I don't do charity."

I want to laugh, except nothing about this is funny, and I want to cry, except I've done enough of that this week already. What I actually do is stand in the doorway like an i***t, waiting for an explanation that clearly isn't coming unless I go digging for it myself.

"Why," I say finally. "And don't tell me it's not about me again, because you just spent what's probably a small fortune on a girl you've known four days."

He sets the pen down. Looks at me the way he did in the yard, like he's deciding how much of the truth is actually necessary.

"Men like that don't stop at one visit," he says. "They come back. They escalate. Eventually they stop texting and start showing up, and when they show up, they don't care whose house it is or whose name is on the deed. They just care about getting paid." He says it like he's reading it off a report, no weight to any of it. "My father has spent thirty years building a name people trust enough to lend against. One story about gangsters on this property and every bank we work with starts asking questions. That's not a risk I'm willing to carry because your father made a bad decision when you were thirteen."

"So it's about the vineyard."

"It's about the house. The harvest. Everything that depends on this family looking like the kind of people nothing bad happens to." He picks the pen back up. "You happened to be standing in the middle of it."

"Right." I fold my arms, mostly so he doesn't see my hands aren't steady. "Cold. Very consistent."

"I told you the first night."

"You did." I should leave it there. I don't. "You could've just told your dad. Let him handle it, since apparently it's his name on the line and not yours."

Something flickers behind his eyes, quick, there and gone the way it always is with him, like a door opening onto a room he doesn't let anyone see into.

"He'd have handled it slower," he says. "Made calls. Involved people. Turned it into a conversation at dinner for a week." A pause, small, almost nothing. "I didn't want it turned into a conversation."

"Why not."

"Because it's done now instead of next month." He doesn't look at me when he says it. "That's all."

I don't believe him, not entirely, not with the way his jaw sets when he says it, not with the half second of hesitation before "that's all" like there was a different sentence sitting right behind it that he swallowed at the last second. But I also know pushing further gets me nothing from a person built like a locked door, so I let it go, for now, and file it away next to the almost-smiles and the flicker in his eyes I keep catching and losing before I can name it.

"Thank you," I say instead, because it's true even if I hate how much I mean it. "I know you don't want to hear that."

"I don't need it." He's already back in the papers, pen moving again, the conversation closed as far as he's concerned. "Just don't make me do it twice."

"I'll try to keep my father's mistakes to a minimum."

The corner of his mouth twitches, there and gone, same as always, same rule he keeps following even when nobody's forcing him to.

"Door's open behind you," is all he says, which in Sebastian is apparently as close to goodbye as I'm going to get.

I leave him to his papers and walk back down the hallway slower than I need to, turning the whole conversation over like a stone I keep checking for something on the underside. He didn't do it to be kind. He said so himself, twice, like he needed me to hear it as many times as he needed to believe it.

I just can't work out, yet, which one of us he was trying to convince.