Page 81 of Love You Always

I lean back and regard her smile. “Feels like you might mean someone other than Dash.”

Her eyebrows bounce. “All to be revealed, Wine Daddy.”

Before I can ask her to be more specific, Ruby comes back with wine openers and glasses, and I can see a few of our tasting room employees busy behind her putting together cheese plates with bread. “Whose are we opening first?” she asks, holding up the corkscrew.

We all look at each other, no one offering up their bottles. “You want to hang onto them, keep ‘em as a reminder of Dad?” I ask the group.

“I dunno. I feel like he wants us to drink them,” PJ says, offering hers up. She shrugs. “We’re a winery, after all.”

One by one, each of my siblings agrees and hands the bottles over to Ruby. She opens the first with a flourish. “This is the oldest vintage.” Ruby pulls out the cork and hands it to me. I roll my thumb over the end of it and smell the fruity residue on the cork. I think of my dad putting the bottle aside the year I was born, and I wonder if he knew he’d have five more kids. The thought of him as a young man with big dreams makes me feel wistful that I didn’t know him better when he was healthier, but I don’t feel sad. I may not know him, but after walking in his shoes at the helm of Buttercup Hill, I feel like I understand him.

“You know what they say, oldest is best,” I point out.

“I think they say oldest is just really fucking old,” Jax says, earning a fist bump from Dash.

Ruby pours a taste and hands it to me. “You should do the honors.”

I swirl the deep red liquid in my glass and watch it drip down the sides, the sugars stretching the legs of the cabernet. I dip my nose into the glass and inhale the heavy scent of the full-bodied wine.

Then I take a sip. Again, I imagine my dad doing the same thing before he instructed his team to bottle the vintage up. Just like I did a month ago when our cabernets were ready.

“It’s amazing. Dad knew his wine,” I say, tipping my head toward Ruby to pour glasses for everyone. She metes out small pours so we can all taste it, and everyone chimes in to agree that the wine is among the best we’ve ever had.

Jax holds up his glass and clinks it with a butter knife. “Feels like we should toast him.” He looks at me and I nod, standing up. I wish our dad could be here with us, but he’s not well enough. He’s regained some function in his left side after the stroke, but his cognitive abilities are all but gone.

“To Dad. And all the half-baked ideas he had, and also to thereally good ones. We’re standing here together because of them, and I couldn’t ask for a better bunch of people to call my family. Love you guys.”

Glasses clink all around and everyone takes another sip of the wine.

I look at Ella, seeing everything I never knew I wanted in my life. “My heart knew all along.”

“Knew what?”

“That you were the one. Back at that party when I tried to meet you, I think my heart knew you were it for me.”

She smiles. “I’m glad you didn’t give up on your heart.”

I lift her up and hold her tight, transfixed by her beautiful pink cheeks, the light shining through her wild hair, her lips, which she lowers to mine. “I’m never going to want more than what I have right here in this moment. You are everything.”

“You’re my everything too,” she says.

I look down at her flat stomach in disbelief that there’s a baby growing in there. My baby. Against the odds, we’re going to have another child in seven months. We’re waiting a couple more weeks to tell anyone, but no one will be more excited than PJ. After all, she taught me everything I know about manifesting.

I think about all the years I convinced myself I couldn’t be a father because I was too afraid to be the wrong kind of dad to kids who deserved better. “I’m going to give this baby the best possible life.”

Ella nods, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I know you will. I’ve always known.”

Wrapping her in my arms, I hold her tight, aware that there are three of us in this embrace. In less than a year we’ll be a family of four. After that…who knows?