I turn and frown at her. Her features are displayed in shades of gray instead of her usual golds and browns, but she’s as bold in this monochrome moonlight as she is in color. “You’re … sorry? For what? Adopting a damn goat without asking?”
Laine blinks, then huffs out a small laugh. “That, too, I guess. God, everything. For being such a pain in your ass. For being wrong all the time and refusing to admit it. For being such a liability here.” She riffles a hand through her hair, which I’ve noticed she does when she feels uncomfortable. “A late-season frost, just like you said.” She huffs again, and it’s filled with self-loathing. “Thank God you stopped me from pruning that day. I could’ve really screwed things up.”
“Yeah, well.” I shrug, unsure how to feel now that I’m finally receiving all the remorse I’ve felt owed ever since Laine showed up. Not sure I want it anymore, though. Not if it comes with this potent disgust for herself underlying her words. “You didn’t.”
Laine draws her knees up, her eyes watchful over the fires. She looks defeated, a word I don’t associate with Laine Woods. “In California, everything I did was too Georgia. In Georgia, everything I do is too California.” She shakes her head, her frustration with herself evident and painful to see. “I don’t fit anywhere.”
“What about … Missouri?”
She looks so affronted it makes me laugh.
“What? Right in the middle.” I squint an eye and poke a finger at an imaginary map. “You could be a Branson dyke.”
Laine scrunches up her face and lets out a single incredulous laugh. “Okay, first? Missouri isn’t in the middle of the country, look at a map sometime; second, what the hell is aBranson dyke?”
I shrug again, ridiculously pleased to have gotten a laugh out of her. “Oh, I don’t know. A lady that enjoys themed minigolf, riverboat gambling, and breasts?”
“I do enjoy breasts.” Laine tilts her head to the side. “And minigolf.”
“All Branson dykes do,” I explain, the new authority on this thing I just invented. “See? You’d fit right in.”
“Next stop, the city of freshly chlorinated waterfalls,” Laine says, but her tone’s too wistful for chemically blue water.
“You fit here, Laine,” I say softly. She side-eyes me, one eyebrow high, as though she knows I’m full of shit. “Or you could, at least. If you wanted to.”
“I don’t know what I want anymore,” Laine murmurs, more to the vineyard than me. “Rachel’s right—my career out west imploded. Everything was going so well, I thought—” She pauses to swipe at a single tear rolling down her cheek. “I thought I was invincible. Destined for the top.”
“What happened?” I ask softly.
“After years of making Le Jardin’s signature line, I’d finally earned the right to experiment with a new white for the label. It’s a big deal, youknow, they don’t put their name on just anything, and I was so eager to makemywine for once, I just—” Laine pauses to shake her head. “I aimed for the fences. Tried the organic processing method I’d been dying to implement, experimented with a new blend of grapes, too much new all at once, and it was …” Her shoulders drop, along with her gaze. “Not great. This wine critic Benjamin Soren attended an early tasting and wrote a scathing review forVinitopiamagazine. ‘The Hayseed Vintner,’ he called me, the Georgia bumpkin who made wine that tasted like a barnyard. Le Jardin fired me a few weeks later.”
“Over one review?” I can’t keep the shock from my voice. “That’s crazy!”
“That’s Le Jardin.They don’t keep losers around.”
“Laine, you’renota loser. So you made something that one asshole didn’t like—”
She holds up a finger. “Lots of assholes didn’t like it, to be fair.”
“So what? At least you made something! At least youtried.” I shake my head. “So many people go their whole lives without ever taking a chance on themselves. Too afraid to speak up, or stick their necks out, or God forbid, be seentryingto do something. To them, being embarrassed or disliked is scarier than never being anything at all.That’slosing to me. So you tried something, and it didn’t work out. That doesn’t make you a loser. It makes you brave.”
The words hang in the air around us, like little stars burning brightly. I huddle closer into myself, into the comfort of my ambition. “We have this one life, Laine. If we’re not brave enough to try and live it, to give ourselves and our dreams the benefit of the doubt, then what’s the point?”
Laine looks at me sidelong, surprise changing the architecture of her expression. It warms my cheeks, the way she watches me, as though I might say something profound that she actually wants to hear.
It’s ironic since she’s the one who taught me this lesson. This almost-religious faith in trying is what drew me to her in the first place, all those years ago.
I duck my chin into my scarf.
“But what if you fail so spectacularly, you’re not sure you know how to try anymore? What if trying feels like failing, and everything feels wrong? How do you keep going then?”
“Maybe because it’s your dream?” I offer slowly. This is unknown territory, thisconversingwith Laine—not fighting, or bickering, or feeling so in awe of her that I couldn’t speak at all. Maybe this foreign terrain is only accessible under the light of the moon and the magic of a dozen tiny fires, but … I want to explore it. “Maybe because you know, deep down, that trying is hard, failing is harder, but giving up what you love would be hardest of all.”
Laine looks at me then, long and assessing. “Is that how you feel?”
“About Bluebell? Yes.” I lean my head against the tree trunk and look at her, too. “This place is special. My mom knew it, my dad knew it, and they built our whole lives around this small, beautiful piece of the universe. I feel a moral imperative to keep it going, to cherish it, to share it with others.”
Laine considers me thoughtfully. “I’m sorry about that, too. I’ve been a real dick about Bluebell Vineyards.”
