The silence stretched again. I leaned back slightly, resting my forearms on my thighs, eyes forward instead of on her.
“You good?” I asked instead.
She didn’t look at me when she answered it. “I’ve been throwing up all morning. I can’t keep shit down.”
That made my chest tighten. “I’m sorry, Bunny.”
She nodded once, like she expected that answer. “Just…tell me the story.”
“Huh?”
She looked at me then, “You know what I mean.Tell me everything. Don’t leave nothing out.”
I sat back slightly on the bench, running my hand over my jaw before letting it rest on my thigh.
“Aight. Well, Alice… Dillon… and me—we were close,” I started. “Before all of this. Before the business really took off. Dillon always had his head in the business side. He saw the long game before anybody else did.”
I let out a quiet breath.
“Alice wasn’t like that.”
That got a small shift out of her.
“She loved this place,” I continued, nodding toward the direction of the vineyard even though we weren’t on it. “The land. The freedom of it. She didn’t care about scaling it or turning it into something bigger. She just… liked being in it. And me and her… we connected over that.”
Rory’s grip on the leash tightened slightly.
I noticed but kept going anyway.
“When the original owner passed, we stayed in Napa for a while to figure things out,” I said. “That’s when things started shifting.”
I looked down for a second before continuing.
“Dillon proposed to her and she said yes. But about a week later, she showed up at my door saying she needed one more night. A break from everything before she stepped into that life. So we did what we always do. We went down to the cellar, broke in like we used to and drank wine we weren’t supposed to touch.”
That made Rory turn her head slightly. “The same cellar you fucked me in?”
I exhaled. “You sure you wanna hear this?”
“I asked, didn’t I?”
I gave her a look. “Fine. We talked about everything. Her. Dillon. The vineyard. What life was about to look like. And then… it crossed a line.”
I didn’t get into details, but I did gesture vaguely.
“And when she said she loved me, I-I stopped it and I left.”
She studied my face like she was trying to catch something I wasn’t saying.
“I avoided both of them after that,” I continued. “I even left their wedding early.”
Her brows pulled together slightly.
“After they got married and moved to New York not just for the business… but because Alice was already sick, they wanted me to come with… but, I couldn’t. Then she died, and I didn’t go to the funeral either. I never got closure with her.”
Aurora’s lips pressed together.
“So when I found out you were hers,” I continued, voice lower now, “It messed with me. And you telling me you love me like that, it really fucked me up.”
