The silence stretches one beat, two...
Holt barks a laugh loud enough to turn heads at his own table. “Touché. If you’d given me names, I’d have finished my drink and wished you luck with the apples.”
Luna smiles.
Holt sets his glass down and turns it slowly on the cloth, watching the gold move.
“Here’s what I know,” he says, finally. “This is best cider I’ve put in my mouth in ten years, which is saying something. Now, I say your suitors had their chance and what they offer isobviously not working out for you. But if you were to make a deal with me, I can guarantee you’d be very happy about it.”
Neither of us speaks. I keep my face completely blank, and Luna doesn’t even blink, letting the silence stretch.
“One million dollars.” He says it the way he’d ask for water. “That’s what I’m ready to offer, right now. And in return, every bottle Hollow Gold sells, one dollar in ten comes to me until I’ve tripled my investment. Then 50 cents in perpetuity.”
One million dollars.
The sound drops out of the room. That’s the barn roof. That’s the press we use for the cider, the loan, payroll through harvest, every red number in our desk drawer turning black. My face holds its pleasant half-smile, and keeping it there is the hardest work I’ve done all year.
Across the table, Luna’s chin tips a degree. “One million is light for a piece of every bottle we ever sell. Forever is expensive, Warren.”
“Two million.” No pause at all. “That’s my ceiling. I don’t gamble past two on a story, even a good one.”
He raised himself. She said one sentence, and the man bid a million dollars against his own offer.
What is happening at this table.
Under the cloth, Luna’s knee comes to rest against mine. Steady.Hold.
“Two million,” she says, pleasantly, “for eight percent.”
Holt’s eyebrows make their first honest movement of the night.
“Eight percent of every bottle until the cider has paid you back six million. Triple your money.” She gives it a beat. “After that, your share drops to five percent for three more years. That could easily yield a ten-fold return on your investment.”
Holt looks at her for a long moment. The glass has stopped turning.
“Agreed,” he finally says, one finger up. “But I’ll need a guarantee: one thousand bottles, delivered by the first of December, with every single bottle matching the quality of the one on this table. Prove to me you have solid operational capability and some real skin in the game.”
“And you should know,” he adds. “I don’t sit on my percentages. I will hook you up with Pacific Crest, my wholesale people. They’ll put Hollow Gold in front of every buyer worth knowing in the country.”
A thousand bottles by December first. The math arrives with teeth: possible, barely, if nothing breaks, if the press behaves, if the weather holds.
I look at Luna.
She’s already looking at me. Her chin dips a quarter of an inch.
That’s all the validation I need.
“Done,” I say with a smile.
“Then we lock it in before the ice melts.” Holt twists in his chair, scanning the room. “They’ll have paper somewhere here.”
“I have a napkin,” Luna says.
Holt turns back slowly.
She slides it across the cloth, white and crisp, the Cormorant Room’s cormorant printed in one corner, and looks up at him.
The laugh comes up from his chest, big and genuine, twenty years off his face. “A napkin. Of course. Half my empire started on coasters.” He pats his jacket for a pen.
