There are hundreds of thousands of dollars in inventory missing.
Someone fucked up. Bad.
We leave dinner on the table and rush to the tasting room. I can hear Jessica screaming as soon as we step inside. She’s in the back with the employees, hollering at the top of her lungs. I only catch pieces of what’s she’s saying around the rush of blood in my ears.
“Liars…stealing from your employer…therewillbe legal consequences, for any and all of you involved, and you can be sure…”
Dante grabs Jessica by the arm and pulls her to the side, silencing her with a crushing look. Armani moves to one of the laptops and starts pulling up reports while Marco looks over his shoulder, lips pressed into a tense line.
I stand beside my husband as he begins, a bit more level-headedly, questioning the staff about what happened, thinly veiling his threats. They shuffle and look at the ground, intimidated by him, no doubt. But nobody has answers. Dante probably wouldn’t believe anything they have to say, anyway.
“I think I figured it out,” Armani says. “The wine wasn’t…stolen, exactly.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Dante asks. “Is it here, or is it not here?”
Armani brings the laptop over and shows him the screen. “It’s not here. It was sold—at the wrong price. Our seven-hundred-fifty-dollar bottles are coming up at the thirty-five dollar peach wine price. The wines were labeled with this barcode here, but it rings up at thirty-five.”
I can feel the blood drain from my face.
Dante taps the screen. “There are twenty bottles per case. How many were sold?”
“Forty-three cases.”
Jessica steps forward and glares at me. “That’s six hundred thousand dollars’ worth of wine. Sold for thirty-thousand.”
Dante nearly pulls the laptop from his brother’s hand, but Armani moves away. “It had to be that someone put the wrong barcodes on the wine and didn’t double-check how it rung up.”
Jessica is still glaring at me. My heart starts to race. In the echoing silence, Greg clears his throat.
“I had brought up the point before that the crates of the cheaper wine looked very similar to the luxury wine. Perhaps that caused some confusion.”
“Confusion?” Jessica cocks her head. “Someonedidn’t do their job.” Stalking over to me, she pounces. “Weren’t you the one who put the barcodes on the crates?”
My legs feel like they can’t hold me. I look up at Dante by increments as my lips part and the words tumble out.
“Yes. I was in charge of labeling the bottles. I know they were correct, though.”
I run the scenario through my mind. The thing is, Ididdouble-check the labels. Ididmake sure they rang up at the right price. I triple-checked. But the look on my husband’s face is so murderous, it will do no good to make excuses. And I’m beyond embarrassed that this is happening in front of the entire staff.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” Jessica hisses.
Before I can answer, Dante grabs my arm and leads me out of the room—but not before I catch the gleeful, smug look on Jessica’s face.
There’s no doubt in my mind: that bitch is behind this. I know those were the right labels on the wine. I’d bet my life on it.
24
Frankie
I havethe lapels of my fluffiest feel-good bathrobe pulled up around my jaw, my body slouched into it like a personal blanket fort. I’ve been wrapped up in this old thing since leaving the tasting room in disgrace. Sitting on the edge of the massive tub in my private en suite watching hot water pour from the tap, I swirl in some dried lavender and expensive bath salts that claim to invoke “calm and peace.”
The only thing that could possibly bring me calm and peace right now would be seeing Jessica getting her ass handed to her for the trick she pulled.
I don’t know how she managed to get away with switching up the barcodes, but I’m one-hundred-percent confident that she’s behind this fiasco. Being grounded in that theory isn’t stopping me from feeling guilty and ashamed, though. I’ve been continually second-guessing myself, worried I may have been the culprit after all. What if I really did screw up this badly?
Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been lost to this one mistake, and if I really am to blame…Dante will never let me set foot inside the business again. Even if he did, the staff will have lost all respect for me anyway. Which means I’ll be trapped inside this mausoleum of a house, alone, with nothing to do to pass the time. Slowly dying here, useless and stagnant.
I dump more bath salts into the water. No. I’m not going to let that happen to me. It’s clear as day that Jessica staged this whole thing to drive a wedge between me and Dante—and fuck up my career while she was at it—and she’s going to come clean, one way or another. I just need to figure out a way to strong-arm her into admitting that she set me up.
