Page 14 of Taken Away

“The funeral is tomorrow afternoon at First Baptist on Main Street,” she said quietly. “Mabel would have wanted all of you there.”

Silence settled over the room again.

Everyone in that room had known Mabel.

Aubrey was the only stranger.

THREE

Blackwood Estate Winery

Aubrey Langford

Aubrey gripped the steering wheel of the rental car hard enough to make her fingers ache.

She sat in front of Harper & Associates a full minute after Bennett stormed out, staring through the windshield at Main Street and the slow drift of tourists with shopping bags and coffee cups.

A year. Stuck in one place for an entire year.

She had a job in Garnet Valley. A sleek condo in West Chester, a Peloton, and exactly one plant she routinely forgot to water. Clients. Deadlines. A favorite wine bar in Media where the bartender always started pouring her pinot before she even sat down. Fall drives through horse country past stone fences and old estates, weekday mornings inching down Route 202 with coffee and a podcast.

She had a life that made sense.

And now some eccentric relative she barely remembered had apparently left her a winery, a giant house, hundreds of acres, and a legal hostage situation in the middle of the North Carolina mountains.

“You have got to be kidding me,” she muttered.

Sylva was annoyingly picturesque.

The courthouse sat high on the hill with its white columns glowing in the late-afternoon sun. Downtown looked like a postcard—brick storefronts, flower baskets, people strolling with ice cream and dogs and absolutely no visible urgency. From where she sat, she could see a bookstore with a chalkboard sign, a café strung with lights, and an antique shop with quilts hanging in the window.

This town had no right to be charming. The prettiness felt like an insult.

It made her furious.

Her mother had shown her pictures once. Old, curling photographs pulled from a shoebox during one of her more sentimental benders—cows in a misty pasture, a weathered barn, a tall blonde woman laughing on a porch.

Her mother had reeked of Chardonnay and cheap perfume that night. Ted—her stepdad, the man who had adopted her and quietly handled every real parenting task—had stood in the doorway with his arms folded, watching like he didn’t trust the nostalgia.

Her mother had stayed long enough to flip through a handful of photos and say, “You’re not missing anything but mud and cows, baby,” before disappearing again with a new boyfriend and a glass in her hand.

Ted had stayed. Ted always stayed.

Aubrey tightened her grip on the steering wheel.

She glanced at the clock on the dashboard.

Tomorrow.

Two o’clock.

She sighed and picked up her phone.

No matter what had happened between them over the years, Mabel had been Anne’s sister.

Anne deserved one last chance to say goodbye.

The call connected on the third ring.