Page 26 of Taken Away

Bennett McCrae

Bennett still remembered the first morning he’d seen Blackwood Estate through the fog.

He’d been in Sylva less than a week then, alone in the small cabin tucked onto the ten wooded acres he’d bought along the back ridge. He hadn’t known his property line brushed Blackwood’s.

Hadn’t cared.

Nothing had mattered much back then.

Not after Napa. Not after Claire.

He’d spent months moving through the world like a man hauling a load he couldn’t ever set down. People mistook grief for sadness, but sadness still left room for wanting things; grief simply hollowed you out.

Claire’s fight with breast cancer had been a slow theft. He had watched the vibrant, brilliant woman he’d built a life with fade cell by cell, until the wine programs they’d designed together in Napa felt less like an achievement and more like a graveyard. When she died, the sun-drenched valleys of California stopped feeling warm.

They felt empty.

So he ran.

And somehow landed beside another vineyard.

He remembered standing on the back porch of that cabin that first morning, a cup of coffee gone cold in his hand while the fog lifted slowly off the mountain. Rows of dormant vines rolled down the hillside beneath the gray dawn.

A winery. Of all damn things.

At first, he’d almost laughed. The universe had a twisted sense of humor.

Only Blackwood wasn’t Napa. It wasn’t polished or expensive or built for tourists with private drivers and curated tasting flights. Blackwood back then had been struggling—smaller production, aging equipment, uneven distribution. Too much pride and not enough money.

But the land… Jesus, the land was extraordinary. Even neglected, his eyes—honed by fifteen years in high-end viticulture—had seen it immediately. The elevation. The mineral content. The slope. The cooler mountain nights. The soil alone should’ve made the place famous.

And somehow Mabel Blackwood had known exactly what he was seeing the first time he wandered too close to the vineyard rows.

“You’ve been standing out here staring at my vines for three mornings now,” she’d called from the porch, amusement tucked into her voice. “You planning to trespass or help?”

It had been the first real conversation he’d had with anyone in weeks. Maybe months. He remembered trying not to like her.

Didn’t work.

Mabel had recognized grief because she carried her own. She didn’t offer pity; she offered friction. She dragged him back into the world relentlessly—sometimes with questions, sometimes with wine, sometimes by pretending not to know how to do things he was fully aware she already knew how to do.

She’d stand in the doorway of the production room with paperwork in one hand and a bottle in the other. “Well?” she’d say. “You gonna stand there brooding or tell me why this merlot tastes like regret?”

Another time she’d shown up at his cabin with a busted inventory sheet she absolutely could’ve fixed herself. “I’m old,” she’d announced. “You’re unemployed and miserable. Seems fair.”

Against his will, he’d laughed. The sound had shocked both of them.

After that, she stopped giving him room to disappear. Little by little, Blackwood pulled him back into motion—harvest schedules, soil testing, replanting sections, distribution plans, late nights in the barrel room arguing over blends while jazz drifted low from Mabel’s ancient radio.

Purpose returned quietly.

And somewhere along the way, breathing stopped feeling quite so hard.

Years later, the house sitting above the vineyard still looked a little out of place against the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Clean white stucco. Black-framed windows. Long horizontal lines. Warm cedar accents. Wide glass facing the valley.

California modern dropped into Appalachia.