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“You want me to escort your friend outside?” Caleb said.
“I’m doing that myself, Caleb,” Jacob said, moving us down the stairs, keeping his voice low, now trying to control his temper, in addition to everything else.
Jacob slammed through the front door of the factory, leading us back out to the parking lot, toward his Honda.
“I can’t believe you,” he said.
He was moving so fast I was basically running to keep up with him.
“What makes you think you can just walk in here like that?” he said. “That was my board up there. Do you have any idea how embarrassing it was to have that meeting interrupted?”
“You need to sell me the vineyard, Jacob.”
He stopped walking. “What?”
“I want to run it.”
Jacob stared at me, dumbfounded. But as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I felt the weight of their truth. It was what I had been feeling from the minute I returned to Sebastopol. This was my family’s home, and I didn’t want to give it up. I didn’t want to give up how I felt being back at the vineyard, despite everything that was going on with my parents and my brothers and Ben. I felt like myself here.
He shook his head, and started moving again, faster than before.
“You have no idea how to run a vineyard.”
“My father will stay on and teach me. That’s not your problem.”
“Except you keep making it my problem when you show up demanding I do something I’m not going to do. My grandfather ran this company for fifty years. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get the board to take his grandson seriously? Even without crazy women interrupting my meetings?”
We got to his car and Jacob opened the trunk. It held several boxes of files. Jacob began searching through, reaching for a file.
“Look, I understand you’re having an emotional reaction to the vineyard’s sale, but . . .”
“Is that what I’m having? An emotional reaction?”
“What would you call it?”
Jacob grabbed the file out of the trunk. Then he grabbed another file. But Jacob seemed to still be searching—and it seemed like maybe he wasn’t actually looking for anything, busying himself as an excuse, so he could get himself together.
“Thing you don’t get is that you can’t save your family like this. I know you think you can. It doesn’t work that way.”
“That isn’t what’s going on.”
“It is or you would have waited downstairs like a normal human being.”
His eyes cut in a way that surprised me. It felt both intimate and mean.
I felt my anger rise up. “Just let me buy the vineyard back. I’ll give you interest for your trouble, higher than anything you’d have made in the bank.”
He shook his head. “I made a deal with your father in good faith, and he wants to honor that deal. That doesn’t make me a jerk. That makes me someone who isn’t going to change plans because his daughter is panicking.”
“Stop pretending this is about my father. It’s about your business model telling you to take on his type of vineyard for reasons that have more to do with money than anything you’re admitting out loud.”
He shook his head, irritated. “Whatever.”
“And we both know the worst part of that transaction. You’re going to change his vineyard into a lesser version of itself. You’re going to destroy it.”
“We’re not going to destroy . . .” Jacob paused, his face red. “Your father knows what he signed on for by selling to us.”
“I’m just asking you to let me hold on to the vineyard until I can find someone to run it who will do it like he did.” I got quiet. “You know, for when he realizes how much it still matters to him.”
