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I need to speak to you urgently. I’m at the coffee shop next door.
My heart starts to thunder in my chest. He’s here? I text him back:What coffee shop?
Rebecca’s, he replies.
How does he know I work here? Did I tell him? Did Kasey?
My fingers hover over the call button for Nick, but I think better. I dial Rita. “How busy is he?”
“At the moment, he has ten people sitting at a conference table, and they all want to kill one another.”
“All right, then,” I say, and because I don’t want to freak her out and have her freak him out, I add, “now is not the time to talk dinner.”
She laughs. “No. Not right now. He could be a while. Or not. Sometimes these things end abruptly.”
“Okay. Thanks, Rita.”
“Congrats on your show, Faith. Nick came in this morning bragging up a storm.”
“He did?”
“Yes. He did. He’s incredibly proud of you.”
“Thanks, Rita. He says it to me, but it’s pretty special to hear it from other people.”
My phone buzzes again. “Talk to you soon,” I say and end the call to read the new message:It’s an emergency, Faith.
He’s going to press me about the winery. I know it. And I’d decline the meeting if I wasn’t afraid he’d go after the winery in some way again and hurt the employees. Or Nick. He could go after Nick, and while Nick can take care of himself, he doesn’t need to fight a war I create when he has his own he’s fighting right now, in this moment.
I stand up and slip my purse over my shoulder, dread in my belly, but I can do this. I’ll navigate whatever he throws at me, milk him for information and missteps, and then hand it to Nick. Ready to get this over with, I hurry through the gallery, lock the doors, and make the quick walk to the coffee shop. I step inside and wave to the regular girl, June, behind the counter before my gaze lands on Bill sitting in a booth.
I cross the space between us and sit down. “What’s the emergency?”
“Look, honey. You’re the closest thing to a daughter I have. I know you don’t believe I care, but I do. And it killed me to be shut off from you.”
“And yet you slept with my mother.”
“That’s a complicated story that I still believe is not my story to tell. But I need you to set that aside, just for now. Because I need to tell you a story that ends right back here, in the present, with you.”
“I’m listening.”
“I heard rumors that you were struggling to pay the bills, and I called the bank. They told me you bought out the note.”
“I did buy it out.”
“You mean Nick Rogers bought it out. He’s an owner now, right?”
“Emergency,” I say. “You said there was an emergency.”
“We need to go back in time. Way back. Your mother had a gambling problem, and they were in a lot of debt. Your father contained it the best that he could. Back before he and I had our falling-out, some men came to him. They offered him a hundred million to sell out.”
I blanch. “A hundred million? Why so much?”
“They were bad men,andthere’s mercury on the property, a fact that I had buried way back then. No one else knew.”
“Mercury? I assume it’s valuable, then.”
“It’s used for weapons, and these men were the kind of men who knew all about weapons.”
