Chapter 2

The service road behind the gatehouse was unpaved and hot, and it smelled like diesel and crushed grapes.

Rudy Tavares from estate security walked on the old man's left, close enough to touch him and hoping he wouldn't have to. Nell Farraday walked on his right with the silver clipboard against her chest. She was twenty-four, pretty in the specific way of someone who had been awake since five and still looked composed, and she was holding the run-of-show for a wedding that started in seventy-six minutes.

"You can wait at the north gate," she said. "Someone can talk to you Monday."

"I'm not going to the north gate."

"Sir-"

At the corner of the gatehouse he stopped and looked back. Not at Prescott. At the arbor. At the third trellis post from the end, where the climbing roses had gone brown at the base and the wood had swollen and split.

"Your west trellis is coming down," he said. "Crown gall. It'll go in the first wind after harvest."

Nell blinked. "Okay."

"And you've got chairs on Block 1." He nodded at the lawn, where a crew was setting the last row of white folding chairs on ground that had been vine rows for fifty years. "Second row past the arbor. That's the root zone. Two hundred people will compact it into brick."

Nell looked down at the clipboard, then up at him. "How do you know our block numbers?"

The old man didn't answer right away. He looked at the lawn the way people look at a house they used to live in.

"I planted them," he said.

Nell's thumb was resting on the run-of-show. He saw the page. He saw the line, four lines up from the recessional: Reyes Vineyard, founding family - Block 1 blessing, 4:20 p.m. - struck through in black pen, with TBD written beside it in a cramped, careful hand.

He read it twice.

"Who crossed that out?" he said.

"It's a timing thing."

"It's not a timing thing."

Nell didn't have an answer, and she was too honest to invent one, so she said nothing, and Rudy Tavares put a hand on the old man's elbow and steered him the last thirty feet to the shade of the service gate.

Behind them, on the lawn, Alberto Vega-Ortiz was standing with a glass of champagne he had not drunk from.

Sixty-six years old. Round brown face, deep lines, gray-going mustache, a bolo tie with a turquoise slide. He had been joking all morning. He had been joking for twenty years.

He watched the old man's walk - the short right step, the roll off the outside of the boot, the way he kept his shoulders square when his knee was hurting - and he knew that walk the way you know your own handwriting.

The glass went over in his hand and broke on the stone.

Beto Vega-Ortiz set the stem down on the table, turned, and started walking toward the gate.

And Priscilla Hollis, standing twenty feet away in a hat that cost more than the champagne, watched him go.