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“That’s exactly what I was looking for,” she says to him.
“For the party?” he asks.
She nods, and it feels like such a win to me since Amelia never would’ve known to give her that one next. She’s in here trying to prove Nana should give this place to her, but it feels more and more like Amelia knows nothing about it at all.
“Are you looking for a few bottles or a case?” I ask.
“What’s the price?” the man asks.
I glance at Amelia to allow her to field a question—maybe a slight manipulation since I know she has no idea—and when she looks lost, I answer the question. “Twenty-six for a bottle, two-eighty for a case of twelve.”
The woman glances at the man. “Case?”
He nods.
I smile at them both. “I’ll be right back.” I head back to our inventory room behind our gift shop, and I grab an already packed case off the shelf. When I turn around, Amelia stands there scowling at me.
“You think you can just come in and steal the clients from me?”
I blow out of breath. “A, they're not clients, they’re customers, and B, it’s not stealing because we don't work on commission here. I closed the sale that you never would've been able to because you don't know our products the way I do.”
She doesn't have a snappy retort for that because she knows it's the truth. She huffs out some sound of annoyance and stalks off. She's not in the tasting room when I return, and Nana is taking payment from the customers.
Once they leave, she turns to me. “Well done with the moscato, my dear.”
I’m thrilled at the acknowledgement. And I hope it's a start for her to see that even if somehow Amelia manages to hold onto Drew for the next year, only one of us deserves this vineyard, and the other one is named Amelia.
I head back to my office to catch up on some of the things I missed while I was gone, and I realize maybe this place really didn’t run so well without me since there’s a lot of work to catch up on.
Spencer walks in just before the end of the day. He closes my office door and sits in the chair across from my desk.
“Where have you been all day?” I ask.
“With your dad. Trying to justify Drew's role here without making it seem like I'm trying to cut him out of the picture.”
My brows dip together. “What do you mean?”
“He’s getting paid a lot, and no matter what formula I tried, he kept coming up at the top of the list of which employees to cut. But if we get rid of him, Amelia will think we're doing it to purposely hurt her chances of inheriting this place. So it's a kind of lose-lose situation where it'll look like your dad's trying to give you an advantage.”
I blow out a breath. “Seems like it just keeps getting more and more complicated, doesn't it?”
“It does, and I know it’ll just cause more problems than it's worth, so it’s not an option right now.” He shrugs.
“Or maybe even after…” I trail off, but we both get the gist of what I'm trying to say.
After I'm the one who gets control of the vineyard at the end of all this, I can't exactly fire Drew as my first order of business.
“What did my dad say?” I ask.
“He agreed with me that it's more or less the wrong thing to do, no matter how much the bottom line tells us it’s the right thing to do.”
“Okay, then we take a harder look at things and try to figure out where else we can trim things down.” I click a few buttons to wrap up what I'm working on then lock my screen so nobody can come in and touch anything while I'm away.
Spencer and I head down to the restaurant, where we put in an order, and we drink wine while we wait. Once the food is ready, we take it out back to the firepits. And as I take the first bite of my favorite flatbread, I feel a wonderful sense of the future.
And then another thought hits me.
What if Nana can’t decide, so she chooses to split the responsibilities in half, sort of like she did with my dad and Uncle Jimmy?
