The Master Vintners

“I don’t understand why he did it and now I can’t ask him, either.”

Tension radiated from his body as the frustration he’d been feeling wound tight inside of him.

“Maybe he just wanted to protect you and your sister. If it happened twenty-five years ago then you can’t have been all that old,” she said, trying to soothe him.

“I was six, my sister only three. I would have had some understanding of his decision not to tell us then, if my father had bothered to tell me the truth later, when I was an adult. It’s not as if he didn’t have ample opportunity. Even after he died, there was no letter, nothing in his will to let me know the truth. If I hadn’t started asking questions about the payments, I never would have known.”

The bitterness in his voice hung in the air.

Isobel sighed. “It isn’t easy to understand the choices our parents make.” That much, she knew from personal experience. “Usually, I guess they think they’re protecting us.”

“Why would I need to be protected from the truth? Don’t I deserve to know why he thought my sister and I would be better off without our mother in our lives?”

“Maybe it wasn’t as clear-cut as that.”

Ethan shook his head. “It must have been. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to get the rest of our family to support him in his lie. My aunt and my uncle and his wife, they all knew the truth. They’ve all kept the secret for all these years.”

“Are they still alive?”

“Yeah, we all live on the family property. We see each other pretty much every day.”

“Then maybe you can find out from them,” she suggested. “Whatever the outcome, though, Ethan, there’s no point in holding a grudge against a dead man. Right or wrong, your father made his decisions. They can’t be undone or the past changed. The only thing you can do is move forward.”

“Is that what you do?” he asked. “Move forward and not ask questions?”

She smiled and lifted her head and met his serious dark brown gaze. “Except for right now, yeah, something like that. It saves on baggage.”

Ethan shook his head slightly. “I can’t imagine living like that.”

Isobel shrugged. “It’s not for everyone. Certainly not for someone like your father, for example. For whatever reason, he kept those payments going for years, got your whole family involved, with the idea that he was protecting you and your sister. I imagine you’re probably very much like he was. Strong.” She coasted her fingertips over his shoulders and down his arm. “Intelligent.” She ran her fingers back up his arm and lightly touched his forehead. “And protective.” Her fingertips traveled back down to his chest and she rested her full palm against it. “Those are the qualities about your father you should remember him by. And how much he must have loved you.”

Ethan remained silent for a while before speaking. “You have an interesting insight for someone who never met my father and who never met me before tonight.”

“You think I’m being presumptuous, offering you my opinion?”

“No, not that. If anything, you probably described my father to a tee. I suppose that coming to terms with everything, losing him as suddenly as we did, I had briefly lost sight of that. I still want to know why he never told me about our mother, though.”

“Is tomorrow soon enough for that?” Isobel asked, raising onto her knees and straddling him as she’d done earlier. “Because I think, for now, it might be fun to distract you with other things.”

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