Chapter 1: The Estate Above the Vines
Dominic Stallone stood on the terrace at six in the morning with a mug of coffee gone cold in his hand, and looked down at the vines as if they might have moved in the night.
They had not. They never did, which was one of the reasons he trusted them. Rows of them ran down the slope in the pale light, orderly as an old army, leaves still holding a little late-summer green before harvest turned everything gold and frantic. Below, the valley was soft with mist. Above, the house woke behind him: a shutter, a door, Ada Cole's voice already giving orders before most people had found their shoes.
"You're in the way of the florists," Ada said from the doorway, not unkindly. "Again."
"I live here," Dominic said.
"You live everywhere the work is. It's a gift."
He grunted, which for him was nearly a laugh, and did not move. Ada, who had run his household for twenty years, simply set a fresh mug beside him and took the cold one away. She did not ask if he had slept. They both knew the answer would be a performance.
That evening, two hundred people would climb the hill road for his seventieth birthday. There would be music and speeches and a charity auction for the valley clinic, and a great many people telling him he looked wonderful, which was the word people used when a man of his age had the decency not to fall apart in public. He had been famous once in a way that still startled him — posters, premieres, strangers shouting lines at him in airports — and he had walked away from all of it twenty years ago with a relief so large it had felt like grief. The films belonged to another, younger man. This man had bad knees, good vines, and a house ready for a party he was not sure he wanted.
Margherita had wanted the house ready for parties. That was the thing no profile ever got quite right. They wrote that Dominic Stallone had built Stallone Vineyards as a second act, a star's vanity project turned respectable. In truth, Margherita had found the land. She had stood on this same terrace in a borrowed coat and said, "Here. We can grow old where things grow." She had chosen the first vines and learned the soil the way other people learned a language. When she died six years ago, the estate had kept her habits the way a body keeps a pulse. Her roses still climbed the south wall because Tomas Aguilar refused to let anyone prune them into sense. Her reading chair still sat in the library because Dominic, who could throw away a fortune in film memorabilia without blinking, could not move a chair six inches.
"Sentiment," he told people who noticed. "Bad business."
By eight, the house had surrendered to the gala. Vans reversed down the drive. The caterers claimed the kitchen with the confidence of an occupying army and were met, at the border, by Ada with a clipboard. Strings of lights were tested over the terrace. Someone polished glasses, and someone else polished glasses that had already been polished, because Simone Hart believed, correctly, that glasses caught the light and the light was the whole evening.
Simone came down the stairs at nine in a robe and full concentration, phone in one hand, seating chart in the other. She had been in Dominic's life for three years, though she had a gift for making a room feel arranged around her. She kissed his cheek, left no mark, and said, "You are not wearing that tonight."
"I am wearing trousers tonight," Dominic said. "I've decided."
"You are wearing the dark jacket. And you will smile at the Halvern people even though you hate their offer."
"I don't hate their offer. I hate being offered."
"Then smile like a man who can afford to refuse." She softened then, because she did know him, in the ways that counted at breakfast. "Seventy, darling. Let them love you a little. It won't kill you."
"That's what the cake is for," he said, and she laughed and was gone, trailing instructions.
Julian Mercer arrived at ten with files, a calm suit, and the air of a man who had already solved three problems before breakfast. Margherita's nephew, Dominic's nephew by marriage, the vineyard's business manager for eight years — Julian held all those titles lightly, as if none of them could ever be taken from him. He found Dominic in the study avoiding a tailor.
"Final numbers for tonight," Julian said. "Auction lots confirmed. Clinic director thrilled. Press will be kept to the terrace, as agreed." He set the folder down with care. "And Halvern sent their regards. Again. They've increased—"
"No."
"Dominic."
"No is a complete sentence, Julian. I learned it in films. Usually before the explosion."
Julian smiled the smile of a man filing the moment away. "It's your birthday. I won't argue. I only keep you informed."
What he did not say, to Julian or to anyone, was that he had woken at four from a dream of Margherita laughing in the cellar, and had lain awake wondering who would stand on this terrace when he could not. Claire had been invited. Claire, his daughter, thirty-nine, a documentary filmmaker in New York with her mother's eyes and her father's talent for leaving a room before a feeling finished. They had not spoken properly since the funeral — each believed the other had chosen something else over Margherita while she was dying. He had chosen the vineyard's crisis that spring. She had never forgiven it, and in his worst hours neither had he.
Her reply to the invitation had been a card. Polite. Regretful. A prior commitment.
He kept it in the desk drawer anyway.
Dominic escaped, as he always escaped, down to the vines in the heat of the afternoon, hat in hand, while the house dressed itself without him. An old grower named Pete, who had worked the rows longer than Dominic had owned them, fell into step without ceremony.
"Big night, boss."
"Big bill," Dominic said.
"You'll speechify?"
"Briefly. A man my age learns brevity. Mostly from his knees."
Pete laughed and pointed out a row where the fruit was coming on heavy and sweet. Dominic tasted dust and sun off his palm where Pete had crushed a grape for him. Almost. Not yet. Everything on the estate that day was almost: the light, the music, the man himself.
When he came back up the hill, the house was transformed and he was, for a moment, simply grateful. Whatever else the evening was — a fundraiser, a performance, a room full of people who wanted a piece of the vineyard or the legend or the man — it was also this: Margherita's house, lit and alive, full of voices again.
"Right," Dominic said to no one in particular, squaring his shoulders as Ada appeared with the dark jacket held out like a verdict. "Let's give them a birthday."