Lucky Charm

Big Elijah said we hadn't seen a season like this in twenty years.

He said it the way he said everything — quietly, standing at the stable fence with his arms folded, looking out at the vineyard the way a man looked at something he loved and had been worried about for a long time.

Then he looked at me and said "you're our lucky charm, Miss Sarah"

And I thought immediately, involuntarily, about Tyler's father at that dinner three years ago, his voice not quite lowered enough across the table as he told everyone that carer to listen.

"The woman is bad luck. She can't even hold a child."

I pressed my hand against the mare's neck and said nothing.

"You're early," Elijah continues, turning from the fence to look at me properly. Taking in the oversized coat over my pyjamas, the mug of ginger tea that had gone cold thirty minutes ago. "Windy days are rest days. Everyone resumes late." He nodded toward the estate. "You should be in bed."

"Couldn't sleep," I said.

It was the truth, if not the whole of it. Five months along and sleep had become a chore. I tossed from one side of my bed to the other, gave up around four in the morning and lay watching the ceiling until it became bright outside. The morning sickness didn't help — it was worse now than in the beginning, arriving without warning at any hour it chose, and I had learned to keep ginger tea and dry crackers within arm's reach at all times.

Alice had known before the end of my first week. Rosa before the end of my second. Neither of them had said a word directly — they simply began leaving ginger biscuits outside my door in the mornings and making sure there was always something plain and easy on the table.

"You know what this land hasn't seen in years?" Elijah said, coming to stand beside me at the fence, his arms folded, looking out at what we had built.

"What?" I said.

"This..." He nodded at the expanded rows, the new section. "This kind of season. This kind of growth." He shook his head slowly. "We haven't seen it since before your aunt Maggie got sick. Before things started getting terrible." He looked at me. "You're our lucky charm, Miss Sarah. I told Norman the same thing."

I laughed — a real one, from somewhere genuine. "What did Norman say?"

The corner of Elijah's mouth curved. "He said luck had nothing to do with it and if I started crediting luck over labour he'd find me something productive to do with my time."

"That," I said, "is the most Norman sentence that has ever been constructed."

Elijah laughed and I smiled and turned back to the mare and felt something settle briefly in my chest. Pride. That's what it was. I had spent enough time without it that I almost hadn't recognized it when it arrived.

I was still holding it when Norman appeared at the stable entrance.

He looked at Elijah, then at me, then at the cold mug in my hand with the specific look he reserved for things I was doing that he disagreed with but had calculated weren't worth the argument.

"Proposals came in from the city," he said, dropping the folder on the stable ledge. "Two distribution offers and an invitation to the Harrington Collective dinner I'm August."

"The Harrington dinner." I kept my voice even.

"It's a very important dinner for all business owners. The kind that opens doors we haven't knocked on yet."

He pulled the folder open. "I've been attending the smaller events on the estate's behalf. But this one is different. This one you need to be in yourself."

"You've been handling things fine."

"I've been handling things as a representative. There's a difference between a representative and an owner, Sarah, and the people in that room will know it the moment I walk in without you again." He held my gaze steadily. "At some point you have to walk in yourself."

"I know that."

"Do you?"

"I said I know, Norman."

Elijah found something important to attend to at the far end of the stable. Leaving us alone.

Norman looked at me for a moment longer. Then he flipped to the distribution page. "Meridian or Calloway?"

"Meridian," I said. "Better terms, northeast network, and longer commitment. Exactly what we need."

He looked up. "That's what Patrice said."

"Patrice is right."

A tiny smile moved at the corner of his mouth. "I'll send the response today." He closed the folder, and turned to leave.

"East fence on the new section needs checking before the week's out," I said. "The wind last night—"

"Already on it."

He left. Elijah reappeared from the far end of the stable three seconds later, his brow arched.

"Not a word," I warned, already knew what he was going to say.

"I didn't say anything," he said. Exactly the way Patrice always said it.

I pulled my coat tighter and walked back out into the windy morning.

---

By mid-afternoon the wind had dropped low and steady and Norman and I were walking the east boundary the way we had developed a habit of doing without either of us ever deciding to —

"Meridian rep wants to visit next month," he said. "Take a walk around the property."

"Good. Let them see it."

"You'll need to be present."

"I'm always present."

"You'll need to be in better clothes —" he gestured vaguely at my current outfit. The third oversized sweater this week.

"Are you mocking my wardrobe?" I said. "Right now? Is that genuinely what's happening?"

"I'm suggesting that when a major distribution partner walks this property, we'd need to be properly dressed."

"Norman."

"Yes."

"Stop talking."

He stopped. But the expression on his face was mocking. We were near the end of the row when Norman slowed.

I turned. He was looking at me — Something different was on his face. A discomfort that sat strangely on a man who was never visibly uncomfortable about anything.

"What?" I Asked.

His jaw shifted. He looked away, then back. Opened his mouth, closed it, and when he tried again his voice had dropped to something careful and deliberate. "Go inside," he said. "Go inside and check yourself."

"Check myself." I looked at him. "What does that—"

His eyes moved briefly. Down and back up. I looked down before I finished the sentence.

A red stain had spread through the fabric of my light grey trousers.

Three times. I had been here three times before and I knew what this meant.

"No." The word came out of me before I knew I was saying it.  "No, no, no—"

My hands went to my stomach. Both of them, pressing flat and hard like I could hold it together by force, like I could keep everything inside.

"Sarah—" Norman's voice came from beside me.

"Not this one." My voice was cracking and I couldn't stop it and I didn't care. The vineyard was blurring at the edges. "Please. Not this one too. I can't—"

I pressed harder against my stomach, against the small fierce life I had been protecting through every single thing that had tried to take me apart this year.

"I can't do it again. Do you hear me? I cannot do it again..."

Don't you leave me, I thought. Not after everything. Don't you dare leave me too.