Who's in My Room?

Norman almost left me behind.

I had one leg in the truck and one still on the pavement when he started the engine, and the look he gave me in the rear-view mirror when I finally yanked the door shut was the look of a man who had already decided I'd exceeded his patience and we hadn't even left the city yet.

Two hours. Not a single word.

 "Do you talk?" I finally asked, somewhere past the first hour.

His eyes didn't move from the road. "When there's something worth saying."

I turned back to the window. "Wonderful," I said quietly. "An entire year of this."

I folded my hands in my lap and watched New York dissolve into highway and highway dissolve into greener and older and unfamiliar lands.

I hadn't prepared myself for the beautiful view that caught my eye three hours later. My chest had already cracked open before I could stop it.

Norman pulled up on the gravel, killed the engine, and had my bags out of the boot before I reached the back of the truck. Two cases and a holdall — everything I owned. He set them on the gravel, slung his own single bag over one shoulder, and walked toward the steps.

 "Are you going to help me with those?" I called after him.

He stopped. Turned. Looked at the bags, looked at me, and then — the last thing I expected — he laughed. A real one. From the chest.

 "What?" I asked confused.

"Nothing." He was still smiling, which was worse than the laugh. "You said that like I'm a doorman."

"Welll, there should be someone. A security person. Anyone to help me." I gestured at the cases. "Those are heavy."

"Look around you city girl, everything up here is heavy. You carry your own things." He turned back toward the steps.

"I'm your boss." I spat out. How dare this man?

He stopped on the second step and turned around with the full, deliberate attention of a man making sure his next words landed exactly where he intended. "You're the person whose name is on a document," he said.

"Being a boss is something you earn." He glanced up at the heavy sky,  threatening to rain. "Leave them if you want. But when weather comes up here it doesn't warn you first. And that holdall looks expensive..." He met my eyes. "Your call city girl."

He went inside.

I stood on the gravel with the wind cutting through my coat and fury burning in my chest, and then I picked up both cases, hooked the holdall over my shoulder, and dragged everything up those stone steps with my jaw locked and my eyes on the open doorway.

I was not going to beg him if that's what he want. I struggled the entire way up, and he didn't look back once.

----------

The staff were waiting inside the main hallway.

Alice was first. She took both my hands before I'd set my bags down. "We've been waiting for you, sweetheart. Your aunt Maggie talked about you." She said it like it was the most natural thing in the world, and the sincerity of it hit me somewhere I wasn't prepared for.

I looked at the ceiling briefly and nodded.

Mae, who pressed a warm bread roll into my hand before I finished saying hello and looked me over like a woman running diagnostics. "When did you last eat properly?" she asked, in the tone of someone already unimpressed with the answer.

I ate the roll before I responded.

From the doorway of the sitting room I felt Norman watching. When I glanced over, he looked away fast.

He took me through the vineyard himself as the light fell.

"Yield last season?" I asked. I knew a few things from listening to Tyler's business calls.

"Forty thousand bottles. Down from forty-six." He crouched and pressed two fingers into the soil, reading something I didn't have the language for yet. "Frost took a section of this in March. The solution needs capital the account doesn't have."

"How much?"

"More than is in it. Which you'd know if you'd read the financial file I gave you on the drive up."

"I read it." I said defensive even though I had slept most of the drive. Pregnancy hormones.

"Then you know the number."

"I know the number," I said evenly. "I'm asking if you have a plan or if you've been waiting for someone else to produce one."

Something shifted in his jaw. "I've three options drafted. But I was waiting to see if the new owner had any thoughts of her own. Didn't want to overwhelm her."

The way he said her carefully like he doubted I could handle all of this.

We reached the frost-damaged section. Even I could see the soil around the roots sitting differently from the rows either side. I crouched down the way he had, pressed my fingers into the cold damp earth, and held them there.

I stood slowly. "The drainage is wrong on this side."

Norman went still surprised at my knowledge.

"Water's sitting too long after rain. Retaining cold against the roots." I looked down the row, and up at his shocked face.

"I spent seven years attending industry dinners I wasn't supposed to be paying attention to. A vineyard lost two seasons before anyone checked the drainage grading on the slope. They regraded it. Recovered in a year." I looked at him. "Has anyone checked this section?"

He looked at me for a long moment. Something moved across his face, and gone before he decided whether to let it stay.

"No," he said. "No one's checked it."

"Then that's where I'd start."

I walked back toward the estate. He stood at the end of that row for a moment before he followed, and neither of us said another word.

------

My room was at the end of the second floor corridor. Iron-framed bed, wooden wardrobe, with curtains that didn't quite meet in the middle. When I sat on the bed it shifted at my weight.

Mae, had left flowers on the window and an extra blanket on the chair.

I had slept in a bed that cost more than most people's salaries for seven years. I had lain in the centre of it every night and felt completely, inexplicably cold.

This creaking, drafty, imperfect room felt more like mine than anything I had slept in for years.

I ran the bath as hot as it would go, lowered myself into the water and felt my whole body exhale.

I washed my hair. Scrubbed my skin until it felt like mine again. No Tyler, no Lucy, no rose petals soaking in spilled wine. For the first time in six weeks I felt something close to peace.

And then the lights went out.

Without a warning. One moment the bathroom was warm and amber-lit and the next it was absolute, complete darkness.

I froze.

Soap was running toward my eyes. I squeezed them shut and grabbed the edges of the tub and fumbled blindly for the tap, rinsing my face, heart hammering, water splashing onto the floor.

I needed to get out. I needed my robe.

I'd hung it on the hook just outside the bathroom door before I got in. I felt my way to the door and pushed it open and stretched my arm out into the dark bedroom, fingers searching for the cotton fabric...

My hand collided with another hand. It was warm. And solid.

I panicked.

"Who is that?" I screamed, snatching my hand back and slamming into the doorframe. "Who is in my room? answer me! Who is there?”