Page 96 of Claim to Fame

“My parents wouldn’t want—”

“Have you talked to Louise and Henry? Because I don’t remember them being as uptight as you’re making them out to be.”

Julie pounded her tiny fist against his bicep. “Mama!” she wailed for the umpteenth time in the last hour.

“You have to own your choices, Ethan.”

“I am. I do,” he insisted. “But I still run a family business, Ang.”

“You run a vineyard, not a fucking preschool,” Angie said with an exhausted sigh. “Look, I won’t come to the Reader Fest thing if it bothers you so much, but I think you’re making a mistake. You’ve got some weird puritanical bullshit in your head about people knowing you’re a sexual being and you have to sort that shit out.”

They said their goodbyes and Ethan hung up the phone as Julie started wailing. “If you would just go to sleep,” he muttered, increasing his pace.

The landline on his desk rang—again. It had been ringing nonstop for the last two days as various reporters tried to get a statement from Ethan. The ringing stopped and abruptly started again.

“Christ’s sake.” He reached over and flicked the receiver off the cradle, hanging up the call and leaving the phone off the hook.

“Need a hand?”

Gavin pushed into the office and held his arms out for Julie. Ethan let his friend take his granddaughter and paced back over to the phone, putting it on the hook but unplugging the cord. “I need reporters to stop calling. I need brides to stop canceling their weddings because their Catholic mothers think the whole vineyard is tainted by my scandal. I need right wing nut jobs to stop tanking our online reviews and I need Julie to take a nap and I need—”

“You need to take a breath,” Gavin said as Julie tugged on his tie. “And don’t worry about the brides. I had phone calls with four separate companies this morning who are interested in booking events at Nuthatch—two corporate retreats, some kind of restauranteurs conference, and a singles event. You can’t see it now because you’re in the eye of the storm—”

“The eye is the quiet part.”

“Is it? Huh. Weird. Well, you’re in whatever part of the storm is hairiest, but it will calm down. This could end up being a good thing.”

Ethan stared at his friend in disbelief. “How?”

“Diversifying the vineyard’s event rentals beyond weddings can only be beneficial in the long run. And I know you’ve been too busy hiding out on your own property to know this, but having the press in town has actually been great. One outlet wrote a whole piece about how Aster Bay is the undiscovered gem of the Northeast, and another did a profile on Aster Place as one of the most haunted houses in New England.”

“It’s not haunted.”

“It could be haunted. You don’t know.”

“You don’t think we’d know if Aster Place was haunted?”

Gavin shrugged. “I think you’re missing the point. An article showed up online today touting Aster Bay as the ideal vacation destination for a girls’ weekend, in part because you can visit the vineyard owned by romance audiobook narrator Slade Hardcastle. The only one still stressing about this is you.”

“Because it’s my life!” Ethan shouted.

Julie jolted in Gavin’s arms, her face turning towards her grandfather and crumbling. Ethan saw it in slow motion, the way her nose scrunched up and her lip quivered moments before she let out a frightened wail. He lowered his voice, crooning apologies and words of comfort as he scooped Julie out of Gavin’s arms, cradling her against his chest.

“This might be fun for the rest of you but I’m the one having his private life speculated about all over the internet. The things people are saying—” He broke off, shaking his head. “I’m a private person, Gav. Ilikemy privacy. I do not like strangers on the internet speculating about the size of my…” He gestured to his crotch and Gavin’s eyes widened.

“Ethan—”

“I need to get Julie to sleep. I’m going to take her for a ride and see if she’ll calm down.”

He hardly heard Gavin’s goodbye as he bundled Julie out the backdoor of his office, the one the press hadn’t yet found, and trudged across the gravel strip to his truck. The strap of her car seat clicked into place at the same time some reporter who’d snuck around the side of the building to smoke a cigarette—despite the multiple ‘no smoking’ signs, the asshole—caught sight of him.

“Hey, Ethan!” the reporter shouted, snuffing out his cigarette with the toe of his shoe.

“No comment,” Ethan barked as he closed the door on Julie and stalked around the truck to the driver’s side.

“Did you know you were the other man?” the reporter called, moving closer to the truck. “Or was it the other way around? Was Jackson the other man?”

Ethan swung into the driver’s side and tore out of the driveway as he buckled his seatbelt. In the backseat, Julie continued to wail as the reporter jogged across the parking lot towards his rental car. Ethan turned off onto a small side street that wound around the edge of the vineyard property, glancing at Julie in the back seat. It would never cease to amaze him how quickly his granddaughter would start to nod off in a moving car. Her little head bobbed with sleep as he took another turn, winding past Cheryl and Ricky’s farm.

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