Page 30 of Forget Me Not
Liam winks at me, that cheeky grin, and I feel a familiar flush in my chest. The same one I felt just yesterday, during our picnic, when we had been ribbing each other like we’d been friends for years.
“By the way,” I say. “I noticed something by the dock this morning. It was an animal, and I’m pretty sure it was dead.”
Liam is quiet for a beat before twisting around, letting his gaze follow mine.
“It looked like a fox.”
“Yeah, that can happen,” he says simply. “I’ll take care of it.”
We stay silent, my eyes still squinting into the distance.
“Anyway,” he says, slapping his legs as I look to the edge of the vineyard, a couple wheelbarrows next to a towering stack of blue buckets waiting for us to fill them all up. “The grapes are ready whenever you are.”
CHAPTER 19
I can barely feel my fingers by the time I get back.
We had been picking for hours, until early evening, when Liam decided we were done for the day.
“Let’s pack it up,” he had said, probably noticing how my body had started to sag; my shoulders hunched, the subtle crick in my neck. “You’re going to be pretty sore in the morning.”
It had been daunting, standing there. Looking down at the buckets I had filled and realizing just how much more there was to go. Glancing at my hands, the dirt and dried blood. Mosquito bites peppering my ankles and the stinging sunburn on the back of my neck. After a while, though, it had become rote: my fingers burrowing between the leaves, finding the grapes that were ready to pick—swollen and ripe, skin thick like a callus—and plucking them briskly from the stem. Liam had told me to watch where I walked, warning of snakes and spiders that liked to lurk in the brush; then he taught me how to strap the harvest bucket onto mychest, eliminating the need to carry it around. Still, it was physical work—grueling, even—spending all that time on my feet.
Even so, I found that I liked it, strangely enough. The sun on my cheeks and the breeze on my face so vastly different than my life back in the city. The stale air of my apartment and the fluorescent glow of my laptop screen leaving me depleted in an entirely different way.
“So, what do you know about Mitchell?” I had asked after a long stretch of silence, still unable to peel my mind from him. I didn’t want to appear too eager so I had waited a while, instead inquiring about the business and nodding politely as Liam spent the better part of an hour spewing out facts about taxonomy and pathology; how they sell grapes by the basket to grocery stores and farmer’s markets, but also as jellies and jams and to wineries around the coast.
“What do you want to know?”
“Anything, really,” I said. “I can’t seem to get a read on him.”
“You’re not the only one,” he responded, smiling vaguely. Continuing to pick.
I thought hard about how to word my next question, careful not to reveal too much from the diary and all this knowledge I shouldn’t already have. Marcia hadn’t given me any information, either, but then I remembered what she said about the vineyard. About how they hadlucked into the land.
“How did he come across Galloway?” I asked. “Is it family owned?”
“No, he bought it back in the eighties.”
“How many acres?”
“Close to fifty,” Liam had said, turning to face me. “Give or take.”
“Fifty?”I asked, glancing around. “I didn’t realize it was that big.”
“A lot of it is the woods out back,” he said, gesturing to the tree line on the side of the house. “The marsh, too.”
“But how could he afford that?” I asked next, realizing, too late, that I may have tipped my cards too much. “I mean, he must have been young when he bought it,” I added, trying to feign ignorance as I remembered how Marcia had guessed at Mitchell’s age on the night they met. “In his late twenties?”
Liam stared at me, his expression blank before he turned back toward the vines.
“Something like that,” he said at last. “Land was cheap back then. A lot cheaper than it is today.”
I nodded, falling quiet, something about it not sitting right. Based on all the things Marcia had written, it didn’t seem like Mitchell came from money. He lived in a camper he parked around town.
“Why grapes?” I asked at last, looking back at the trellis, but Liam just shrugged.
“He’s good with plants.”
