Page 1 of The Vines Between Us
Chapter One
ALEXANDRE
The call came at 2:47 p.m. on a Tuesday, while I was trapped in a boardroom seventeen floors above Paris, discussing quarterly projections that meant everything to the company and nothing to me.
"Monsieur Moreau, I apologize for interrupting." My assistant's voice crackled through the speakerphone. "There's an urgent call from Saint-Émilion. A notary named Bertrand Dupuis. He insists it cannot wait."
The name of the village hit me like a slap. I hadn't heard it spoken aloud in this office—hadn't allowed myself to speak it—in years.
"Take a message." I kept my voice level as twelve pairs of eyes tracked me from around the conference table.
"He says it's regarding your grandfather's estate. There's been a... development."
My grandfather had been dead for three weeks. What development could possibly warrant this interruption?
"Five minutes," I told the room, not waiting for their permission.
In my office, I closed the door and took the call.
"Monsieur Moreau? Alexandre?" Bertrand Dupuis's voice carried the distinctive accent of the region, softening consonants in a way that transported me instantly. "I regret to inform you that there are... complications with your grandfather's estate."
"Complications?" I straightened my tie, a reflex when control seemed to be slipping.
"Yes, the vineyard's ownership is in question. The bank is demanding payment immediately. There are documents you must review. In person."
"That's impossible. I have meetings scheduled through—"
"The estate could be lost, Monsieur. If you don't come within the week."
The vineyard. Lost. The words didn't make sense together. Domaine Moreau had been in our family for four generations. My grandfather's blood and sweat were in that soil.
"I'll be there tomorrow."
After ending the call, I stood at my office window before heading for the nearby metro station. Paris sprawled below, elegant and indifferent. Seventeen floors up, the city became an abstraction—beautiful, distant, like a relationship maintained through careful negotiation rather than love.
My apartment felt emptier than usual that evening. I'd lived there for seven years, yet as I packed an overnight bag, I realized how little of myself existed in the space. The furniture was all high-end minimalist pieces selected by an interior designer. The art on the walls—abstract canvases in muted tones—had been chosen to "complement the aesthetic." Nothing personal. Nothing alive.
As I packed my suitcase, my phone buzzed with a message from my father. I glanced at it and immediately deleted it without reading—a ritual I'd perfected over the years. Three months since our last stilted conversation in person, and still he expected me tojump when called. Some habits died hard—both his need for control and my instinct to avoid confrontation and the inevitable fear he drove within me.
I owned three framed photographs. One of my mother, taken before time and my father's drinking hollowed her out. One of my university graduation. And one—kept in my bedside drawer rather than displayed—of an eighteen year old boy with sun-browned skin and eyes that crinkled at the corners when he laughed. Hugo.
I didn't take it out. Didn't need to. That face lived behind my eyelids.
Sometimes, in the quiet moments between midnight and dawn when my defences were worn thin by exhaustion, I'd find myself reaching for that drawer. I never opened it—not fully. Just enough to know it was still there, like pressing on a bruise to confirm it still hurt. Because the pain was proof it had been real.
My colleagues called me calculating, meticulous. They'd never seen how my fingers trembled when a certain song played in a café, or how I'd once walked fifteen blocks in a rainstorm after glimpsing auburn hair in a crowd that turned out to belong to a stranger. They didn't know I'd declined three job offers in Montpellier over the years, afraid of what might happen if I found myself too close to the Languedoc region, too close to him.
I'd built walls around those summers, sealed it away like wine in a cellar—not to forget it, but to preserve it. To keep it pure and untouched by the disappointments that came after. What good would it do to admit that in fourteen years, no one else's laugh had ever sounded quite right to me? That I still caught myself searching for gold flecks in every pair of brown eyes I met? That sometimes, in dreams, I could still feel the weight of his slender frame against mine, could still smell vineyard soil and lavender on his skin?
No. Better to keep the photograph hidden. Better to pretend I'd moved on.
Even if the lie tasted bitter every time I swallowed it down.
The TGV sliced through the French countryside the next morning, a blur of green and gold outside my window. I'd booked first class, of course. The extra hundred euros bought me silence and space—the two commodities I valued most.
My laptop remained closed on the table. Four emails from the office had already arrived on my phone, marked urgent. I'd answered two, ignored the others. Let them wait. The vineyard might not.
Domaine Moreau. I closed my eyes and it appeared, not as I'd last seen it fourteen years ago, but as it had been in childhood—enormous to my eight-year-old self, a kingdom of endless rows of vines, cool stone cellars, and the grandfather who'd shown me a gentleness my father never could.
