The night she had arrived at Giovanni’s house, she had dropped her phone to the bottom of her suitcase and forgotten all about it during the two weeks she’d been here. She didn’t intend to pick it up again—perhaps ever, if she could get away with it—but she needed lip balm and turned her suitcase over to try to find it one morning. When her phone fell out, she looked at it as one might examine a strange artifact from the past. What might it have been used for? Why did that old culture value such a strange object so much?

She was hit by a small touch of guilt—she had parents and a sister who probably wanted to know if she was alive. It was nice to be off the grid, but she did need to at least acknowledge that there were other people in the world.

The phone was completely dead, so she had to fish through the pockets of her suitcase to find the charger. Then she had to search through the drawer she’d adopted in the guest room to find an adaptor. Once she plugged it in, she sat on the bed and waited for the screen to light up.

She felt a strange mixture of nostalgia and dread as she waited. She ached to hear some news from her sister and Micah, and suddenly wanted to hear their voices, to tell them about Italy, to teach them some of the phrases she’d learned in such a short time here. She wanted her sister to see Alessia and Nicoletta; she knew that Gabrielle would take one look at them and see them the way Tabitha saw them: as funhouse reflections of them, almost a glimpse into their own past. She could already feel the tenderness Gabrielle would have for them, and the expectation of this shared adoration made her heart swell in anticipation for all of them. She wished the girls could know Micah; they delighted in the neighborhood children, and Tabitha knew they would dote on Micah and his head full of curls.

The red dots alerted her to all she’d missed. Most of it she scrolled through without reading—some sommelier consulting opportunities. She could ignore those; she had an auto-respond set so people knew she was on vacation. Some check-ins from friends, also which she could ignore from now.

One from Mark. She let her thumb hover over it for a moment but didn’t select it. Whatever it was, it could wait.

She went to the chain of messages from her sister. Most of them were pictures of Micah. She and Gabrielle normally texted several times a day, funny memes or jokes, comments about people or places or their work. Other than the Micah updates, Gabrielle hadn’t texted much. Her sister knew, more than anyone else, when Tabitha needed silence. And she knew not to attempt to push her out of it.

But the past days had brought a string of texts from Gabrielle that grew more and more intense. The first was a link to the follow-up Wine Life article about Royal that Mark had written. Tabitha glanced at the headline—Corruption at El Zopilote del Mar—but clicked away.

So, he’d published it. Without her input, just as he said he would. She wondered who talked, how accurate it was, or if her name was mentioned.

She couldn’t read it now. She couldn’t bear wading into a muddy pit when she finally got her shoes clean. She didn’t want the stink or the stain from that life back on her yet. Not yet.

The next few texts from her sister grew more intense.

You need to call him.

Have you read the article? You really need to call him.

Tabitha, it’s going down. You need to get home.

This most recent text was accompanied by another Wine Life link: Major Shakeup at El Zopilote Winery. Head Winemaker Royal Hamilton Said to be Furious with Staff.

Tabitha wondered if Mark had waited until he knew she was gone to publish. She remembered the look on his face after they’d left the brewery, his utter disappointment that someone would not reveal an injustice.

But there was more to it, and she knew it. Mark was a friend; he cared about her well-being as well. She knew that he knew the worst of Royal Hamilton, and he’d told her many times how glad he was that she’d left him. He probably wouldn’t admit it, but it was entirely possible that he’d waited until she was out of the country before he published.

It wasn’t just possible, it was likely. That was how a moral code worked, Tabitha realized. She’d been swimming with the sharks for so long that she’d forgotten how the other fish treated each other.

She scrolled back up to the string of messages from Mark. The first was a link to the initial article, the same one Gabrielle had linked. He did not ask her opinion, just sent it without comment.

The second was another link, this to an article that had only published yesterday. Royal Hamilton and El Zopilote del Mar winery sue Wine Life Magazine, Wine Geek International Publishing Company, and writer Mark McClintock for Libel and Damages.

“Where are your thoughts tonight?”

The girls had gone to bed an hour ago, and Tabitha and Giovanni sat on opposite sides of the couch, their legs intertwined in the middle, sipping wine in front of the fire.

Giovanni had a book on his lap, but she realized now that she hadn’t heard him flip pages in a long time. He’d been watching her, and she’d been brooding. Arms crossed, eyebrows pulled into a knot, chewing her thumbnail to the hilt. She looked up at him, straightened up immediately, and tried to smile.

“It’s nothing. I’m okay.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

He knew. She was living in an idyllic, unconnected paradise, pretending the world outside of this Italian village did not exist. But it did, and Giovanni was still part of it. He subscribed to Wine Life; she’d seen past issues of it lying around his house.

“I don’t know what there is to talk about.”

“Is Mark lying?” he asked, but Tabitha knew that Giovanni already knew the answer. The men had gotten to know each other in Napa, and the honesty on Mark’s face was as obvious as the duplicity on Royal’s.

Everyone could see it, except Tabitha. Until it was too late.

“Of course he’s not lying. I think it is all true.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to do nothing. I want to throw my phone away and forget all about the winery and Wine Life Magazine and being a somm. I want to live here in this village and help you make that beautiful wine and serve it to people who love to drink it just because it’s delicious, not because it’s a label. I want to make out with you every single day and make love to you every single night and eat pasta for dinner and learn to speak Italian and watch your daughters grow up.”

She blurted it all out without thinking, and then stopped in astonishment. She could not remember a time when she’d been so nakedly honest with anyone, except perhaps Gabrielle. She watched his face to see if she’d gone too far, but she knew she hadn’t. With Giovanni, she could speak the truth.

“What do you think I should do?”

“All of those things,” he said. “Especially making love every night.”

They smiled at each other, and Tabitha stopped to consider the possibilities in front of her. For the first time, she had a dream that made her happy. Not just professionally happy, not just accomplished enough to impress her mother, but a vision of a life that seemed to include everything. She could see that dream in front of her now, on the shabby couch with her feet tangled up with this handsome man in front of a crackling fireplace. Happy children slept in the rooms down the hall; perhaps more children in the future. Maybe this was the vision of her life she’d always wanted, but never allowed herself to recognize: this contentment, this feeling of being loved without expectation, this sense of being a valuable part of a family who accepted her for who she was and not what she could provide. It was all here, in front of her, and she had been living it these past two weeks like a daydream.

But it was only that: a daydream. As real as this life felt to her, as a part of it as she thought she was, she knew that it was illusory.

“I only worry about your phone,” Giovanni continued. “If you throw your phone away, how long will you be happy with me?”

“I think I would be happy with you forever.”

“I would make sure of that. But you are not a woman who could be happy if her friends are hurting.”

She turned from his gaze and stared into the dying fire. As soon as she said the words out loud, everything would change. She thought about saying goodbye to the girls, and an ache formed in her throat. She couldn’t even think about saying goodbye to Giovanni.

“What happens in these cases?” Giovanni finally asked. “Can you simply call them, and tell them what you know? Then these people who are in court will know that Mark tells the truth?”

She shook her head. “Yes, but there will be more to deal with. Royal is suing Mark on the winery’s behalf. That means I’m involved. If I find any evidence that Royal has done something wrong—and I’m not saying I can, but if I do, I don’t know what will happen. Will we lose the winery? Will the winery be stripped of all the medals they won under him? I don’t know how this works. I just know that those people trusted me, and I let them down because Royal gaslighted me. I trusted him more than I trusted myself.”

“What does this word mean—gaslight?”

“It means I knew he was lying. I knew it, Giovanni. Every time I brought up a concern. If I suggested the Mourvedre tasted awfully sweet, for example, he’d convince me that I was inexperienced.”

“When did you realize he did this gaslight?”

“When Mark started telling me about all of the inconsistencies, everything I used to ignore at El Zop made sense. It was already humiliating that he’d been cheating on our marriage for years. And I never once suspected that. I was too proud to admit that I was accidentally ignorant about our marriage but willfully ignorant about our business. I thought if I came after Royal with what I knew, I would look like a vicious shrew. A scorned woman, only out for revenge.”

He thought about this for a long time.

“And what now? Can you change anything?”

“I can tell the truth, but I will look stupid when I tell it. Who is that blind to her own husband’s criminal behavior? But I’ll tell it anyway. We might lose the winery. But I can get someone out of trouble that he doesn’t deserve.”

“Mark?”

“Mark. The one person in all of this who doesn’t have any blood on his hands. The one person whose only goal was to tell the truth. And I stopped him, just as much as Royal did. It’s nice to think that I’m the honorable one, but in reality, I acted just like my ex-husband. I didn’t want to look bad, so I let Mark suffer in my place.”

“You are not like Royal. You are different than him in every way. Your ex-husband is a man who cheats on everything and every person he meets. It would not occur to him to fix something that he has done wrong. It eats at you every day. I can see it in you even when you don’t know that you are thinking about it. You are not truly happy if you have been a part of something wrong or incorrect or ugly.”

“I am happy here.” She turned back to him and looked into his eyes, eyes that had become so familiar to her that. In Giovanni’s eyes was the promise of the home she’d always wanted, the life she’d craved. The love and stability that she’d never had, though she’d fought with everyone she met to create it.

He put his book on the coffee table in front of them and moved over her, pulling her into an embrace. “I am not Royal. I do not want half of you. The ambitious half, the half that looks beautiful on my arm, the part of you that is only for the outside world to see. I want all of you. I want your heart that is not divided by sadness or regret. I want you completely.”

“I can’t say goodbye to the girls. I can’t say goodbye to you.”

“In Italian, we say spero di vederti presto. I hope I will see you soon.”

She met his lips in a kiss that stopped time. They had that, at least. They had another night together, a kiss that could make them forget the impending sadness, two bodies that fit together as if they had been carved from the same piece of wood. Their grain, the whorls and burls of their skin matched each other; their flaws fit into each other’s strengths; their pleasure could erase their pain. They had tonight.