The Developer’s Offer

By morning, my quiet resolve had gone sour, like milk left in the sun. I woke up in Grandma's old bedroom — Maggie had insisted I stay the night rather than drive back to the city in that state — and before I'd even fully opened my eyes, I reached for my phone to check whether yesterday's reading of the will had all been a dream.

It hadn't. My inbox already held an email from Mr. Pembrooke with a copy of the will "for your review," as if one verbal humiliation hadn't been enough and a written record was required too.

I went downstairs looking for coffee and found the local paper on the kitchen table, apparently left open by whoever — probably Maggie, who'd stopped by that morning to feed Grandma's chickens — to the real estate listings page. Not on purpose, I was fairly sure. Just a coincidence that turned my stomach worse than last night's wine.

A full-page ad for Meredith Development was advertising an "Exclusive Project: Laurel Crest Estates — twenty villas on the grounds of a historic vineyard, farmhouse-style spa, private wine-tasting club." The photo showed a man in a hard hat, sickeningly familiar from Derek's Instagram, shaking hands with a man in a suit against a hillside that — I'd have recognized it anywhere — was the exact same hill where Grandma taught me to stomp grapes barefoot.

I felt something rising in me that wasn't panic anymore. It was something more useful. Anger.

I called Maggie.

"Your cousin's already been showing the land to developers," I said instead of hello.

"What?" Maggie was clearly chewing toast on the other end. "Wait, what developers?"

"Meredith Development. I'm holding an ad right now where the hill behind our vineyard is already called 'Laurel Crest.' With a spa, Maggie. With a private tasting club."

There was a silence during which I heard Maggie choke on her toast.

"He can't have done that," she said finally. "The will hasn't even officially taken effect yet."

"An ad with a picture of a hill doesn't require a will to take effect. It requires nerve and a good photographer. Derek's apparently got both."

I called Meredith Development under the pretext of asking for details — pretending to be a potential investor, a bald-faced lie, but no more bald-faced than advertising someone else's land — and after ten minutes with an enthusiastic sales rep named Todd, I had the whole picture in my hands.

Negotiations had been going on for three months already. Derek had provided the company with "preliminary owner consent" — I wasn't entirely sure that meant anything legally, but it sounded frighteningly official — and the developers had already commissioned a geological survey of the land. Todd cheerfully informed me that "phase one construction could begin as early as next spring, circumstances permitting," and I thanked him as politely as I could manage before hanging up and staring at the kitchen wall for so long that Grandma's chickens outside started to look concerned.

Six months. I had six months to find a husband, and Derek had a three-month head start on lining up bulldozers.

I paced the house trying to come up with anything resembling a plan. The mental list of possible husbands I drew up standing in Grandma's kitchen was depressingly short. Mark from the restaurant was engaged. David from the wine trade conference lived on another continent and was, it turned out, also married — or so his wife informed me, meeting my eyes in the hotel lobby with an unexpectedly sharp look. I didn't even consider the sommelier from the disastrous date, because I'd rather lose the vineyard outright than spend another evening listening to him compare wine lists.

I wasn't the kind of person who married for convenience. I wasn't even sure I knew anyone who was — aside from the endless historical examples my mother used to make me read as a kid, which, given my current situation, suddenly seemed a lot more practical than I'd ever given them credit for.

But something in me — the same something that had spent nine stubborn years building a career in the most competitive restaurant city in the country with no connections beyond sheer stubbornness and a good palate — refused to simply lie down and give up. The vineyard belonged to our family. Grandma had loved that land more than most people love their children. She didn't deserve to have her funeral coincide with the first geological survey for a future spa complex.

I went out onto the back porch, sat on the top step, and called Maggie a second time that morning.

"I need a plan," I said. "A real one. Not 'marry the first guy from a bar,' but something that could actually work in six months."

"Okay," Maggie said slowly, in the tone of someone clearly already turning something over but not sure whether to say it out loud yet. "What if I told you I already had a plan?"

"Maggie."

"Just hear me out before you start panicking."

I closed my eyes, leaned my head back against the porch post, and braced myself to listen to my friend's plan — a friend who, just last night, had already tried to slip her own brother's name in as a joke, a joke that, I now suspected, hadn't been an accident at all.

"Fine," I said. "I'm listening."

Over the hill, where yesterday there had been nothing but silence and vine rows, someone was already hammering on the roof of the old guest cottage — a sound I chalked up to coincidence at the time, not the first sign that fate had already made up its mind before I had.