Coffee and Catastrophe

The only coffee shop within sight of Laurel Valley was called The Bean, and judging by the decor, it hadn't changed since the last time I was there as a teenager — the same checked tablecloths, the same cracked bell over the door, the same owner behind the counter who seemed to remember every customer's order since their very first visit.

Maggie was already sitting at our old table by the window when I walked in — the same one where we'd spent hours at sixteen debating who liked whom in the other homeroom, though the stakes had clearly been much lower back then.

"You look like you haven't slept," she said instead of hello, sliding a cappuccino across the table that she'd already ordered for me, because twenty-two years of friendship gives a person the right to order your coffee without asking.

"I haven't," I admitted, dropping into the chair. "I spent all night trying to come up with a better plan than yours."

"And did you?"

"No."

"Then," Maggie said, with that infuriatingly smug smile she got whenever she turned out to be right, "we're back to my plan."

I wrapped both hands around my cup, as if the warmth could somehow help me survive the next few minutes.

"Say it again. Slowly. So it sounds exactly as absurd as it actually is."

"Fine," Maggie straightened up, clearly relishing the moment. "You marry Sam. Formally. On paper. By contract, if that makes you feel better — and I know it will, because you're the kind of person who needs a 'in case of unforeseen circumstances' clause even in a grocery list. You get married, you keep the vineyard, and after some reasonable amount of time — a year, two, whatever your lawyer says — you quietly and civilly get divorced, and you both go on with your lives. Nobody gets hurt. Derek's furious. Everybody wins."

"Your brother Sam."

"My brother Sam, yes, I still only have the one."

"Who's spent the last fifteen years treating me like his little sister's kid sister, not like someone he could marry."

"He treats everyone like that," Maggie waved a hand. "It's not personal, it's just his factory setting. He treats me like that too, and I am, for the record, his actual sister."

"Maggie, this is insane."

"This," she paused for dramatic effect, "is genius, and you know it perfectly well, you're just not ready to admit it out loud yet."

I wanted to protest more forcefully, but if I was being honest with myself, I'd spent most of last night thinking roughly the same thing — just phrasing it as "this is insane, who does something like this" rather than as an actual course of action. Hearing the same idea said out loud, over coffee, with such disarming practicality, was somehow far more convincing than my own three hours of nighttime spiraling.

"He won't even consider it," I said finally, grasping for the most reasonable objection I could find. "Why would Sam marry me to save my vineyard? There's nothing in it for him."

"There's exactly something in it for him," Maggie countered, and for the first time in the conversation something less joking crept into her voice. "He quit the firm in March and still hasn't told Mom and Dad why. He's living at home, fixing everything he can get his hands on just so he doesn't have to sit around doing nothing, and if you ask me, he's basically looking for a way to prove to himself that he's capable of more than blueprints he doesn't want to draw anymore. Maybe 'save the neighbor's family vineyard for six months of paperwork' is exactly what he needs right now."

I frowned. "What happened in March?"

"I don't know," Maggie shrugged, and this time it looked genuine, not another maneuver. "He won't say. One day he just came home and said he wasn't working there anymore, and he's been fixing our roof, our fence, and apparently yesterday he started on your guest cottage roof without anyone asking him to."

That explained the hammering I'd heard from the porch yesterday.

"Is he there now?" I asked, not entirely sure why I was asking, as if the answer could change my decision somehow.

"Probably. He's out there almost every day since he heard about your grandmother. Says the house 'shouldn't fall apart just because nobody's watching.'"

Something in that phrase — clearly Sam's own words, not something Maggie had invented for effect — hit me harder than I was ready to admit. Not because it was romantic. Just because it was kind, and I'd long since stopped expecting kindness from a man whose main claim to fame in my memory was prosecco criticism at a high school graduation.

"I'll think about it," I said finally, and Maggie made a sound so triumphant that the coffee shop owner glanced over from the other end of the room.

"'I'll think about it' is the first sensible thing you've said this whole conversation, and I'm counting it as a win."

"Don't take it as a yes."

"I'm not," she said, finishing off the last of her latte with an entirely too-innocent expression. "I just think you should drive over there today and, I don't know, casually happen to be near the guest cottage around the time my brother's there with a hammer."

"That's not a plan, Maggie, that's a setup."

"It's," she said, standing and leaving far too much cash on the table for two coffees, the way she always did when she didn't want to wait for change, "called giving fate a chance, and personally I don't see the difference."

I was still shaking my head indignantly as we walked outside, but somewhere halfway back to the valley I caught myself already calculating what time would look the most casually convenient to drop by.