These Tangled Vines(18)

He was right. Even on her wedding day, Sloane had felt smothered by doubts and fears, and she had cried in the bathroom that morning before the hairdresser arrived. But she was so madly in love with Alan—rich, handsome Alan—and she wanted desperately to be loved and married and to have children and a beautiful, perfect life that all her friends would envy. It was what her mother wanted for her too. Her mother had walked into the bathroom and wiped Sloane’s tears away and convinced her that everything would be fine. It would be different once they were married, her mother had said, and then she’d convinced her to go through with the ceremony.

Since then, Sloane felt her world continually caving in around her, because there were always other women. Last week she had dreamed of a thunderstorm where the roof of her house was struck by lightning and her attic was exposed.

“Why do you always have to be so mean?” she said to Connor. “Even when we were kids, you used to throw spiders at me.”

“I’m not being mean,” he said. “I’m being honest. And if divorcing Alan is what you have up your sleeve, why should you care that Dad cut us out of his will? Are you just insulted by the principle of the thing? Because you’ll get at least twenty million in a divorce settlement, easy. I know how much Alan is worth.”

“No, I won’t,” she replied, morosely. “I signed a prenup.”

Connor frowned at her. “Are you joking? You didn’t tell me that. You said he didn’t want one.”

“I lied.”

“Sloane! What the hell?”

“Please stop. You’re not helping. My life is imploding right now, and I thought this was my escape hatch. This morning, I had visions of leaving all the gossip about Alan behind in LA and coming here, where Maria would cook traditional Tuscan meals for the kids, and they would help harvest the grapes every September and learn how to speak Italian, and I wouldn’t have to see or hear what Alan was doing with other women.”

Connor pinched the bridge of his nose. “Oh, please, Sloane. You wouldn’t last five minutes without your therapist and your personal trainer.”

“Yes, I would,” she insisted. “I think that’s half the problem. I expect too much from myself. I keep paying other people to make me perfect and happy. But maybe there’s no such thing as perfect, and I think I just need to eat some pasta and not worry about it.”

Connor sat down and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyeballs. “I can’t deal with this right now.”

“Fine,” Sloane said, standing quickly. “I’ll go and take the kids for another walk.”

He watched her head for the door. “You say that like it’s a threat. Oh no! I have to stop my poor sister from this terrible self-inflicted torture where she takes her kids outside to play! ”

“Like I said. Jerk.” Sloane walked out.

Returning to her own room, she found Evan and Chloe sitting on opposite sides of the sofa, staring at their phones.

“Hey, you guys!” she sang cheerfully, smiling. “How about we go outside and see if the grapes look ready to harvest? Maybe we could help pick some.”

Evan glared at her with contempt. “They don’t need our help, Mom. And we don’t know anything about grapes.”

“But wouldn’t it be fun to learn?” she suggested, full of enthusiasm.

“No.” He looked back down at his phone.

“Chloe, how about you?” Sloane asked with a smile, speaking in a singsong voice, trying desperately to tempt her. “Want to go check out the vineyard?”

“Mom! We did that this morning,” Chloe replied in that whiny tone of voice that made Sloane want to rip her own hair out.

What was wrong with her daughter? Didn’t she understand how important it was to be charming and charismatic?

“Fine.” Sloane turned on her heel. “I’ll go and see what’s cooking in the kitchen.”

She left the room, ever hopeful that they would suddenly realize what they were missing out on and change their minds. But no one ever followed Sloane when she said fine and stormed out of a room. Alan especially. He always just let her go.





CHAPTER 6


FIONA


As soon as the lawyers packed up and left, Ruth rolled Mabel’s wheelchair away from the table. She said they had a plane to catch and pushed her aunt out the door without a single glance back in my direction.

“They’re not happy about this either,” I said to Maria. “I can hardly blame them. No wonder they want to fight it.”

“Yes, but you heard what Mr. Wainwright said. They can’t fight it without clear evidence of blackmail or fraud or undue influence.”

I leaned back in my chair and sighed. “My mother would never blackmail anyone. You should have seen how she cared for my dad every day of her life. She was a saint.”

“Except for the fact that she was unfaithful to him,” Maria gently reminded me. “Maybe you didn’t know her as well as you thought you did.”

I had no choice but to accept that Maria was right. “I don’t know anything anymore,” I said. “I didn’t expect this to happen today. I thought I was just going to inherit some dinky little plot of land somewhere, maybe half an acre with a little house on it. Not the whole kit and caboodle.” I sat forward again. “How much is this winery worth, anyway? The lawyer said there were nine hundred hectares. Is it all vineyards? Because that sounds like a lot of grapes.”