“Where are your awards?” she asks. “I know you’ve won some.”
“There isn’t room for all of them.”
Truth. I’ve won a ton.
She meets my gaze and opens her mouth, but no words come out. She doesn’t quite know how to respond.
“I don’t do this for the glory,” I say. “I do it for the love of the work. For the art. For the sake of the wine.”
“L’art pour l’art,” she says softly.
“What?”
“Sorry. It’s French. It translates to ‘art for art’s sake.’”
“That’s a nice philosophy. I share it, but I also know art has another purpose. In my case, producing wine that consumers love.”
“For money, yes,” she says.
“Of course for money. And the more awards I get, the better my wines sell. But as I said, I don’t do it for the glory.”
“Because you already have all the money in the world.”
I hold back a chuckle. How easy it is for someone outside our family to judge our motives. I’ve seen it again and again. “We’re very charitable with our money. The more we have, the more we can give away.”
“Still, you pretty much live like kings here.”
“We do. I stopped apologizing for that a long time ago.”
“I’m not asking you to apologize for it.”
“Yeah, you kind of are. Not one of us is a spoiled brat. We work our asses off, and we were raised to be grateful for our good fortune, to be generous with it. Part of good fortune, though, is to be able to live comfortably.”
She chuckles. “Comfortably? Or luxuriously?”
I shake my head. “If you’re gunning for an apology, I already told you that you won’t get one.”
“I’m only gunning for reality. This is beyond comfortable, and you know it.”
For some reason, this hits a nerve. She doesn’t know about my past. I get that. But damn, she’s being rude about our fortune—a fortune we’re sharing with her.
I stare straight into her burning blue eyes. “Why exactly did you come here, Doctor?”
She rolls her eyes, clearly irritated. “I’ve told you, time and again, I’m not yet a—”
“Semantics. Just answer the question. Why did you come here?”
“You know exactly why I came here. To learn. To experience. And for the credit.”
“I could accept those reasons,” I say. “In fact, I think you actually believe them.”
“Uh…yeah. That’s because they’re true.”
“You may be a California girl, but you’re also studying oenology, which means you’ve heard of Steel Vineyards.”
“So?”
“And you happened to meet my sister at a lecture given by my uncle. Nice, the way things work out, huh?”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“I’m making perfect sense, and we both know it. You’re getting all uptight about how we live. So what? We’ve earned it. And I think you wanted to come here to see it for yourself. To live it for yourself.”
Her cheeks redden. Anger is brewing. Anger and indignance and a thunderstorm of emotion. What colors is she seeing?
“You’re nothing like Diana said.”
“I doubt my sister told you any untruths about me. That’s not her style.”
Ashley balls her hands into fists. “You infuriate me.”
“You’re always free to leave.”
“Maybe I will.”
Please don’t.
I don’t say the words, of course. They stay inside me, along with all the other things I want but can never have.
“If you had lived the life I have—”
I clench my teeth. “You know nothing about my life.”
She laughs. A sarcastic, demeaning laugh. “I know what I see. Someone smiled on you long ago.”
Black rage. Like a furious rhinoceros being taunted by a gazelle. I don’t want to be angry with Ashley, but she doesn’t have a clue what she’s talking about. Sure, someone smiled on me. Brought Donny and me here to Steel Ranch. My father and Uncle Ryan rescued us twenty-five years ago from that compound of horror where we spent…how many months? I never really knew.
I don’t know now. Don’t want to know.
So yeah, I’ll give her an inch. We got a prize at the end. A lot of those kids didn’t.
But for those months of hell, we were anything but lucky.
“Have you ever gone to bed hungry?” she asks boldly.
How I want to answer. How I want to rub her face in the truth about me, so she’ll give up this dumbass game of who had the worst childhood. At home with my mother—my natural mother—the answer is no. Donny and I never went hungry. We ate a lot of hamburger and macaroni and cheese, but our little bellies were always filled.
For those months in the compound, though?
We were constantly hungry. Constantly thirsty. Constantly huddling for warmth. Our captors used all methods of torture to break us. Starvation. Beatings. Rape. Humiliation. Fear.
But I don’t talk about that time.
Not to anyone, and especially not to Ashley White.
Did Ashley go to bed hungry? Despite my anger, a spark of sorrow slides through me. Why would she be asking otherwise? I can’t bear the thought of anyone doing to her what was done to Donny and me.