Southern Hotshot (North Carolina Highlands 2)

So I eat. And I answer questions and ask some of my own between bites.

“Why wine?” Milly asks. “I mean, I totally get being obsessed with it. But what made you decide to, you know, devote your life to the stuff?”

I feel the heat of Samuel’s gaze as I ponder my response. He’s had to get up from his chair in the hopes of helping Maisie chill out, and now he’s doing laps around the dining room while bouncing Maisie in his arms. Every so often, I’ll glance up, and he’s looking at me with this funny gleam in his eyes.

“I was pre-law throughout all of undergrad,” I say. “I took the LSAT, got into law school, and was set to enroll the fall after graduation. Everyone in my family is a lawyer, so it just seemed like the thing to do.”

Hank’s eyebrows pop up. “Literally every member of your family?”

“Literally. My grandparents, my mom, my dad, my sister…everyone. Needless to say, I felt a lot of pressure to follow in their footsteps. I wasn’t crazy about going into law. As a matter of fact, when I committed to law school, I had this terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach, like I knew it wasn’t the right move. It just didn’t feel very me.”

Milly winces. “I don’t like where this is going.”

I shrug. “I just didn’t have a particular calling or passion for anything else. My sister had gone to law school a few years before, and my parents were ecstatic about how well she was doing. So I figured I’d go to law school, keep everyone happy, and go from there. And then Spain happened.”

I glance up to see Samuel looking at me again. “What happened in Spain?” he asks. His eyes are intent on my face, his jaw tight, like he really wants—needs—to know where this story goes.

“It was spring break my senior year. United was running this insane sale on tickets to Europe, so my friends and I hopped on a plane to Madrid. We took a train to Grenada, which is this cool town in the south famous for its Moorish architecture. On our first night out, we met some of these cute Spaniards at a bar—”

“Okay, I changed my mind. I really like where this is going,” Milly says, leaning an elbow on the table and resting her chin in her hand.

I smile. “I wish I had a better ending for you. Nothing crazy happened, but the eight of us sat at this table outside a tiny restaurant overlooking the Alhambra, a gorgeous medieval Moorish palace right out of a Game of Thrones episode. We ate tapas and talked for hours and drank bottle after bottle of this red wine that was maybe ten euros a pop. I still remember how it tasted, how warm the air was while I tasted it, and the happy buzz it gave me. It made us philosophical. Funny. It allowed us to bare ourselves, our true selves, in a way we never had before. As I drank and ate, I realized I’d never talked so frankly with my friends like that. I finally shared how I was feeling about law school, how I had that awful feeling in the pit of my stomach. Saying it out loud made me realize just how wrong the whole thing was. And a lot of that had to do with the fact I was falling in love at that table. Not with a person, but with the truth.”

“That’s beautiful,” Samuel says. The look in his eyes turns my heart inside out.

“And naïve.” I swallow. I notice Hank is looking at me too. “I followed that feeling I got at the table—the warm, deep, happy peace that filled me. Again and again, it led me back to wine. Food. A table full of friends. Sharing stories and truths and fears. Look, I get it. At the end of the day, wine is grape juice that gets you drunk. But when I drink it—even just a taste, a sip—I feel seen. Or maybe I allow myself to be seen. It liberated me. When I came back from Spain, I kept following that feeling. It led me to drop out of law school to work in a restaurant cellar instead.”

Hank’s eyes go wide. “Bet your parents loved that.”

“They did not.” I smile tightly. “But I get it. They want me to have a nice life, you know? I want that for myself too. So I’ve worked hard to put myself in a position where I can get it. I know that will make them a little proud at least. Still, it’s taken me a long, long time to come to grips with the fact that following my heart meant letting down the people I love. It’s something I still struggle with, especially when I see how my sister’s crushing it in her law career.”