You Again

I was not listening.

I knew I wasn't listening, and I suspected Agatha knew it too, but she was a patient woman and the salmon in front of me was the single greatest thing that had happened to me in six weeks, so we had reached a silent understanding.

She talked. While I ate.

The restaurant was the kind of place that had no prices on the menu, Agatha had walked me through the doors in my dirty clothes without a word, ordered half the menu without consulting me, and watched with careful, unreadable eyes as I ravished my plate like a woman who had been on the wrong side of an empty refrigerator for longer than she intended to admit.

"So let me make sure I understand you," I said, tearing off another piece of bread because the bread was also exceptional and I had stopped being embarrassed about it somewhere around my third roll. I looked up at her. "Aunt Maggie left me a large estate and a vineyard."

"That's correct."

"My great-aunt Maggie." I said it again slowly. "Who I have met maybe four times in my entire life."

"The very same."

I reached for my wine glass before remembering it held water and drank the water instead. Agatha watched me with careful eyes.

"You've not touched your green tea," she said, nodding at the cup that had been sitting untouched to my left. "It's getting cold."

"I don't really drink‐-"

"It's good for the baby."

The bread stopped halfway to my mouth.

I set it down. Looked at her. Agatha looked back at me with the same composed, unhurried expression she'd been wearing since she sat down, and the silence between us stretched just long enough to confirm that she meant exactly what she'd said and had no intention of taking it back.

"How did you know?" My voice came out smaller than I intended.

"I'm a woman," she said simply. "I have three children. I know the signs." She tilted her head. "The way you've been holding your breath near strong smells. The hand you keep pressing to your stomach without realising you're doing it. The fact that you've eaten enough for two people and you still look hungry." She said it without judgment, just the plain and steady delivery of a woman who saw things clearly and didn't pretend otherwise. "How far along?"

I reached for the green tea.

"Six weeks," I said.

She nodded slowly, and something in her eyes shifted. "Then there is even less reason for you to walk away from this." She opened the leather folder at her elbow and turned it to face me across the table. "Your aunt was specific, Sarah. She didn't include you by accident. She sat down to decide what mattered to her, and your name is what she wrote."

I looked at the document. My name, printed in the middle of the page like it had always been there, like someone had been saving a place for me.

*Sarah Rider. née Collins.*

Still his name. Even on paper I couldn't get free of him.

"But why me?”

"Does it matter?" Agatha asked genuinely. "Nothing in life makes the kind of sense we want it to. It doesn't make sense that I spent three weeks trying to locate you and your ex-husband didn't know where you were and made it very clear he had no interest in finding out."

Silence.

"And yet here you are. Someone remembered you when it counted. Whatever her reasons were, what matters now is what you do with it."

I looked down at the page.

A vineyard. An estate. Two properties sitting somewhere quiet and far from here, waiting for a broken woman.

"I don't know anything about running a business," I said.

"Which is why the will includes a condition." She tapped the relevant paragraph. "The estate becomes yours at the end of one year, provided the vineyard operates successfully in that time. You won't be doing it alone... your aunt retained a property manager. Someone she trusted completely. He's been running it for two years and he knows the land better than anyone."

She glanced at her phone on the table beside her. "I texted him our location when we arrived. He should be here any—"

The chair beside me scraped back.

"I'm sorry I'm late," a deep baritone voice said, slightly out of breath, pulling itself back to composure. "The traffic across town was—"

I turned.

He turned.

The whole restaurant kept moving—glasses and cutlery and low elegant conversation—and the two of us went completely, identically still.

His face. I knew his face. I had stared at it before I passed out last night.

"You," I said.

"You," he said.

And then we both started talking at once.

"You almost killed me—"

"You walked into the road—"

"I was on the pavement—"

"You were absolutely not on the pavement, you stepped directly in front of a moving car!"

"*Your* moving car that was going far too fast for a residential road."

"I was doing thirty-two miles an hour." His voice came out hard. "Thirty-two. In a thirty zone."

"That is still speeding—" I almost screamed at him.

"That is mathematically two miles over the limit—"

"You almost killed me!" I was aware my voice had risen. I was aware the couple at the next table had stopped pretending to look at their menus. I did not particularly care.

"But you're not dead, are you?" He held up a single finger, pointing it at me. “I sat in that hospital till day break, to make sure you were still breathing. I went back to my hotel for one hour — to shower and change — and by the time I walked back through those doors, the nurses told me you'd discharged yourself without leaving a name."

He looked at me with the expression of a man at the outer boundary of his patience. "Not a name. Not a thank you note. Nothing."

"Thank you?" The words came out almost airless. "You want me to thank you for running me over?"

"For *not* running you over, which required significant effort on my part given that you appeared from absolutely nowhere—"

"Agatha." He turned to her without warning, and the shift was so sudden I blinked. His voice dropped back to something that sounded almost professional. "Has she attacked you physically? I'm asking because we might be dealing with a mental patient here."

Agatha had not said a single word.

She had sat with her hands folded on the table and watched our back and forth. Something that built slowly in her eyes and spread to the corners of her mouth until she starter laughing.

We both stared at her.

"Forgive me." She smoothed the front of her jacket. "I didn't see this coming.” She looked at the man who almost killed me. "Norman. Sit down, please."

He sat, though he kept a careful distance from my side of the table.

"This," Agatha said, gesturing toward me with the unhurried calm of a woman resuming a meeting that had briefly caught fire, "is Sarah. She is the woman your employer named in her will. She is the new legal owner of the property you've been managing for the past two years." A deliberate pause. "She is your boss."

Norman looked at me. I looked at Norman.

"And Sarah." Agatha turned to me, her tone firm and serious. "This is Norman. The property manager your great-aunt trusted above anyone else. The man whose cooperation is not optional — it is written as a condition of the entire agreement."

She folded her hands. "The two of you are going to work together, side by side, for the next twelve months. Starting immediately!"