Two in the Morning

You don't sleep.

You lie on top of the covers with the window open and listen to the valley do its night things. A dog two farms over. The irrigation ticking. An owl in the oak by the barrel room that your father named Teofilo for reasons he took to the grave. Every time you close your eyes you see a number, and the number keeps changing between 96,400 and 100,000, and you hate that it does.

You're not going to do it. You know you're not going to do it.

But you lie there and you do the math anyway, and that's the part that makes you sit up at two in the morning and put your boots on.

The moon is three-quarters and bright enough to throw shadows. The rows run up the hill in silver lines. You walk up through the pinot because it's the way you always walk when you can't think, and halfway up you stop, because someone is sitting in the dirt.

She's at the end of a row with her back against a trellis post, knees up, wearing the flannel over what are clearly pajamas. No cap. Her hair is a mess. She has a cluster of grapes in her lap and she's eating them one by one, which is a thing you are absolutely not supposed to do two weeks before harvest, and she doesn't look up when your boots crunch on the gravel.

"I knew you'd come," she says. "I wasn't sure if it'd be you or the police."

"Why would it be the police?"

"Because of the reward." She eats another grape. "There was a radio in the cottage. Under the sink, for some reason. I found it at eleven. I've been sitting here since about eleven-fifteen."

You don't say anything. She finally looks up at you, and in the moonlight her face is all planes and shadows, the cheekbones that make cinematographers weep, the eyes very dark. She looks tired in a way you didn't see in daylight. She looks like she's been tired for a long time.

"Are you going to, Ethan?" she asks.

It's not a performance. Her voice is flat and careful, the way you'd ask a doctor a question you already know the answer to.

"No," you say.

"A hundred thousand dollars."

"I know what it is."

"I saw the letter on your table. At dinner. Under the salt." She says it gently. "Ninety-six thousand four hundred. I'm good at reading upside down. Six years of reading other people's scripts across the table at auditions."

You sit down in the dirt across from her, because your knees decide for you. The ground is still warm from the day. "Then you know I need it."

"I know you need it."

"I'm still not going to."

She studies you the way you'd study a contract. "Why not? And don't say your mother."

You pick up a leaf off the ground and turn it over. You think about what's true.

"My dad planted these," you say. "The pinot, anyway. The zin at the top, that's my great-grandfather's, that's older than anybody. But these rows, my dad put in the year I was born. He used to bring me up here at night when I was little, when I couldn't sleep. He'd say, 'The vines don't care about the bank, mijo. They don't care who's famous. They just want to know if you'll show up.'" You turn the leaf over again. "I sell you to a tabloid, I can pay off the bank. And then I've got to walk up these rows every morning knowing what I paid it with."

She doesn't say anything for a long time.

Then: "That is the corniest thing anyone has ever said to me," she says, "and I once did a movie where a man proposed in a hot-air balloon."

And she laughs.

It's not the laugh from the movies. You've heard that one: bright, musical, perfectly timed. This one is a snort. It comes out of her nose and surprises her, and she claps her hand over her mouth and her eyes go wide over it, and then she laughs harder, bent over her knees in the dirt, and you start laughing too because you can't help it.

"I'm sorry," she gasps. "I'm sorry. It was beautiful. Your dad sounds… I'm sorry."

"He'd have thought it was funny."

"I would have liked him." She wipes her eyes with the flannel sleeve. Then she goes still, and looks at you, and something real is in her face. "Thank you."

"For what?"

"Nobody's said no to money for me in…" She thinks. "Ethan, I don't think anyone ever has."

You walk her back up to the cottage. It's farther than it looks, the way everything on a hill is. She walks barefoot and pretends the gravel doesn't hurt, and you pretend not to notice her pretending.

"Why here?" you ask. "Of all the places."

"I shot a movie in this valley when I was nineteen. My second one. I had four lines. I played a waitress who gets murdered in the first ten minutes." She smiles at the ground. "I remember the light. Every afternoon at four o'clock, everything turned gold, and I'd sit on an apple box between takes and think, people live here. People wake up and it's just… theirs. When everything happened, it was the only place I could think of where I'd been happy for no reason."

At the cottage porch she stops. The valley is laid out below you, black and silver, the creek a thin line of light at the bottom.

"Everyone calls me Fiora," she says, not turning around. "Or Miss Jardine. Or worse things, lately. My friends call me Fee. The ones I have left." She glances back at you over her shoulder. "You can, if you want. Only if you mean it."

"Goodnight, Fee."

The dimple. Small. Real. "Goodnight, farmer."

The door closes. You stand on the porch for a second longer than you should, then walk back down through the pinot with your hands in your pockets and a feeling in your chest you decide not to name.

You're in the kitchen, getting a glass of water in the dark, when your phone buzzes on the counter.

Unknown number. A 310 area code. Los Angeles.

You didn't give her your number. Then you remember: it's printed on the rental sign at the bottom of the drive, and on the laminated card on the cottage fridge that says IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, in your mother's handwriting, underlined twice.

The phone buzzes again. A second message, right under the first.

You stand in your mother's kitchen at two-forty in the morning with the letter under the salt shaker and the moon in the window, and you open it.