Page 116 of You've Got Hate Mail
“Don’t you work only on commission?” I ask. “How do you get three orders at once?”
“Didn’t think two of them would be willing to pay the price I quoted them. Especially when I added the rush fees.”
“So you need that extra room for more projects.”
There’s a lot I appreciate about Mabel.
I appreciate that she wouldn’t have told anyone where she found me and who she found me with this morning.
I appreciate that she wears all black, since it’s easier on my eyes today.
I appreciate that she runs this place as efficiently as possible and doesn’t generally ask for as much handyman support around here as she’s had to ask for lately.
But I don’t currently appreciate the bland look she’s giving me that tends to mean she’s about to say something I won’t like.
“Whatever it is, no.”
“Is this grumpiness because of the hangover, or because you don’t know what to do about being attracted to a woman for the first time since Ava passed?”
“I’m not attracted?—”
She lifts a brow.
Just one.
One simple movement above her glasses.
I huff out a breath. “It doesn’t fucking matter. I don’t date. Even if I did, Lav and I are moving. I’ve found a few options. Just—just need to decide where I’m most likely to be able to get a job and where I like the schools the best.”
“I took out a loan.”
My brain is still too full of sludge to process that immediately, but when all of the ramifications of that simple sentence hit me, I huff in surprise. “Mabel.”
“It’s done. I got a loan to fix the fermentation building.”
“You—”
“I called in favors and may have resorted to a little blackmail and I did a few things Aunt Pip would murder me for if she ever finds out, even if she finds out why too. It’s a personal loan, basically with my own reputation and some very old bottles of wine as collateral. I didn’t qualify for enough to stave off foreclosure more than a few months on top of the repairs, but I bought us some time, and I bought us some safety.”
I swallow hard as the implications, both good and bad, of what she’s done continue to sink in. “The old wine for collateral—it wasn’t stored in the tasting room, was it?”
She smiles. “I have my own hiding places that even Pip doesn’t know about.”
“How much debt are you in now?”
She ignores the question. “Ginny has a call with a promising potential investor this week, and I’m prepared to have the hard conversations with Aunt Pip about it too. With exclusive events and creative marketing and some fencing to separate our homes from the functional parts of the winery, we can maintain most of the same privacy and pay the bills.”
She doesn’t add the part where we only have one booking for exclusive events, and it’s a nepo job. Or that any of the other buildings around here could fall apart at any minute.
“How much debt, Mabel?” I repeat.
“Irrelevant.”
“It’s entirely relevant.” She’s doing this for me. For me and Lav. So we can stay.
But I don’t know if it’s enough.
She doesn’t break eye contact. “Aunt Pip won’t live forever. But the biggest thing she’s expressed repeatedly in the past few years is that she wants her home to stay a refuge for women in distress when she’s gone.”
