The Inheritance of the Vineyard

Catalina Reyes has come home to a vineyard she has never seen, with a will she wrote herself on a kitchen table in Cádiz, and no intention of leaving. The man at the gate has other plans. Thomas Wren, forty-eight, English, sunburnt, and unfailingly polite, has run this estate for twenty years for an owner he has never met — an absentee heir who, as it happens, does not exist either. He takes perhaps one week to figure out what Catalina is. He does not say. She does not ask. They are too busy arguing about the harvest. By August the grapes are hanging heavy, the workers have taken her side, and the real claimant is writing from Madrid. Somebody has to lie under oath. Somebody has to be honest first. In the hills above Málaga, in a summer no one in the village will ever forget, they will both have to choose which one of them is going to be seen for what they really are.