Wild Season

Chapter 1: Damage Control

The call came at 5:47 a.m., which meant it was bad.

Natalie Preston had been in public relations long enough to understand the taxonomy of crisis by the hour it arrived. Afternoon calls were manageable—a misquote, a leaked memo, something that could be massaged before the evening news cycle. Evening calls were worse: lawsuits, regulatory actions, the kind of thing that required war-room energy and cold pizza at midnight. But dawn calls—the ones that dragged you from sleep with your heart already hammering before you'd even said hello—those were the career-defining ones.

She sat up in bed in her Murray Hill apartment, phone pressed to her ear, and listened to Britt O'Neill's clipped voice outline the situation.

"Ridgemont Cellars. Our biggest wine account. They've been caught blending bulk juice into their reserve bottles. The story broke on a Portland food blog two hours ago and it's already trending. The town is in an uproar, and the sourcing trail leads back to a small family operation called Hollister Vineyards. I need you on a plane to Ashland, Oregon, by noon."

Natalie swung her legs over the side of the bed and pressed her bare feet into the cool hardwood. Her mind was already sorting: timeline, stakeholders, media landscape, talking points. This was what she did. She was the person Whitmore & O'Neill sent when the building was on fire and someone needed to stand in front of the cameras looking calm.

"What's the exposure?" she asked.

"Significant. Ridgemont is a prestige label—three hundred dollars a bottle for their flagship. If this sticks, Carver-Lynde pulls their investment, and we lose a seven-figure retainer. I don't need to tell you what that means for the firm."

She didn't. Whitmore & O'Neill had been hemorrhaging clients for eighteen months. The economy, the shifting media landscape, a few high-profile missteps—it all added up to a firm running lean and desperate. Natalie had survived three rounds of layoffs by being indispensable. She intended to stay that way.

"And the Hollister connection?"

"Ridgemont claims they sourced grapes from Hollister Vineyards with full knowledge and consent. The Hollisters are saying otherwise. It's a he-said, she-said situation, and right now the locals are siding with the family. I need you to get ahead of it. Contain the narrative. Protect the brand."

"How long do I have?"

"Two weeks. After that, Carver-Lynde makes their decision, and either we've controlled this thing or we haven't. Natalie—" Britt paused, and the silence carried weight. "Don't come back without a win."

The line went dead.

Natalie sat in the gray pre-dawn light of her apartment and breathed. Just breathed. She could feel the familiar tightness gathering in her chest, the one she'd learned to manage with breathing exercises and the occasional Ativan she kept in her toiletry bag like a secret talisman. She hadn't needed one in three months. She was not going to need one now.

She stood, crossed to her closet, and began to pack.

---

The flight from JFK to Medford was five and a half hours with a layover in Denver, and Natalie used every minute of it. By the time the small commuter plane descended over the Rogue Valley, she had read every article about the Ridgemont scandal, studied the Hollister Vineyards website (charmingly outdated, heavy on family history, light on marketing savvy), and compiled a preliminary communications strategy on her laptop.

The facts, as she understood them: Ridgemont Cellars was a mid-sized winery that had rocketed to prestige status over the past decade through aggressive branding and a series of high scores from influential wine critics. Their flagship, a Cabernet Sauvignon called "The Patriarch," retailed for $325 and had a waitlist. Behind the glamour, however, Ridgemont had been quietly supplementing their premium grape supply with cheaper fruit from the Central Valley—a practice that was not illegal per se but was a devastating betrayal of the terroir-obsessed wine world.

The scandal had broken when a former Ridgemont cellar worker posted internal blending logs on a Portland food blog called Vine & Veritas. The logs showed that for at least three growing seasons, Ridgemont had been sourcing grapes from Hollister Vineyards—a small, respected family operation—and using the Hollister name on documentation to legitimize blends that were anything but premium.

The Hollisters, according to the blog post, claimed they had never authorized any such sourcing arrangement. Ridgemont's CEO, a man named Douglas Fenn, insisted otherwise.

Natalie's job was to make sure Douglas Fenn's version of events prevailed.

She closed her laptop as the plane touched down and looked out the window at a landscape so different from Manhattan that it might as well have been another planet. Rolling hills the color of lion's fur. Vineyards stretching in neat green rows toward blue mountains. A sky so wide and clear it made her eyes ache.

She collected her rental car—a sensible sedan that the agency had booked—and drove the thirty minutes from Medford to Ashland with the windows down, because the September air smelled like something she couldn't name. Warm earth, maybe. Dry grass. The faintest sweetness of fruit on the vine.

Ashland itself was smaller than she'd expected. She'd known it primarily as a theater town—the Oregon Shakespeare Festival drew tourists from around the world—but beyond the charming downtown with its brick-fronted shops and café awnings, the town quickly gave way to agricultural land. Vineyards and orchards and lavender farms spread across the valley floor, and the hills rose green and gold on either side, studded with oak trees.

Her hotel was a converted Victorian on the main street, the kind of place with lace curtains and a breakfast room that smelled of cinnamon. She checked in, changed from her travel clothes into a crisp white blouse and navy slacks, and drove out to Hollister Vineyards.

She needed to hear their side of the story. Not because she cared about their side—she was a professional, and professionals didn't take sides—but because understanding the opposition was the first step in neutralizing it.

The drive took fifteen minutes along a two-lane road that wound through vineyard country. The Hollister property announced itself with a modest wooden sign: HOLLISTER VINEYARDS — EST. 1971 — FAMILY GROWN, SMALL BATCH. The driveway was gravel, lined with old walnut trees, and it led to a cluster of buildings: a farmhouse with a wide porch, a modern-ish tasting room with barn-wood siding, and behind them, the working winery—barrel rooms, a crush pad, equipment sheds.

Natalie parked and stepped out into the late afternoon heat. The air here was different from town—thicker, sweeter, heavy with the smell of ripe fruit. She could see the vineyard rows stretching up the hillside behind the buildings, the vines heavy with dark clusters of grapes. Somewhere, a dog barked.

She smoothed her blouse, checked her reflection in the car window, and walked toward the tasting room.

The door was open. Inside, the space was cool and dim, with a long wooden bar, shelves of bottles, and framed photographs on the walls—black-and-white images of people working the land, generations of the same strong jaw and squinting eyes. A woman in her sixties stood behind the bar, arranging glasses.

"Welcome to Hollister," the woman said with a warm but measured smile. "Tasting today?"

"Actually, I'm looking for Jack Hollister. My name is Natalie Preston. I'm with Whitmore & O'Neill—we're a communications firm based in New York."

The warmth in the woman's face cooled by several degrees. "I'm Marguerite Hollister. Jack's mother. And I know who Whitmore & O'Neill is. You represent Ridgemont."

"We represent Carver-Lynde, which is an investor in Ridgemont, yes. I'm here to—"

"Jack's in the barrel room. But I wouldn't recommend going back there right now."

"I appreciate the warning, Mrs. Hollister, but I'd really like to speak with him. I'm interested in hearing your family's perspective."

Marguerite studied her for a long moment, then shrugged one shoulder. "Through the courtyard, last building on the left. Don't say I didn't warn you."

Natalie thanked her and walked through a stone-paved courtyard where potted herbs baked in the sun. The barrel room was a long, low building with thick walls and a heavy wooden door propped open with a cinder block. She stepped inside and was hit by a wave of cool, damp air that smelled of oak and wine and something darker, earthier—the smell of fermentation, of sugar becoming alcohol, of transformation.

The room was lined with barrels stacked three high, and at the far end, a man stood with his back to her, drawing wine from a barrel with a glass thief—a long pipette used for sampling. He was tall, broad through the shoulders, wearing a faded work shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. His forearms were tanned and corded with muscle, and his dark hair was longer than fashionable, curling at the collar.

He didn't turn around.

"Mr. Hollister? My name is Natalie Preston. I'm with—"

"I know who you are." His voice was low and unhurried, with the faintest rasp. He still didn't turn. He held the glass thief up to the dim light, examined the wine's color, then released it back into the barrel. "My mother texted me."

"Then you know I'd like to hear your side of the story. I think it's important that—"

He turned around.

Natalie's prepared speech died somewhere between her brain and her mouth. She had seen his photo on the winery website—a slightly out-of-focus shot that made him look like a pleasant enough farmer. The photo had not prepared her for the reality of Jack Hollister in person.

He was not handsome in the way she was used to—not polished, not groomed, not the kind of man you'd see at a Manhattan fundraiser. He was handsome the way the landscape outside was handsome: rough, weathered, unapologetically itself. Deep-set eyes the color of strong coffee. A jaw that looked like it had been carved with a dull knife. Lines around his eyes from squinting into the sun. He was maybe thirty-eight, maybe forty—it was hard to tell with men who worked outdoors.

He looked at her the way you'd look at a rattlesnake on your doorstep: with calm, absolute assessment.

"Ms. Preston," he said. "I don't have a side of the story. I have the truth. And the truth is that Ridgemont stole from my family, lied about it, and is now sending PR people to spin the damage. So with all due respect—" He pointed at the door behind her. "Leave."

The word landed like a door slamming. Not shouted. Not angry, exactly. Just final.

Natalie stood in the cool dark of the barrel room, surrounded by the smell of aging wine, and felt something she hadn't felt in years of navigating hostile boardrooms and combative journalists.

She felt dismissed.

Completely, thoroughly, unequivocally dismissed.

She turned on her heel and walked out into the blinding sunlight, her pulse pounding in her ears, and she was halfway to her car before she realized that the heat in her chest wasn't embarrassment.

It was a fuse, lit.