Chapter One
This Was Not on the Schedule
The bottle was still glowing.
Valentina stood in her kitchen at 5:47 AM—thirteen minutes before her scheduled wake-up time, not that she’d slept—and stared at the impossible object sitting on her farmhouse table like it belonged there. Like it hadn’t crawled out of her vineyard’s dirt less than twelve hours ago, pulsing with amber light that had no business existing outside of a special effects department.
She’d tried putting it in the pantry. It had glowed through the door.
She’d tried the wine cellar. The 2019 Reserve had started humming in response, which was a problem she absolutely did not have the bandwidth to address.
She’d tried covering it with a dish towel, then a mixing bowl, then her late husband’s favorite casserole dish that she’d been meaning to donate for fifteen years but couldn’t quite bring herself to let go. The light bled through everything like the laws of physics were merely suggestions.
At 2 AM, in a moment of desperation, she tried putting it in the freezer. The ice maker had responded by producing perfectly formed ice cubes shaped like tiny grape clusters. She’d thrown them down the sink and pretended that hadn’t happened.
At 3 AM, she’d tried reasoning with it.
“I don’t know what you want,” she’d told the bottle, feeling like an absolute fool. “I don’t know what you are. But whatever you’re doing, you need to stop. I have a vineyard to run. I have responsibilities. I don’t have time for—” she’d gestured vaguely at the glow, “—whatever this is.”
The bottle had pulsed once, almost smugly, and continued glowing.
At 4 AM, she’d given up and started reorganizing the pantry.
“I am a rational woman,” she said out loud, to no one, because her sons had long since moved into their own places on the property and there was no one to hear her talking to glassware. “I have run a successful vineyard for two decades. I have raised twin boys into reasonably functional adults. I survived the aphid invasion of 2019 and the great oak barrel shortage of 2021. I survived my mother-in-law’s ‘helpful suggestions’ about how I should just sell and move somewhere sensible. I do not believe in glowing bottles.”
The bottle pulsed brighter.
“That wasn’t a challenge.”
It pulsed again. Mockingly, if light could mock. Which it couldn’t. Because this wasn’t happening.
Valentina closed her eyes and counted to ten in Spanish, the way her mother used to when Valentina was being especially impossible as a child. Uno, dos, tres… She made it to siete before giving up.
The spice cabinet needed reorganizing anyway.
