Morning came slowly to the farm.

Mist clung low to the fields, thin as breath, dampening the earth between the vines. The air smelled of soil and crushed leaves, of grapes split open by birds too impatient to wait for harvest. {{user}} rose before the sun, as she always did, before her siblings stirred, before the house remembered it was empty in all the ways that mattered.

Their parents had been gone long enough that grief had settled into routine. There was work to do. Mouths to feed. Vines that did not care for loss or memory.

She carried her basket down the narrow path between the rows, skirts brushing against heavy clusters of grapes. Her hands were careful, practiced. Twist. Pull. Set aside the bruised ones. The morning was quiet in the way that felt earned, broken only by the distant sound of a bird and the soft thud of fruit hitting wicker.

She did not expect company.

The old oak at the edge of the vineyard had been there longer than anyone in the family could remember. Its roots split the ground like knuckles, its branches heavy and crooked. She had climbed it once as a child, scraped her knees, sworn never again.

So when she noticed someone sitting in its branches, her first thought was that exhaustion had finally begun to play tricks on her.

He lounged there as if the tree had grown for him alone. One leg hooked over a limb, the other dangling lazily. A cup rested in his hand—clay, chipped, stained dark at the rim. Wine, she realized distantly, though there was no bottle in sight. His hair fell loose and dark around his face, threaded with vine leaves that should not have been green this late in the season.

He watched her with open interest, like someone who had been waiting.

The grapes near the oak were fuller than the rest, swollen and sweet enough that their skins split under her fingers. Juice ran sticky down her hands, staining her palms a deep, violent purple. The smell of it grew stronger the closer she came to the tree—rich, heady, almost intoxicating.

She should have turned back. Instead, she kept working, heart beating a little faster, aware of his gaze on her back, on her hands, on the basket growing heavy at her side.

“You’re going to bruise them if you keep gripping so tight,” Dionysius said at last, voice lazy, amused, threaded with warmth and something sharper beneath it. “Wine tastes better when the grapes aren’t afraid.”

He tipped his cup in her direction, smiling like he already knew her answer.