The band stopped in the middle of a song, and that was the first thing that told me something was wrong.

The sun had been up three hours before the valley began to answer for the night.

We didn't stay at the mill house. By eight in the morning, Marcus’s Subaru and my flatbed were parked outside the County Administration Building in Napa.

The air was brisk, smelling of autumn frost and crushed grapes, the morning sun sparkling off the broad, grey waters of the Napa River. People in suits were walking into the building with cardboard coffee cups, their shoes clicking sharply against the granite steps.

We sat in the third-floor conference room of the County Recorder’s office.

Clara was there, still wearing my father’s red flannel shirt over her wool skirt, her hair combed back, sitting in a high-backed swivel chair with her hands folded over her walnut box. Sarah Lin sat beside her with six volumes of historical plat maps stacked like battlements on the walnut table.

Across from us sat Richard Vance.

He had not slept. His silver hair, usually brushed back into an immaculate crest, was dull and uncombed. His tie was slightly crooked, and his tailored Italian wool suit looked like it had been pulled off the floor of a closet.

Amber was not there. Henderson had sent her to their ranch in Mendocino at six in the morning, under strict orders not to touch a phone or a computer until the title board had concluded its inquiry.

Arthur Henderson sat beside Richard, looking through a stack of certified filings with the grim, hurried intensity of a surgeon trying to stop an arterial bleed with a paper napkin.

"Richard," Clara said, her voice cutting through the dry rustle of Henderson’s papers. "You look like your father did when the game warden found the six deer in his smokehouse."

Richard Vance did not look up immediately. He stared at his gold signet ring, turning it slowly around his knuckle. When he finally lifted his eyes, they were grey, watery, and surrounded by rings of deep, dark exhaustion.

"Clara," he said, his voice raspy. "We could have handled this without the county recorder. We could have handled this between the families."

"We aren't a family, Richard," I said, leaning forward across the table. "We were never a family. You wanted the deep aquifer because the upper bench at Harrow Ridge is going dry, and you didn't want the investors in San Francisco to know you were selling them dead vines."

Henderson raised a pale hand. "Mr. McAllister, let us maintain professional decorum. We are here to discuss a disputed drainage easement—"

"No, Arthur," Sarah Lin said, pushing a heavy, certified folder across the center of the table. "We are not here to discuss an easement. We are here because at seven-thirty this morning, the County Recorder’s Office issued a formal cancellation of Harrow Ridge LLC’s water allocation permit."

Richard Vance went entirely white. He looked as if Sarah had struck him across the face with an iron level.

"You can't do that," Vance whispered. "The allocation permit is tied to the vineyard bond. If you cancel the permit, the bank calls the construction loan on the new cellar."

"The allocation permit was granted based on an affidavit of uncontested riparian ownership," Sarah said, her voice completely devoid of emotion, the voice of the law when the law is dry and clean. "The affidavit your daughter signed on Tuesday afternoon claimed Harrow Ridge owned the underlying water rights of the McAllister parcel under the 1962 county agreement."

Sarah tapped the ledger lying before her.

"The agreement was satisfied on November twelfth, nineteen sixty-two. The McAllister water rights were never encumbered. Your affidavit was false, Mr. Vance. In legal terms, it’s an unsworn falsification to a public board. In banking terms, it’s mortgage fraud."

Richard Vance turned his head slowly toward Henderson. "Arthur?"

Henderson didn't look at his client. He took off his gold-rimmed glasses, laid them on the table, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Richard," Henderson said quietly. "I told you three weeks ago that we needed the quitclaim from Clara before we filed the board certification. I told you that without the McAllister signature, the title was an open target."

"She was supposed to sign it!" Vance hissed, his hand slamming down onto the walnut table with a dull, hollow thump. "Amber told me the old woman was terrified! She said Clara was eighty years old, living on a pension, and that eighty thousand dollars would have her out of the cottage by Christmas!"

Clara let out a small, dry sigh that sounded like autumn leaves blowing across a gravel walk.

"Your father was the same way, Richard," Clara said, her pale eyes settling on him with a pity that was far worse than hatred. "He always thought that because a man didn't have money in the bank, he must have a price in his head. He never could understand that some things aren't for sale, because once you sell them, you don't have anywhere to put your feet down when the sun comes up."

She stood up.

She did not use the armrests. She stood up straight, her fingers smoothing the red flannel down over her hips, looking like an old cedar tree that had survived three fires and four logging crews.

"We aren't taking your money, Richard," Clara said. "And we aren't signing your paper. The water stays in the creek. If your vines die on the ridge, you can pull them out and plant wheat, like your grandfather should have done."