EPILOGUE
SIMONE ESQUIVEL WENT into labour nine months later, on a warm autumn night where the vine leaves rustled on the breeze up the trellised slopes and where the wine grapes grew fat on the view over the spectacular coastline.
It was exactly one year since the day she’d arrived on Alesander’s doorstep and delivered her crazy proposal, a year that had changed like the seasons, and been filled with despair and loss, and hope and renewal.
And like the vines themselves, ancient and strong and with roots eighty feet deep, love had featured through it all.
Alesander was more nervous than Simone, fussing and fretting as he tried to manoeuvre her into first the car, and then into the hospital, as if he were trying to herd the sheep that grazed between the vines.
And when Simone refused to be herded and told him to calm down, he tried to herd the staff instead, barking out orders and demands so that nobody was in any doubt that the Esquivel baby was arriving tonight.
He held her hand while she laboured and fretted, and barked orders some more. He sponged her brow and moistened her lips and rubbed her back when she needed him to. And when their baby was born he watched in wonder and awe at this strong woman who he loved deliver him a son.
‘You didn’t lie to him,’ he said later, as he sat by her side, his finger given over to the clutches of their tiny child, clearly besotted by their new son.
She must have looked as if she didn’t understand.
‘To Felipe. That last time you spoke to him before he died. You told him the truth. You told him you were having a baby and that you would have a son and we would name him Felipe.
‘Don’t you see,’ he said, ‘our baby was conceived that night. You spoke the truth.’
She smiled at him, this man who was her husband, who she had married to make an old man happy but who had given her his heart and this child and who now was giving her yet another precious gift.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Did I ever tell you I loved you, Alesander Esquivel?’
‘You did,’ he told her, ‘but I didn’t believe you then.’ He leaned over the child they had made and kissed her ever so preciously on the lips.
‘But I’ll never doubt you again.’