Sweet Romance10 min read
The Box of "Romantic Ruby" Grapes
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"I brought something for your mother," I said, lifting the cardboard box so the logo showed.
She glanced down and her face changed like someone flipped a switch. "What is that? Grapes?"
"Yes," I said. "They're called Romantic Ruby."
"Romantic Ruby?" Her eyebrows rose. "You expect me to believe your family can even buy Sunlight Rose? Farmers are poor, you know."
"I'll put them on the table," I said. "They're for you."
"What's your parents' job?" she asked while fingering the grapes the way someone inspects a cheap painting.
"My father farms. My mother works at a winery," I answered honestly.
She poked a grape, sniffed, and curled her lip. "Farming? They must make almost nothing a year."
"They do fine," my father had taught me to say. "Be humble."
She tapped each grape like they were stones. "And you, what do you do?"
"I help in the vineyard," I said.
"No wonder you're so dark," she said with a slow, precise contempt. "Girls who are this tanned don't look good. It's embarrassing to take them out."
"Everyone has different tastes," I started.
She cut me off with a glare. "Don't bother with that Chanel knock-off. If you can't afford real brands, don't pretend."
I caught my own breath. The jacket had a CHANEL logo. I didn't care for labels—I'd worn everything from high-end to market stalls—so I hadn't noticed. She had noticed everything.
"Kenia," Jonas said beside me, smiling like a practiced portrait. "Our neighborhood pays pretty well. We can offer eighty-eight thousand as a bridal gift."
"Eighty-eight thousand?" My head tilted. She kept talking. "And your family can give five hundred thousand as dower, a car and a house."
"Five million as dowry?" I mouthed. Her numbers were a show.
Jonas's mother pushed the grape box back to me. "Take these. This match isn't right. Don't lie to me."
Jonas tugged on his mother's sleeve. "Mom—"
"Marry well, son. Marry into money. Don't waste your life struggling. A rich wife saves you years."
She said it loud enough that I heard every cruel syllable. She wanted him to climb social stairs by wedding, not love.
I put the box and the bottle my father had packed back into my arms and looked at Jonas. "My Sunlight Rose grapes were fed to pigs last year," I said. "They're not worth much. We cut that variety down. These grapes in the box, though—Romantic Ruby—are special."
She looked at me like I'd spit on the floor. "You're calling me a liar?"
"Not at all," I said. "I only said my family farms. You can't look down on farmers. Without us you'd drink wind."
Her eyes snapped. "Get out of my house."
Jonas's hand tightened in mine. He whispered, "Kenia, leave it. We'll move out after we marry."
"You know my mother is worried," he said. "She doesn't want me left behind. But I don't care about money. I care about you."
I almost believed him. He sounded honest then. He sounded like the Jonas who walked me home at night, who bought cheap coffee and made bad jokes. But his smile in that doorstep made me blind.
The next day Jonas was not the steady boy I thought he was. I came to his office with an umbrella and a bottle of wine—simple things—and overheard him and a colleague.
"His girlfriend is poor," one man said. "Why isn't he ditching her? Too many months wasted."
"Don't worry. I'll finish what I started," another said. "Use some leverage."
Jonas laughed in a way that clattered. "Once it's done, I throw her away."
"You're wasting resources," they said. "Take the pretty ones who can pay."
I pressed my back to a column and listened until my fingers were white. The water on my umbrella was cold like ice. When he saw me he made a face.
"Jonas," I said when he came out. "Why would you say that?"
He shrugged like a man who'd lost none of his appetite. "It was one of those talks. Office talk."
That night, he came over with wine and a grin. "Celebration," he said.
"You drink," I said, peering at the bottle. "I'll open it."
I checked the seal, the cork. It was him buying small things at a small store to make a small evening feel large. After a few glasses, his laugh got sloppy. "You always hide," he slurred. "Not tonight."
"Don't," I said when he leaned in.
"You always look like a country girl," he whispered. "So fresh. So—"
"Stop," I said. "Jonas, stop."
He tried to force himself on me. I shoved, I screamed. I grabbed his finger and snapped it. He screamed, staggered, and I ran to the bathroom. The door was pushed open. The room shook with the sound of him falling.
He lay on the floor like a bad dream and I went to wash my hands. He got up, red-eyed and furious. "You hurt me!" he shouted. "You'll pay!"
I put my shoe down and kicked him hard. He howled and crawled away. "Get out," I said. "Don't come back."
He mumbled about ruining me. "I'll make you famous," he said. "I'll show everyone who you really are."
The next morning the building smelled like a different fight. Flyers were plastered on every wall, calling me a monster with a headline and his bruised face in photos. "Kenia Burns beats Jonas Sandberg. Pay her bill!"
My stomach turned. I had my own videos. I had the wines he left, the bottle with his fingerprints. I had the security footage I'd installed because I wasn't naïve. I also had the box of Romantic Ruby grapes my father had packed and my mother had wrapped.
They became my proof and my plan.
I confessed none of it to Jonas. I told my roommates only a sliver and set things in motion.
"I will not be quiet," I told them. "If he posts lies, I will answer them with truth."
They rallied. "We will help," my room leader said. "We won't let them make you small."
The nastiest things followed: anonymous calls, cards slipped under my door, messages asking how much I charged and how long I'd been selling myself. Each time my hands shook. Each time I thought of my father's calloused fingers and the vines we pruned together.
I found him at the small company my father had helped start a branch of—a place with a new legal department. He worked there briefly, and his ignorance was loud. At a product review I watched as he failed to tell an expensive grape from a simple table grape.
"Do you know what this is?" Gerard Bowers, the elderly manager, asked him.
Jonas guessed wrong and then tried a clumsy excuse. "I thought Sunlight Rose was the premium."
Gerard's face crumpled. "We had one box held back for auction. It's worth a lot. It was Romantic Ruby."
That afternoon the warehouse alarms screamed. They checked and a box was missing. "The Romantic Ruby," Gerard barked. "It was for the auction."
Jonas went pale. "I gave it to a client for tasting. I didn't know—"
"Recover it!" Gerard shouted.
Jonas called and called. His voice trembled. "They ate it," he stammered finally. The room went cold. "They told me to taste. I didn't pay attention."
The company lost a small fortune. Gerard's retirement plan in one small coin hole. It fell on Jonas. Gerard's eyes were like glass.
The punishment I gave him in public began there, but it was not enough yet. People needed to see the whole picture: the lies, the attacks, the theft. They needed to see his greed and his cruelty.
I arranged a meeting in the conference room. "Everyone is invited," I told Gerard. "Bring the board, the staff, and any students who want to come." I called my university dean, Scott Moller, and asked him to send a representative. "This is about how one person can harm many," I said.
On the day, I walked into the conference room carrying the box of grapes that had not been eaten—the replica I used to bait him. The room filled with people: employees, students, the legal team. Jonas sat near the back, face drained, his mother Frances Harris by his side.
"I thought this would be private," he whispered.
"Not today," I said brightly. "Truth is a public thing."
"She stole company property," Jonas's colleague muttered.
I began to speak slowly, like pouring wine. "You know when I wrapped your sorry little truths in a box? I did it because farmers taught me to preserve things. I did it because grapes show their color. I did it because farmers do honest work."
"Enough," Jonas's mother cried. "Stop playing the victim."
I held up the surveillance footage. The projector hum filled the room.
"Here is Jonas taking the box from the company storage," I said. "Here is him handing it to a man who told him the grapes were samples. Here is the man eating them."
The footage played and the room watched the truth like a theater. Eyes moved from the screen to Jonas and froze.
"Why did you take them?" Gerard demanded.
Jonas's voice thinned. "I—" He swallowed. "I thought it would impress a client."
"Impress?" Gerard laughed without humor. "You cost this company ten thousand. You cost me the auction chance."
Frances Harris jumped up. "He didn't mean—"
"Silence," I said. "You mocked my family. You called my grapes pig feed. You told people I was filthy. Then you stole and covered your tracks. You pasted flyers. You lied to the police. You called me and demanded money."
Jonas's face crumpled. "I was wrong. Please."
"You were not only wrong," I said, stepping close. "You were cruel and you were reckless."
Phones came out. A few people recorded. I did not stop them.
"You will apologize here, in public," Gerard said. "And you will sign a statement of restitution."
Jonas knelt in the center of the room, not because anyone forced him but because whatever thin skin he had left split. "Kenia," he said, voice small. "I'm sorry."
"Say it like you felt it," I said.
"I am sorry," he said. "I am sorry."
"Say to everyone what you called me," I told him.
He hesitated. Frances covered her mouth and shook her head. "Don't humiliate him."
"Humiliate?" I leaned close and looked at everyone in the room. "Humiliation is what he sent through town. Humiliation is what his flyers did. He deserves to face what he did where everyone can see it."
Jonas's apology sounded like a draft through paper. People whispered. Some clapped softly. Some took pictures.
"You will write an apology, and you will sign a statement acknowledging theft, harassment, and defamation," Gerard said. "You will be dismissed from your post. Your name will stand as what it is."
Jonas's mother tried to stand in front of him, but people parted like water. "You are out," Gerard said calmly.
"Please," Jonas sobbed. "I'll do anything."
"Anything includes eight years behind bars if you persist," Driscoll Berger, our legal counsel, said matter-of-factly. "Harassment and extortion are serious."
Jonas's face changed. The color bled out. He tried to stand and then slumped, hands shaking. He looked up at Frances, and she couldn't stop the shame. Her face went through the sequence I'd learned to expect: arrogance, then confusion, then denial, then collapse.
"Look," I said. "If you want to be forgiven, start with the truth. Not a whisper, not a private apology, but a day like this."
He tried to speak. "Kenia, I—"
"Not a word," I said. "Write. Sign. Leave."
He wrote like a child. His handwriting trembled. The room watched every line. When he finished, Gerard read the words aloud: theft, harassment, defamation. Jonas's shoulders buckled. Frances began to cry, not the theatrical kind she'd performed before but the raw wet kind. Around us, people murmured. Some looked at Jonas with pity; some with disgust.
A student came forward and said, "You tore down her life with posters. You made us doubt her. You should pay for that."
Jonas tried to protest. "I will pay," he said. "I will—"
"You will face the law if you continue," Driscoll said. "This room is witness."
The humiliation lasted long in words, but it lasted longer in consequence. He was sacked. His reputation had holes. Students who had once pointed fingers now avoided him. His mother tried to confront me later in the dormitory; Jett King, my tattooed tenant who'd become a friend, sat quietly in the living room and did not let her in.
"Don't come near my daughter," he told her in a voice that made the floor feel steady.
She stopped coming.
Jonas followed a darker path. He called, he tried to blackmail with fabricated calls asking for money. He believed himself clever until the law closed like a net. "Kenia, just give me one million," he demanded in a call that would become evidence.
"Are you trying to extort me?" I asked.
"Just—" he stammered.
I recorded every word.
We went to the police. The investigation moved quickly. Evidence stacked: his calls, his flyers, the surveillance of the theft, the recordings where he bragged he would throw me away. The court did its slow work and gave a harsh sentence. Jonas was taken away. Frances sat outside my dormitory and wailed until the security asked her to leave.
People who pretended to be my enemies changed their tone. The dean, Scott Moller, placed the flyers in a case of evidence and called the responsible parties to task. The student body rallied around me in a quieter way: offers of support, apologies whispered in corridors.
In the end I did what I'd always believed in: I ran my father's vineyards and my mother's winery with honesty. "Romantic Ruby" became our pride. Grant Munoz, a partner who had long worked with my family, came by to buy crates. He had known me as the farmer's daughter and later as a business leader. "Your grapes changed my mind," he said with a grin.
And the man who had sat in the shadows for many years, the assistant who had watched me with careful attention—Luca Beasley—became the steady hand I trusted. He worked beside Gerard for years, gentle and exacting, and eventually the company was his to lead when Gerard retired.
"You taught me something about pride," Luca whispered once in the vineyard, standing knee-deep in soil. "I want to help. I want to be with you."
"You're not the kind to take a box and run," I said, smiling.
"Never," he said. "I'm the kind who stays."
We married in the vines with a small crowd: my father, my mother, Gerard, Luca's family, and even Grant Munoz. Frances Harris did not come. Jonas never returned.
Years later, while pregnant and pruning grape shoots, I saw Jonas at the edge of a field carrying baskets. He kept his head down and moved like someone trying to disappear. I walked over.
"Jonas," I said.
He looked up, surprise and something like apology on his face. "Kenia."
"My mother warned me," I said, looking at the mud on his pants. "She said farmers are poor. She was wrong. Farmers are the starting point. The earth is our work."
"I remember," he said.
"I am proud to be a farmer," I said. "Without farming you'd drink air."
He tried to say something. I patted his shoulder. "Go on. We all have to keep working."
He walked away.
I stood in the rows, the leaves rustling like a small crowd. Luca took my hand and squeezed. "I will marry a farmer," he said, quietly proud.
"You will," I said.
We walked back to the farmhouse where a crate of Romantic Ruby grapes sat gleaming in the sun, and I thought about how boxes can carry either shame or truth, depending on who opens them.
The End
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