Who knows? You might be able to do this.

You might even love it.

The corners of her lips twitched, but she wasn’t sure whether she was trying to laugh or cry.

She was desperately aware of how rare opportunities like this were. A house and a business, each worth more than all of her current possessions combined, had been handed to her. She felt achingly ungrateful for the way she was shirking them.

Except that, sometimes, an unasked-for gift could easily begin to look like a burden.

She would try, though. For her parents. Whatever their reasons for sending her away, she must have meant something to them if they had left all of their worldly goods to her. And so she would try to do the right thing, to keep the workers employed, to keep the winery running.

And she would just have to hope that she was enough.

Margot turned back to the window. The panes were closed, but she hadn’t touched the padlock. It hung from its bracket, the shackle open, the key still in place. For a second she considered locking the window, as had clearly been intended. It was a ridiculous thought. And a terrifying one.

What was she locking the window against? And why only in this room? None of the downstairs windows had locks, and if theft was any kind of concern, that was where they would be most needed.

She gingerly lifted the padlock. It was heavy. Like many things in the home, it seemed old, but Margot suspected its mechanism would still work. She let it drop back again.

The night was still early, hours before her normal bedtime, but Margot’s sleep in the motels had been erratic and she was ready for the day to be over. She lifted the first suitcase onto the foot of the bed and began unpacking. She hadn’t brought much. A lot of her old possessions—furniture, board games, and the television—had been joint purchases with her roommates and left at her old apartment.

That meant her life neatly fit into the suitcases. They could have belonged to a traveler: stacks of clothes, a bag of toiletries, a few of her favorite novels, and a spare set of sneakers.

Her bag held her cell phone, which in turn held everything valuable to her: hundreds of photos with her nana, her calendar—which would be shockingly bare once she asked to be taken off her old work’s roster—and contacts, mostly for people she hadn’t spoken to in years.

Everything else had been left back at the apartment…and could stay there. Margot chewed her lip as she considered how little her life had boiled down to. There wasn’t much. Not enough to fill the house she’d found herself in. Barely enough to fill the wardrobe, even.