Even Elliott looked impressed with Bastien’s sincerity. I nudged Elliott playfully and whispered, “Can you see now how a girl could get a little swept away when a guy talks like that?”

“Yeah, yeah, that and the full lips that look like doughy pillows, I get it.” Elliott rolled his eyes.

“Sorry, what did you say about pillows?” Bastien asked, oblivious as ever.

“Don’t worry about it,” Elliott replied. “What you do need to worry about is how the two of you are going to convince Claudine and Jack to get on board with this new direction.”

“Oh, I’ll convince them,” I stated. “I just need you to help arrange the meeting without Kate finding out. And it has to be in the house. In the cellars preferably. For this to work, we need to take them straight into the heart of Château Mirabelle.”

Chapter Forty-One

As Bastien and I stood shoulder to shoulder in the dimly lit, bombed-out cellars of Château Mirabelle, the gravity of the moment weighed upon us like the thick, musty air pinned between the dirt floors and the impressive oak beams up above. We awaited the arrival of Claudine, Jack, and Elliott, well aware of the immense stakes at play. Convincing Jack and Claudine to embrace an alternative vision for Heart Restoration Project—one centered not on a manufactured romance storyline but on the profound sacrifices made by the Adélaïses and others—would be an uphill battle.

But if I could make them see that the château wasn’t just a star vehicle, but the true star of the show—a place where the very walls whispered stories of courage and strength—we might have a fighting chance. No, there was no “if.” I had to make them see. And not because I wanted to stick it to Kate, and believe me I did. This was about something far more significant. It was about honoring the legacy of those who had given so much and ensuring that Château Mirabelle’s true story would finally be told.

“Hello? Is anyone down here?” Jack called into the tunnel, his voice echoing off the cavernous walls.

“Oui, come down a few more steps, we are here,” Bastien called back.

Seconds later, Claudine, trailed by Jack and Elliott, emerged in the old wine cellar, a labyrinth of stone passages littered with piles of splintered wood from broken wine barrels and glass bottles, all blanketed in thick cobwebs. Crates were strewn about, and metal cogs and other gears that had once belonged to the enormous grape press were scattered in broken and bent pieces across the ground. The walls bore the scars of time, adorned with sparse patches of moss and crumbling plaster, and the low, vaulted ceilings added to the sense of confinement the deeper one descended.

Claudine ducked her head as her eyes darted around the room. “Is it even safe to be down here?”

“Do not worry, we reinforced the structural supports when we repaired the foundation. You will be perfectly safe,” Bastien confirmed.

Claudine breathed a sigh of relief as all three of them shuffled a little farther into the space.

Jack turned to Elliott. “So, Mr. Schaffer, what’s this big surprise you have to show us?”

Elliott motioned for me to step forward and said, “Floor’s yours, Plum.” Then he leaned in close, his warm breath brushing my ear as he whispered, “Remember, be the lion. You’ve got this.”

He stepped to the side, leaving me center stage. Though I should’ve grown accustomed to the spotlight’s glare by now, the white-hot intensity of this moment felt strikingly different. I steadied my voice and began. “I’m sure you’re wondering what you’re doing here? And, more to the point, where here even is? Look around; you are in the place where Château Mirabelle’s story began and ended. Let me explain . . .”

And as I unraveled the long, winding, complicated, and tragic history of Château Mirabelle, Jack and Claudine became increasingly enthralled, their unwavering attention revealing that they had never heard any of this before—because they hadn’t. As showrunner, Kate had been curating the material based on her vision, prioritizing falsehoods over the far more compelling and profound truth, most of which, according to Elliott, had ended up on the cutting-room floor.

The scene of me and Bastien examining the cracks on the cellar walls—cut! The footage of the crew working painstakingly to preserve the Adélaïse family crest—cut! The sequences of René walking me through the vineyard, explaining how the soil was still rich and fertile and how it might be brought back to life—cut! Anything that couldn’t be used to trick the audience into believing Bastien and I were entwined in a messy, passionate, and intense love affair—cut! Everything that might suggest I wasn’t the Plum Everly people had come to expect on TV—chaotic, reckless, aimless—cut! Cut! Cut! Cut! Until Heart Restoration Project was nothing more than another cliché reality TV show where genuine moments were thrown away to make room for the manufactured drama.

But it didn’t have to be that way. Heart Restoration Project could be so much more—a show where humanity took center stage. It could be that, assuming I could get Jack and Claudine on board, and by the contemplative looks on their faces, that was far from a sure thing.

“I don’t understand. Why wasn’t any of this backstory included? Elliott, where’s all that footage?” Jack demanded.

Elliott did a double take. Apparently Jack had completely forgotten the conversation in video village where he told Elliott that researching the house’s history was a complete waste of time.

“Sir, as I recall, you weren’t particularly interested in including anything in the show other than Plum and Bastien’s romance,” Elliott retorted as politely as his gruff nature would allow.

I stepped forward. “About that . . . I think it’s only right that you know that Kate manufactured that relationship. She lied to me, and she lied to Bastien. She edited the storyline to make it seem as though we were a real couple.”

“But you were a real couple. We all saw you off camera together. Nobody forced you to spend time with one another,” Claudine fired back, her eyes now darting between the two of us.

Bastien cleared his throat. “I am not proud of my role in any of this. What I did, I did because I believed by being a part of this show, by helping to restore le château, I would somehow make amends for my grandfather’s misdeeds. Kate cast me as her leading man, and I played along because I thought it was what the show needed to be a success. I believed Plum was in on it too. But as I recently discovered, she was not.”

“Is that true?” Jack asked.

“Yes.”

Claudine narrowed in on Bastien and me. “So you two? You’re not? You never were—”

With an open palm, I gestured to explain. “The lines may have been blurry. They may have even been crossed once or twice. But the fantasy Kate was crafting was complete fiction, one I never signed on for. So what I want to do is take the narrative back and give it to the rightful storyteller, Château Mirabelle.”

Claudine took two steps closer to me. “So, Mademoiselle Everly, what exactly did you have in mind?”

Over the next hour, I walked Jack and Claudine through my revamped version of the show. Elliott shared the clips we captured around Maubec, at Camp des Milles, and in the archives of Saint Orens. We showed them the interviews we’d conducted over our stay and the dozens of artifacts we’d painstakingly collected during any downtime we could find away from the show.

“This is a tale that has remained lost for more than eighty years. If you’re looking for a hit, why not go with the unexpected? Plum Everly getting humiliated on a grand stage? Well, it’s been done. More than once, in fact. And if I’m being candid, more than I care to remember. But what if all the intrigue, heartbreak, drama, and tension, what if it didn’t need to be manufactured the way it is in so many reality shows? What if it didn’t have to be staged, because it’s already all here,” I said, pointing to the stack of materials and research, which was more than enough to prove my point. “This history, although certainly devastating, is compelling and honest and is one that I know will affect an audience in a way that a cheesy, made-up love story never could. It’s the difference between making entertainment and making art, making something fleeting versus making something that will remain a part of this town’s story and could be part of Tributary’s story long after it’s aired.” I surrendered a silent exhale and said, “Well, what do you think?”

Claudine eyed Jack, who stood with his arms crossed, as they both deeply considered my pitch.

Jack scrubbed at his chin and nodded his head. “This is going to require a bit more discussion and consideration on our part before we can say one way or the other what we’ll decide to do. You’ve certainly given us a lot to consider, and in light of this new information, let’s take a few days while they are putting the finishing touches on the house for filming, and we’ll get back to you with a decision.”

Less than forty-eight hours later, I received a text from the production team to meet them at Château Mirabelle so they could render their final decision. Though confident the idea to change the focus of the show from me to the château was a solid one, I was still plagued by doubt, knowing that salacious gotcha-style reality TV might, at least on its face, seem like more of a surefire hit. But when I spotted Kate carrying an armful of items and rolling her suitcase behind her as she made her way out of her trailer and through video village, my heart leaped at the notion she was leaving and hopefully taking her fake show and her even faker friendship with her.

With where I was positioned, concealed out of sight, I considered letting Kate disappear off into the sunset fairly confident (and content) our paths wouldn’t cross again anytime soon. The timid lion I used to be would have stayed safely tucked away behind the large mirabelle tree until she was gone, but the brave lion I’d become needed to face her head-on and demand closure.

I stepped out onto the path, heading Kate off before she made it to the car that was waiting for her at the gate. Not sure what to say or how to even start, I just opened my mouth and hoped the right words would follow, but instead I uttered a simple, “We need to talk.”

Kate rolled her suitcase in front of herself on the dusty road, the wheels kicking dirt onto her black pumps and up to the hem of her pencil skirt, and then set her belongings on top. “You must be pretty pleased with yourself. Hijacking my show and getting me fired, I really didn’t think you had it in you.” She slowly clapped her hands together, the pace more sardonic than celebratory. “Congratulations, they loved your pitch and decided to take the show in a whole new direction and scrapped everything I worked on, the entire brilliant concept. Such a shame, their shortsightedness. But hey, that’s showbiz, right?” She smiled smugly, her attitude still oozing with poor-me energy.

“You really still think what you did was okay, don’t you? You still believe that it was perfectly fine to tear me down in order to build yourself up?”

Her face looked hardened and unflappable as she held her ground. “I’ll repeat what I said back at the château. You know how this game is played, Plum. You and your family practically invented how it works, and you continued playing long after everyone else had grown tired of it. So don’t stand there on your soapbox and act like I did anything different than the rest of them. Christ, your own boyfriend sold you out with a sex tape. What exactly did you expect from me?”

As she continued to dig her heels in justifying her duplicity, my anger softened into pity shaded with a dull sadness for her. She would likely return to Hollywood and continue to hustle and grind, use people and fight to get ahead, having learned absolutely nothing from this incredible place or the people who inhabited it. And realizing that she’d missed it all made me even more grateful that I hadn’t.

“What did I expect from you?” I repeated back to her, almost incredulous at the audacity of the question. “I expected better, that’s what. I expected that as a woman, you would have understood that tape changed the way people saw me and worse, the way I saw myself. And I would have expected for you not to have exploited that vulnerability.”

“Hold on, I really don’t think—”

“Yes, you do. You know exactly what you did, and maybe you’ll never be sorry for it. But it doesn’t matter now because through this experience, I’ve learned to stand on my own two feet, and the promise you made to me when we first met about how I could reclaim the narrative came to fruition not because of you, but in spite of you. So it looks like, on this one and only score, you were telling the truth—I do get to write my own ending.”

Kate grabbed for her belongings and the handle of her bag before lifting her chin a bit higher. “Au revoir, Plum.”

“Au revoir, Ms. Wembley.”

And with that, Kate turned on her sky-high heels and teetered down the path, back off to La-La Land.

Chapter Forty-Two