Page 82 of Nine-Tenths

There's nothing to suggest, beyond the whimsy of the front gate, that it’s Dav who lives here. My Dav, who is proud of his wine, and secretly loves silly socks, and drinks his coffee with a hit of espresso. My Dav, who is tactile and comforting, and trieshard to please. My Dav, would be a hedonist, it's so clear in the way he makes meals, and makes love, but is notallowedto be.

That's what this walk looks like: Dav being denied.

Again.

In the ten minutes it takes me to get to the house, I oscillate between sorrow, fuming anger on his behalf, and curiosity. There are more walls inside the estate, low enough I have a view of the outbuildings and vineyards they section off. What would I find if I walked across the manicured lawn, risking the wrath of a security detail or gardener to crush the grass and hop the nearest boundary? The sustainability-nerd in me is desperate to see if the original watering systems are still in place, if the equipment is run on gas, or solar, or literal-horse-power. I want to poke through every shed, analyze a real working farm that has been at it for centuries.

I don’t because that can wait.

I’m going to see Dav.

I pass through the ivy-heavy wall—an inner bailey, my brain screams,a fortress prepared for a siege—and the house that’s revealed looks like something out of Jane Austen. (Dav was seventeen years old when Jane Austen was born, I recall with a jolt.) The house is two and a half stories, topped with a pitched roof and dormers, built of the same sandstone as the walls, and overflowing with fussy classical detailing. The windows and front door are surrounded by stonework that looks like Greek pillars. The front door is topped with a little stone roof trimmed with ornate scrollwork, and a modern front door in a cheeky wine-red. I bet Onatah put him up to that.

The whole building is so quintessentially Loyalist it might as well be on a postcard.

But this isn't a museum. People live here: housekeepers, farmers, winemakers. And I’m standing like a dumbass in the middle of the inner courtyard, surrounded on both sides witha riot of barely-controlled rose bushes. I wonder how many pairs of eyes are watching me through the regimented rows of rectangular windows. The thought of being judged by the people who know Dav's private life better than I do gives me goosebumps.

The front door opens before I'm halfway up the three shallow steps.

"Hi," the woman holding the door open says. She's shorter than me, white, probably in her mid-thirties, with funky glasses and plump cheeks that betray a ready smile. Right now she looks serious, but not thebadkind of serious. Her gaze drops to the pin on my lapel, then bounces up to my face, politely bland.

"Uh. Hello. I'm, uh, I'm Colin."

"Yes, I know." She waves her hand to invite me into a narrow, well-lit foyer.

"Um, Onatah dropped me off."

"I know that, too," the woman says, and nods to a small screen beside the door, where a video feed streams a view of the front gate. It flicks to the walkway, the inner courtyard, and a terraced stone patio. Yikes, she watched my whole walk-of-not-shame. Awkward.

She thrusts out her hand, business-like and confident. "Sarah Appleby." We shake. "I'm the P.A."

"Colin Levesque," I say, like an idiot, because she knows who I am. "I’m the, er, boyfriend. I think? I hope."

She shoots a reassuring, if slightly pitying smile at me, and I follow her out of the narrow, wood-paneled front hall. We head through a pair of double doors with an elaborate stained-glass transom into what looks like a formal sitting room done up in powder blue and daisy yellow.

Okay, so maybe this placeispart museum. I tuck my elbows in as we weave through spindly sofas and tables, which someoneclearly stole off theDownton Abbeyset, terrified of knocking over some precious family knickknack.

Christ, this room doesn't feel much like Dav, either.

Isanypart of his life his own?

Sarah bustles through a side door—green baize and everything—and suddenly we're in an ultra-modern industrial kitchen. It's easily as big as my whole apartment, bisected by a massive worktop lined with stools.

One side is all chefy stainless steel, and the other is a wall of pantry cupboards, as elaborately and classically wrought as the exterior of the house, but in expensive gleaming wood, and likely just as old. There's a big bay window framing a spectacular view of the vineyards, ringed on the outside by the limestone patio I'd seen on the security feed.

And sitting at the window, curled up on their knees to reach coloring books on a much-loved family-sized dining table, is the last thing I expected to see in Dav's house: kids.

Two of 'em. And the little girl, maybe seven years old, is ginger.

I feel all the blood drain from my face.

Both kids bolt up from the table with delighted "Mom!"s.

"They're not his," Sarah says, smirking as she hugs the younger boy to her thigh.

I hope my relief isn’t too obvious. "Well… okay."

I'd have been annoyed if Dav had children and he'd never mentioned them. But the deal-breaker would have been that he'dhiddenthem from me, not their existence. I'm suddenly wondering how a child with Dav's hair and my ears would look. Besides it being a biological impossibility because,hello, we are both dudes, that is very much not what I should be thinking about right now.