Does Love Have A Price

Does Love Have a Price Author: Victor Fernandez Title: Does Love Have a Price >Jennifer Marchetti has everything a woman is supposed to want. Forty-one acres of the finest Pinot Noir vineyard in California. A name on a label that was her grandfather's. A husband whose name is on the side of buildings. What she doesn't have is a single person who asks what's in the wine. Jacob Rios asks. He's the sommelier her husband hired for an investor tasting, and he stands in her cellar and tastes something in her best vintage that she didn't know was there. He's articulate, easy, at home among money - and when she asks what he does, he says, "I'm in wine. Doing fine." He never says he's rich. She never asks. Over one winter in a cottage at the bottom of the vineyard, they build a small life on that silence - until the night Jennifer follows him home and discovers the apartment above a laundromat, the bus, and a debt with his father's name on it. She does the math. The math says the vineyard. She drives home. But the man she goes back to has done math of his own, on paper she signed at thirty without reading - and the vineyard was never hers. To keep it, she can stay married in name to a man who has never once let her want for anything. Or she can walk out with two suitcases, a corkscrew, and one case of the best wine she ever made, toward a man who has nothing to offer but a chair he went and found. Told in alternating voices - hers dry and unsparing, his warm and doing arithmetic on everything - Does Love Have a Price is a love story about the difference between being kept and being seen, and about a woman who finally learns what she's worth by giving up the only thing she thought measured it. The Great Gatsby from Daisy's side - if Daisy got it right.