Ullage

Petra Kovac authenticates wine the way other people confess sins: slowly, and without mercy. Nine years after one beautiful lie cost a man everything, she trusts only the liquid, never the label, never the story. So when the legendary Falk cellar surfaces - twelve hundred lots, forty million pounds, one final job before she can walk away for good - she reads the contract twice and finds the clause buried in the grey: she is being paid not to look, but to agree. Then Luca Sabel steps out of the crowd holding his glass by the stem, exactly the way she does. He deals only in true bottles now. He has reasons he keeps buttoned in his coat, and a past sanded down until no fingernail can catch the join. One of them is lying. Neither can afford to be right. A slow-burn literary romance about the difference between what a thing claims to be and what it confesses when no one is looking.