Andrea's wearing a dark red, long-sleeve maternity dress, with stretchy black sweatpants underneath that end in a pair of combat boots. Over the dress she wears an open leather jacket that clearly can't close over her pregnant belly. She's almost as pregnant as Lori.
"Can I take my katana off his throat?" the black woman asks.
"I don't know," Andrea answers.
"Hell you mean you don't know!" Daryl roars, and then wishes he hadn't, because that causes a slight prick of the tip of the blade, enough to draw a drop of blood. He takes a step back. The woman doesn't push her blade against his throat again, but she warns him not to take another step back or risk being run through.
"Well, it's been months since we last saw each other," Andrea says. "Things change. People change. And you're with someone I don't know."
"He's my son, like your friend there assumed."
Andrea snorts. "Your son?"
"You fucking shot me, and I forgave you!" Daryl barks. "Now you're gonna let this bitch hold a sword on me?"
The sword-wielding woman glares at him and presses her blade to his throat again, just enough to draw another tiny drop of blood. Damn she must keep that thing extra sharp.
"I wouldn't call her that if I were you," Andrea advises him.
Daryl doesn't step back, but he moves his head back. "Noted."
"You can lower your sword," Andrea tells her friend.
Still eyeing Daryl suspiciously, the woman lowers her sword. With a puff of a sigh, Daryl drops his upstretched hands. Jackson looks curiously from woman to woman.
The sword-wielding woman steps back to let the men onto the winery floor. Andrea, with her hand on her belly, says, "It's good to see you alive, Daryl."
"Could have fooled me."
"This is Michonne." She nods to the black woman, who is now sliding her sword into a sheath on her back. "Who's your so-called son?"
"Jackson," the young man answers a little nervously.
Andrea's eyes move from Daryl to Jackson and back again. "You do look a lot like Daryl, if he were younger and a little taller and cleaned up good. Are you really his son?"
Jackson nods. "My biological mother didn't tell him about me. She adopted me out. And we met right before the collapse. And then again after."
Andrea now turns her attention to Daryl while Michonne leans back casually against an empty, upright oak wine barrel and continues to eye the men suspiciously and silently. "Were you the only one who got out of the farm alive?"
Daryl shakes his head. "Jimmy and Patricia didn't make it. But Carol's alive. Lori. Rick. Carl. T-Dog. Beth. Hershel. Glenn and Maggie. We all got a camp. Jackson's with us, and his younger sister, Addison."
"And Shane?" Andrea asks hopefully.
Daryl opens his mouth and then closes it. Andrea doesn't know what happened right before that herd flooded the farm. She doesn't known Shane attempted to kill Rick. She wasn't there beside the dying fire, when Rick told them he had killed his best friend for them. "Sorry. He didn't make it out of the farm alive."
Andrea gasps and covers her mouth with her hand. Michonne stands suddenly straight, walks to her, and puts a comforting hand on her back. Andrea drops her hand and takes in a few deep, calming breaths. "I'm fine. I'm okay."
Michonne nods ever so slightly and steps back. She returns to her perch against the wine barrel and continues to follow the conversation silently.
"Until I saw you," Andrea tells Daryl. "I didn't think anyone had made it out alive. But then you listed everyone, and I thought maybe…" She shakes her head. "How is everyone?"
"Glenn and Maggie are married now."
"Married?"
Daryl laughs. "Yeah. And Maggie's pregnant. Like Lori." His eyes flit to her stomach. "Like you." A thought occurs to him suddenly. Andrea and Shane were starting to get close on that farm, and the timing seems right. "Is it Shane's?"
Andrea nods.
Well, he thinks, that's a lot better than the other likely alternative, which was that she was raped somewhere between the farm and this winery. Of course, the other option is that she picked up a boyfriend somewhere along the way. "Are you two alone?" he asks.
Michonne eyes him warily and doesn't answer.
"If you're alone, you can come back with us," Daryl offers.
"We don't need your charity," Michonne insists. "We're doing just fine here on our own."
"Michonne!" Andrea scolds. "This is no place to settle down and have the baby."
"That house is defensible. I just need to spike the wood fence that's already around it. It's a good position, on the hill. It's got two fireplaces, and we can drag those planters indoor and try to grow some vegetables this winter - "
"- We're almost out of food! A few planters of herbs and vegetables isn't going to cut it. And all we have here is wine."
Michonne sighs. "Remember what happened the last time you wanted to settle someplace you thought had nice people?"
Andrea turns away from Michonne and looks directly at Daryl. Her expression has changed to one of discomfort. She looks as if she has something to say that she doesn't want to say. But she does say it, quickly, as if she's ripping of a bandaid to get it over with: "I found Merle. In a town called Woodbury." Daryl's eyes widen and his heart begins to beat hard with a hope he buried months ago. "He was alive. But now he's dead. He's dead and buried."
Daryl reels at the news. He lets out a great cry, staggers a few feet, and then collapses to the ground, where he sits back against the stone wall of the winery. Jackson walks to him but seems unsure how to offer comfort. Eventually, he just slides down and sits silently beside him.
"I'm sorry," Andrea says. "Take comfort in the fact that he died a hero. He went out way better than – " She stops, seeming to think better of mentioning the kind of man Merle was in her eyes.
"What exactly happened?" Daryl demands. "Tell me!"
Andrea tells him the entire story from the beginning. She met Michonne shortly after fleeing the farm. They survived together roaming from place to place until they ran into Merle on the road. Merle took them back to a town called Woodbury, where he was serving as the right-hand man to the leader, who called himself the Governor. They lived there for two months, during which time Michonne grew increasingly suspicious of the Governor. Andrea, however, had a brief relationship with the man.
"He was creepily obsessed with her," Michonne mutters. "And she didn't see it."
"What I saw was that he didn't care that I was pregnant, and he wanted to help raise my child."
"And name it Penny if it was a girl," Michonne says, her face contorted as though she's eaten something sour. "After the undead daughter he kept chained in his closet."
"What?" Jackson asks.
Michonne explains her discovery of the Governor's walker-turned-daughter. She killed the corpse, and when the Governor found out, he flew into a rage and sought to have Michonne publicly executed despite Andrea's pleas on her behalf. He ordered his right-hand-man to carry out the execution.
That was when Merle turned on him. He refused to obey the order. The Governor then ordered his army captain, Caesar Chavez, to open fire on Merle, but Merle fired first, taking out the would-be shooter. The Governor fled behind a tank, several of his army men with him, while other members of the army drew to Merle's side.
A skirmish erupted between those on Merle's side and those on the Governor's. During the fray, the Governor set fire to the entire town. Michonne got Andrea out, but when the gunfire stilled, Merle lingered behind to save several people. He got several civilians out of the flames to safety, and then he began leading a pilgrim train of the thirty-two Woodbury survivors (including Michonne and Andrea) away from the wreckage. But he'd breathed in too much smoke rescuing those people. The symptoms of smoke inhalation took time to appear, but when they showed up suddenly, ten hours after they had pulled out of Woodbury, he was dead in ten minutes. The survivors buried Merle by the side of the road and marked his grave with a cross.
Things got worse after that. The Woodbury refugees followed signs to a place called Terminus, which was advertising "sanctuary to all." They offered to welcome, feed, and house the group, on one condition only—that they surrender their weapons at the entrance.
"I told Andrea we should turn around and leave," Michonne says. "I didn't like it, having to give up my weapons to get in. And if Merle had still been alive, he never would have agreed to it. I shouldn't have either. But I gave in because you were pregnant," she tells Andrea. "Because you convinced me we couldn't just keep roaming."
"How many times do I have to say I'm sorry for that?" Andrea asks with rising voice.
"You don't! Just use more sense now, when these men invite you to some camp you've never seen!"
"I know Daryl."
Jackson interrupts the argument, "So…this Terminus place turned out to be a bad camp?"
"That's the understatement of the year," Michonne replies.
Terminus turned out to be a camp of cannibals who murdered, cooked, and ate their guests. Once disarmed, and fed what they now know to be human flesh, the refugees were locked in cattle cars to be butchered in shifts. Soon, the only Woodbury inhabitants left alive were Michonne, Andrea, and some people whose names float over Daryl like a mist – Milton, Tara, Lilly, Tyreese, Sasha.
Locked in the same cattle car with them was a trio of people from elsewhere: Abraham, Eugene, and Rosita. When this group of nine was led together to the slaughter, they fought back and seized control. They killed their captors, and they took over Terminus.
Abraham then told them about his mission to get Eugene, who purported to be a scientist, to Washington, D.C. to find a cure for the disease that plagued them. Michonne thought Eugene was full of shit and playing some kind of long con, but the others agreed to leave with him. Andrea and Michonne remained in Terminus, determined to live off the gardens and stored foods, and for Andrea to have the baby there.
Their decision to stay was, unfortunately, followed by a month of drought. It did not rain once over Terminus, and maintaining the gardens was difficult. They ran out of stored water. Then one day, a thunderstorm erupted, and they thought it would bring them salvation. Instead, a lighting strike set fire to one of the propane tanks. The tank exploded, and the flames leapt to the building. The rain petered to a drizzle and did not drown the fire. The building burned quickly, and Michonne and Andrea barely escaped Terminus with their lives.
They wandered again, this time toward Alabama, looking for a place to camp. They found the winery just yesterday, entering from a different road than Daryl and Jackson had. They came upon the winery from the back, past the family's old house.
"Thus the tire tracks," Jackson observes.
Michonne and Andrea entered through the cellar. When they saw the undead upstairs in the tasting room, and all the vomit and broken bottles, they left them alive there, just as they left the walkers in the traps.
"Why?" Jackson asks.
"We weren't going to live or hang out in the tasting room," Andrea tells him. "And we thought it would be a deterrent for anyone who came up that way. Although it didn't seem to work for you two."
They settled in the house beyond the wine tasting room that day. Today, they were out scavenging, and as they passed the road weaving to the tasting room, they spied the fresh tire tracks from Daryl and Dixon's pick-up truck. "So instead of going around to the back road to the house, we investigated," Michonne says. "You two have a lot of nice loot in that truck."
"That's our loot," Jackson insists.
From where he sits, still slumped against the wall, Daryl asks, "That Governor asshole who set the fire that killed my brother – he's dead? You're sure of that?"
"I killed him myself," Michonne assures him. "In the skirmish that erupted, I personally drove him through."
Daryl drags himself into a standing position. The initial blow of the news of his brother's death was hard, but he's also gotten used to the idea of life without Merle. He's grieved already. He grieved with rage in the quarry camp when Rick told him Merle was left behind in Atlanta. He grieved with tear-laced shouts of protest on the rooftop when he found Merle's hand. He grieved quietly through the confession he made to Carol as he gave her that Cherokee rose and said he wasn't fool enough to think there were any flowers blooming for his brother. And he's grieved gradually, almost unknowingly, in the subtle sorrow of the days that followed. It's already been a long, slow process of letting go, and he doesn't have much grief left to pour out.
"So y'all coming back to our camp with us or not?" he asks. "I can't stand 'round here all day. Got to get back in time to cook dinner. Got me a date with Carol tonight."
Andrea laughs. Her smirk falters and she asks, "Wait, are you serious?"
"Like you said," Daryl tells her. "Things change. People change."