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Archer stepped forward and raised his hands and when he began signing, Bree interpreted for him. “After my uncle left the army, he did all sorts of different jobs around town. Something had happened to him overseas that he never spoke about, but he came home changed. He’d been a canine handler and from what little I do know, whatever occurred also killed his dog, Duke. He said his dog’s name in his sleep sometimes and woke up crying.” Oh, God. Archer took a few steps closer to the painting and turned his head to look at it for a moment before meeting my eyes again. “I was young, so I only remember a few of the jobs he did when he returned to Pelion. He worked at a gas station for a while, and later, he did landscaping work. He must have been doing well that spring if they hired him at the Metropolitan Club.”
The army—something had happened to him overseas. He must have been doing well. “He suffered from PTSD,” I guessed.
Archer nodded, and Bree continued to act as his voice, his elegant hands moving fluidly through the air. “Nathan stepped in when I was a little boy. He had flashbacks, and he was paranoid. It got bad sometimes, but he was always kind, always good. He would go away for hours, or in a few cases, days, and I knew he was trying to deal with his demons, but he always came back. He always did. And I knew sometimes it would have been easier for him if he didn’t.”
Archer explained to me what had happened to him when he was seven years old, and the roles his father and his uncle had played. As he spoke, Travis moved closer to him and rested his hand on his brother’s shoulder momentarily, offering strength. Even relaying the story was obviously difficult for him, his jaw tight and his eyes filled with sadness. I heard the emotion in Bree’s voice as well as she spoke the story he was telling, the one she obviously already knew, but one that still affected her.
And I understood why. A lump had formed in my throat as he explained the horror he’d experienced as a little boy, the terrible confusion, and the resulting trauma. And yet his uncle—my father?—had been there, caring for him as best as he could, even if that meant they’d both been isolated.
It was all so much. Too much to take in all at once. And I was somehow tied up in all of it. Faith reached out and took my hand and gave it a squeeze, offering her silent support.
“I know it’s a lot,” Haven said, she too obviously seeing that I was reeling. But I took in a big breath and blew it out slowly. Yes, it was a lot. But Archer had dealt with far more than I ever would. I was not going to fall apart in front of a man who had lived with the kind of burden he had and especially after he’d just summoned the strength and grace to tell me his story because it might factor in to mine.
“It is. Thank you,” I said to Archer to which he nodded and gave me a smile.
“Do you know how the other paintings ended up in secondhand stores?” Faith asked.
Archer raised his hands, and this time Travis spoke for him. “I cleaned out the attic when I built on. There were boxes I assumed were full of old clothes of Nathan’s and nothing more. I’d put the boxes there after he’d died. I didn’t go through them before I gave them away. There must have been paintings underneath the clothes.”
Faith nodded and glanced at me. “Could there have been more than the three small ones?”
“Maybe one more, but I doubt it. The boxes were light which is why I thought there were only clothes in them, and there were only three boxes.” Which meant they were all accounted for. The full collection.
“But that does bring me to one more thing,” Bree said, reaching in the drawer of a table next to the chair she was sitting in.
I gasped when I saw what she was holding. A stack of journal-sized pages.
“Oh my God,” Faith murmured. “There were pages in the backs of the paintings you have too.”
Bree handed them across to me and I took them with shaking hands.
“We took all the signed paintings down and found those hidden in the back, just like you described with the three you located.” She looked from Travis to Archer. “We think Nathan hid them for some reason related to his paranoia. Maybe to his mind, he was protecting your mother in some way, or preserving her in the way he could. We can obviously never know for sure, but that’s our best guess.”
Oh, God. My vision blurred, and my hands trembled as I looked down, reading the one on top, my breath coming short as my eyes danced over my mother’s shaky writing, smudges blurring the ink where her tears must have fallen.
Oh God oh God oh God. Lys is gone. Connor and Marcus are gone. Oh it’s too horrible to describe. I can’t stop sobbing. Nate is going to the hospital to see his nephew who is all alone now and needs someone. Nate is on such shaky ground. How will he handle being the sole caretaker for a seven-year-old in the midst of so much grief? Oh God, how will he cope when his foothold is already so tenuous? And how can I possibly add to that by not giving him the space he needs? I love him to the depths of my soul and loving him means giving him a chance to heal, and to be the source of healing for that little boy who needs him so desperately. I have Mud Gulch. I have my family and my friends. Archer only has him.
I gasped, bringing them to my chest.
“I read through some of them,” Bree said. “I hope that wasn’t an intrusion but I…we wanted to understand what happened, so that when we told you about Nathan, we could offer any additional information we might be able to.”
“No, it’s not an intrusion. I appreciate it.” I wanted to know what happened, but I couldn’t focus on the written words. I couldn’t hear the story from my mother’s voice without losing it completely.
Bree nodded with such kind understanding in her eyes. “There are pages missing, but we believe the gist of it was Nathan had begun backsliding and having episodes. He went into the hospital himself for a short time and because of that, she must have held off telling him about her pregnancy, and then…” She sighed a heavy sigh. “Everything happened with Archer and his mother, and Nathan’s brothers. He was thrust into the position of caring for Archer, and your mother left town having never told him she was expecting his child, or it’s possible she didn’t yet know and decided later not to contact him.” She nodded to the small pile of pages from the two-and-a-half-month period nine months before I came into the world. “There’s tragedy in there, Rory, but there’s also love. He’d served as a ‘master sergeant’ in the army and that’s what she called him. Even we never knew why Nathan signed some of his paintings that way. He often did things that were inexplicable. Only, this time, it wasn’t inexplicable at all. The ones signed M.S. are from the time period when he was with your mother.”
“Master sergeant,” I whispered. “M.S. His moniker was based on her nickname for him.”
Bree nodded, her gaze moving to the paper I was holding. “It’s my guess that it made him feel loved. It made him feel important and helped him remember who he was…before. Those pages are your parents’ love story. I only wish it had had a happier ending.”
I looked down at the pages, running my fingers over my mother’s writing. No wonder she’d always seemed so sad when I asked about my father. No wonder she’d never been able to speak about him. “I just…I wish she had felt like she could tell him about me and at least bring me to visit.”
“Maybe she believed he was too far gone,” Haven offered. “Or that knowing about you would tear him in two. It would have made him choose between duty and love.” Archer and Travis both nodded at Haven’s assessment while Gage’s distraught face flashed in my mind. Duty and love. How familiar. Even if I wasn’t at all sure that Gage loved me like I did him. I pushed the image of Gage aside—I couldn’t think of him now.
“One last thing,” Bree said, handing me what I saw was a photograph. “This was with one of the entries.”
I took it and blinked down at the photo of my beautiful, smiling mother, wearing that long-ago blue dress, and standing next to the man who was obviously Nathan Hale in his military dress clothes. “That was from the spring gala at the Metropolitan Club,” Bree said softly. A tear tracked down my cheek and for a moment, I simply couldn’t speak. I’d not only found the truth about my father, I had a picture of him with my mother. And from the way they were standing, the way he’d been looking down at her when the camera clicked, I could see they’d been in love. I placed the photo between the diary entries, a pile of the most precious things I owned.
“Thank you.” I looked around at each of them in turn. “Thank you to all of you, for being here.” I stood shakily and Faith jumped up too. “I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t stay. This has all been…very overwhelming.”
