Jude wipes the rain from his face with his palm. And then, as though reaching an unspoken agreement, we get out our phones, turn on our flashlights, and search for the gemstones. It takes awhile, but eventually we find them—a pearl, a triangular onyx, and a diamond-shaped ruby the same shape and size as the one Isabel wore.
Jude picks up the stone Rafe removed from the well.
“I dreamt about it,” I say, the disembodied words escaping without any premeditation. They drift from my lips and hover in the air.
He looks at me.
“The ruby necklace Rafe took from Isabel. I was wearing it in a dream. There were sirens and bombs. I was holding a little boy, using my bodylike a shield. There was an older couple there, too. With British accents.”
He stands very still—his hair dark from the rain, his face pale—as though carved from marble. “That’s real?” he finally says. “What you just said?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
He scrubs his palm down his face again, and when his hand comes away, he looks disturbed. Almost angry. “My great grandmother died in The Blitz. She saved my grandfather when he was only four.” His eyes meet mine. “By shielding his body with her own.”
The sky rumbles—low and long.
I close my fist around the gemstones.
Somehow, I am the subject ofEzra’s Obsession, a portrait painted centuries before I was born. And now, I’m having dreams of Vandenberg tragedies centuries after they died.
I have no idea what’s going on. But whatever it is, I think it’s time to show Jude my journal.
“Hey kiddo,” Dad says as I close the door behind me. He’s looking inside the refrigerator with his back turned. “The rain chased me inside. Are you up for an early—dinner?”
His voice hiccups on the tail end of his question as he shuts the refrigerator door and spots not just me standing in the entryway, but Jude and me, wet from the rain. I can practically see the cogs inhis brain turning, trying to catch up with the situation. I’m sure last night’s dinner conversation is powering at least one of those cogs.
Kate called Jude my boyfriend.
Dad grabs a couple kitchen towels from a drawer. He hands one to Jude, the other to me while I make introductions and they shake hands.
“I’m, uh, just gonna show him something in my room,” I say, patting my neck dry.
Dad looks uneasy, like a man navigating unchartered territory. It’s not like I haven’t had a boy up in my room before. But somehow, Twig in my room feels very different from Jude in my room.
I give Dad a reassuring smile. “We won’t be long.”
We slip off our shoes and head upstairs.
The soft patter of rain has turned into a downfall. It pounds against the roof and blurs the grounds outside my window.
I grab the journal from my nightstand with more bravado than I feel, and when I turn around, I catch Jude surveying my room. He looks from my daybed, decorated with vintage throw pillows from The Lucky Penny, to the handmade lanterns hanging from the window, to the modest collection of books standing at attention between mismatching bookends on my writing desk, to the Magic 8 Ball and the clamshell trinket dish on my dresser. His attention lifts to the pinboard above it, tacked with photographs. Polaroids mostly, taken at the Hunter’s Moon Masquerade Ball two yearsago, when Harper went through her photography phase.
Jude sets the kitchen towel next to my new autumn-scented candle from the Calloways and examines the one photograph that isn’t a polaroid, but a glossy 4x6. A picture of toddler me, sitting on my dad’s knee, holding tight to my mother’s hand, like I knew even then that if I let go, she’d slip away.
I open to the journal entry in question and hand it over.
The longer he reads, the deeper the furrow in his brow gets.
When he finishes, I point him to another entry. One I’ve read so often, I have it memorized. A young woman in a yellow taffeta dress, her hair in ringlets, hanging from a noose. By the end of it, his face is pale, his jaw tight, his hair dark and damp against his forehead. “You don’t think this was about …?”
“Molly Ludwig?”
His attention returns to the entry. Namely, the date of the entry. I recorded it before we researched Molly. Before we even found the sketch of her in the family archives.
I wring the towel in my hands. “Jude, I really don’t think the subject of Ezra’s portrait was a relative of mine. Or some coincidental twin stranger he loved and painted, either.”
For the first time, he doesn’t argue.
