“Do you have anything of hers?” Libba had asked, trying hard not to hope.
He’d considered it. “I might do. I’ll look around. Give you a reason to come back. She sold all her paintings, though. Sold ’em on the boardwalk. If I had one, I’d tell you.”
That was what had given her the idea to look for the specific item she’d taken tonight. That word. Painting.
Shehadknown her mother had had paints in all sorts of bright colors; she’d just never considered why she might have.
She touched the top of the basket absently as she pushed her way into the Rest, and as soon as she was fully inside and had the door shut against her back, she called for her brother.
“Mal?” she sang, frowning at how sedate it seemed in here, after such a hectic day. “Malcolm, are you home?”
No one answered.
The parlor was empty, though the fire was lit, casting a halo around a little, white card they kept on the mantel.Felicitations, it read.
Someone had given it to Elias, on the day of Willa’s funeral. Someone no one had seen. She hadn’t much thought about it or looked at it since that day, but she paused tonight. She set the basket down and crossed the room and picked it up, turning the thick vellum card around in her hands.
It had a sketch of the shingle beach on it, simple and rough.
Had Willa been an artist too?
Had both of her mothers been artists?
She pressed her lips together and set the thing back in its spot. She reminded herself that Willa Selwyn was dead.
She couldn’t have drawn that sketch. You had to be alive to make art.
“Mal?” she called again, taking up the basket and checking the dining room next, which was occupied by Hattie and Monica sharing a cream tart.
“He’s in the guest wing,” Hattie said, giving a sleepy smile to Libba. “Come and look at my belly. It is finally rounding.”
And of course, she couldn’t decline that invitation, so she spent a few moments cooing and marveling over Hattie’s growing child.
“Sometimes I feel little flickers inside,” Hattie said wistfully, pressing her hands over the top of the swell. “Not quite kicking, but soon, I think. Soon.”
“We’ll want to feel them every day until the baby comes,” Monica told her, her fingers hovering over her round, pink cheeks. “Oh, it’s so exciting, isn’t it? A baby!”
A baby, Libba thought to herself.
She wasn’t really certain she’d believed it until just this moment. She broke off a piece of the tart’s crust and popped it in her mouth as she left them, moving toward the guest wing.
What was Mal doing back there? Was he speaking to Lem?
Perhaps those two would finally get to know one another. She hadn’t said so, of course, to either of them, but she wanted that. She wanted it very much.
“Mal?” she called again as she reached the guest wing’s hallway. “Are you down here?”
“In here!” he called back from an open door.
Not Lem’s.
She was already narrow-eyed and puzzled at the surprise when she turned into the room and came up short, her heart giving a thump and then dropping into her gut at seeing Jasper, there with her brother, seated casually in the corner of the room and smiling, like they were having a normal, everyday chat.
“Oh,” she said. “Jasper.”
“Pleasant evening to you,” Jasper returned, still smiling, still warm. “What’s that you’ve got?”
She looked down at herself, remembering the basket, and blinked. “Oh. It’s for Mal. I… wasn’t expecting… Why are you two back here?”
