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A woman a few feet away pulled up a crab pot and pulled out a small crab, then showed it to her overexcited son, who promptly asked to take it home for his fish tank.
I smiled, then looked away, back at the water, and took a deep breath.
All I’d ever wanted was to earn a living as an artist—to paint and draw and have my work displayed and appreciated. Of course, the earning a living part of the dream was now rather obsolete, but the rest of it remained, and now this was a real possibility.
Did it really take me moving more than three hundred miles away from where I grew up to achieve that dream?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EVA
“I got a commission today.”
Matthew looked up from his laptop. “A commission?”
“Well, sort of.” I sat on the sofa and looked at him over the top of the lid. “When I took the sketch of Lucky into Dafydd today, he said he wanted a map of Beaumaris for the pub. The only problem is that I know nothing about Beaumaris, nor do I have any idea what the going rate for such a sketch is.”
“Eva, that’s amazing!” He closed the laptop lid halfway and smiled at me. Genuine happiness shone in his eyes, and warmth spread through my body when he reached over and squeezed my hand. “Are you going to do it?”
“I really want to, but like I said, I need to figure some stuff out. He did say he’d make a list of things he’d like on it, but I really have to figure out what to charge.”
“That shouldn’t be too difficult. We can do some research.”
I tucked one leg up and hugged my knee to my chest. “I feel a little weird about accepting money for it.”
“Why? It’s your work. You deserve to be paid for it.”
I motioned around us. “I don’t need it, do I? Not now.”
“I suppose not,” Matthew said slowly. “There has to be something we can do in lieu of you keeping the money. Perhaps donate it to charity? There are several here on the island—an animal rescue or two, there’s also the food bank. I know there are others, I just can’t think of them off the top of my head.”
I hadn’t thought of that. Keeping the money for myself felt a little wrong, especially if the work was for a public place. Taking commissions and keeping the money for charity, however…
“I like that idea.” I sat up a little straighter. “I don’t want to do too many, because I still want to do it for fun, but I guess it’s something I can do to keep me busy.”
Matthew nodded. “I agree. I think it’s a really good idea for you. You can either do individual donations every time you get a commission, or you can keep it all in a bank account and do it once a year. Before Christmas could be nice.”
“What could be nice?” Christopher asked, carrying a tea tray in. “This’ll be all from me tonight,” he said to Matthew. “Elin said something about a carrot cake, and I don’t want to miss that.”
Matthew chuckled. “We’re discussing what Eva could do with any money she earns from her art commissions.”
Christopher turned to me with pleasant surprise making his lips pull up into a small smile. “You have a commission?”
I nodded and told him the same thing I had Matthew, including adding that I wasn’t comfortable taking money and Matthew’s suggestion of keeping it for charity.
“You know what you could do?” Christopher asked, folding his arms across his chest. “Set up a charity. Aside from the charities on the island, there are a lot of smaller groups that need funding that don’t get the same level of support. There are support groups, nature groups, all kinds of things spread across the entirety of Anglesey.”
“Isn’t that a lot of work?”
“Of course, but it might allow you to reach more people. You could even do prints for the shop in the public area of the house. Postcards, greeting cards—it would be an effective way to raise money without too much work on your part.”
I glanced at Matthew. “How much work would that be?”
“I have looked into the process of setting up a charity,” Matthew admitted. “It’s a fair amount of work, but there’s no reason we couldn’t look into it if that’s something you wanted to do.”
There was something about Christopher’s suggestion that tugged at me. It felt right, like it was the thing I’d been missing. Like a little piece of a puzzle that I didn’t know was missing until just now.
A charity.
But that was a commitment. A long-term one. Doing something like that would be hard to part from when the inevitable divorce came, although I wasn’t entirely sure that Matthew would take something like that away from me.
