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I’ve done that, for sure.
Emerson and Leo cross the sand, waves rolling gently behind them. They climb the stairs set into the break wall. Both of them are lit by the house lights at the same time. Both look serious. My stomach turns over. Emerson’s expression flickers between that survival-blank and determination. Leo doesn’t look happy, but he doesn’t look angry, either. He looks…thoughtful.
They come through the back door.
Carter and I go out in the hall to meet them. Emerson already has his coat off. He probably hung it up in the mudroom. Leo hands his coat to Carter.
“I need to talk to you, Daph,” he says. “Where do you want to go?”
“My studio.”
Emerson’s face lights up. It’s subtle—a flash of brightness in his eyes, a lift in his cheeks. If I didn’t know him, I’d think it was nothing.
“Upstairs?” Leo asks.
“Yes.”
As we climb the stairs, I hear Carter ask Emerson how long he’s been a collector. I don’t realize I’m holding my breath until Emerson answers him.
“Carter Morelli, by the way,” is the last thing I hear before we cross the landing and go into the studio. “Wasn’t much time for introductions before.”
Leo paces across the room and looks out the window at the ocean. “This is where you were waiting.”
My painting is still on the easel, half-done. “This is where I paint,” I tell him.
He turns, looking everything over. The shelves. The canvases. “Chairs?” he asks.
“Sometimes Emerson watches me paint.”
Leo nods, releasing a breath. It was foolish to think I could ask him to become someone else. No matter how old I get, no matter how independent I become, he loves me. Same way he’s loved me for a long time. It’s just a matter of rebalancing.
I hope.
“So.” My mouth is so dry my tongue feels sticky. “How did it go?”
“It was fine,” he says. I don’t say anything, because this is a reflexive lie. The kind we all tell. Leo’s lips press into a thin line, and pain like the pointed end of a brush spears through my heart. “Carter was right. You scared me to death.” He pauses, gathering himself. “I need you to be able to talk to me. I want you to be able to talk to me. Maybe it’s my fault that you thought you couldn’t. I was too wrapped up in everything else to see that you weren’t happy.”
“I was happy. I had my gallery. I had my paintings. I had you and Eva and my friends. I just—I wanted more. I went about it the wrong way. I see that now.”
My fingers itch for a pencil. A paintbrush. Anything I can focus on instead of this. Anything to make these feelings and their waves and curves into colors rather than what they are, which is painful. Raw.
“No. I’m the one who fucked up. I ruined your painting.”
“I regret ever painting it. I didn’t think you’d see, which was—I should have just talked to you instead.”
His eyes flicker toward the corner of the room, then back to mine. “Did you paint it because you had to?”
“Not for him. Emerson—he commissioned some paintings from me. Of his beach. But he never asked me to paint this. I did it for me. I couldn’t keep it inside my head. I didn’t want that to have happened to you. That’s why I painted it. Not because I wanted anyone to know.”
“This isn’t—” Leo covers his eyes with his hand, then drags it down. “As long as he wasn’t using you. Demanding things from you. That’s what I care about.”
“He wasn’t.” My lips are starting to buzz. They’ll be numb soon. “He didn’t. We got to know each other. He told me his secrets. I told him mine. Things I kept from you.”
If Leo’s still thinking about the painting, if he remembers it at all, it’s gone from his eyes. He’s watching me the way he did in his living room, when I accidentally told him about Emerson.
“What things?”
“Things that happened in Dad’s house.”
