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“Yes.” I lean against the table and peer down at them. “Eyes are windows. Everything you need to know about someone, you can find it there. The rest of the face is just… Extra.”
“Who do they belong to? Are they all the same person?”
“Not all.” I pull one from a stack and show him. “These are my father’s eyes. Kind. Proud. And these eyes”—I show him another—“belong to my college professor, Miss Crane. She was a bitch and hers were cold as ice.”
“And these?” He circles his hand above the majority. “They’re all the same person.”
I nod. “They are.”
“These are amazing, Emily. It’s like…” As if he can’t find the words, it takes him a while to continue. “It’s like I’m staring into someone’s soul.”
“Thank you.”
“For a second, I thought it was you. But I’m not so sure now.”
“They’re my mother’s eyes,” I whisper. “How I remember them, anyway.”
Turning to me, his brow furrowed, he asks, “Did she pass?”
I smile sadly. “No. She left.”
A dark flicker crosses his expression for a split second. But almost as fast as I’m able to capture it and recognize it for what it is—Pain. Ache. Anger—it’s gone.
His golden gaze softens with sympathy, but what I just saw skitter over his features wasn’t because of me. And it makes me wonder…
I take one of the sketches of my mother’s lovely gaze. It was the first one I ever did, going only by an image I had to dig from my mind because my father destroyed all other evidence that she ever existed from our lives. Even the photograph I’d managed to save and kept secreted away under my mattress was eventually found and thrown into the fireplace.
She was beautiful. Blonde hair, blue eyes. Sunshine.
People used to say I had my father’s coloring but my mother’s features. I also got her free spirit. Though, I suppose, not quite as free, because I could never leave the people I love. Who love me.
Touching a fingertip to the paper, I say, “She left when I was eight. Life for her was too suffocating with a husband and child. She wanted to do whatever she wanted to do, and loving us wasn’t a part of that. It wasn’t until I sketched this that I realized there was something missing from her gaze.”
“What?”
“Love.”
“I’m sorry.” There’s more than sincerity in his tone. There’s understanding.
“Don’t be. I’ve made peace with it. Have dissected everything about it. It had nothing to do with us and everything to do with a selfish person. If she’d stayed in my life, the damage might have been worse.”
“But you still miss her.”
My lips pull into a straight line as I ponder that. “No,” I say. “It broke my father. But me…” I shake my head. “I think it’s the idea of her I miss. No kid wants to grow up without a mother.”
“And no mother should leave their kid.” There’s a hint of anger in his voice that has me glancing up from the sketch. The glassy golden lake in his eyes ripples, as if there’s a current roiling beneath it. That dark thing I saw before moves, just a little.
I swallow hard as I realize that in allowing him to peel back a layer of my skin, he’s exposed himself too. Although it may not have been on purpose.
“Did you grow up without a mother too, Noah?”
He narrows his gaze, then quickly averts it. Nodding, he says, “She left too. My father was a prick; she grew to hate him and didn’t love me enough to take me with her.”
I place my palm on his arm and he shudders. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he says, mimicking my words and offering me a smile. “I actually ended up better off too. My father remarried.”
“Your stepmother was nice?”
