“You didn’t tell her to leave? Kick her out of your room or something?”
“I couldn’t. Even though she made me mad, borrowed things without asking—and usually returned them broken or stained—she was . . . magnetic. I remember watching all my friends watch her, their eyes glued to her. I wanted to be mad, but really, I just wanted to be more like her.”
Ty shook his head. “And now? Do you still wish you were like her?”
Betsy was quiet, studying her feet on the wooden board. She shrugged. “Parts of her, I guess. I’m not sure I’d want to spend two weeks in the Florida wilderness, but there’s something appealing about having the courage to jump at opportunities as they come. To not think twice.”
“I don’t know, Bets. Maybe she should have thought twice about it. She has two good reasons to have thought long and hard before she booked this retreat on barely a moment’s notice.” He gestured toward the girls out on the grass.
“That’s not exactly what happened. You know that. We had barely a moment’s notice, but that’s just because she didn’t find out she got in until a few days before she was supposed to be there. She didn’t just drop the kids off on a whim.”
“Well—”
“She didn’t. Or that’s not what she meant to do. Anyway, she’s my sister. We’re family. We help each other out.”
Ty clenched his lips together to keep from saying more. No sense arguing over what had already happened. Out in the yard Walsh hung off the swing while Addie picked dandelions in a shaft of sunlight. He squeezed Betsy’s knee. “They are kind of fun to have around though, aren’t they?” As the kids’ laughter bounced around the yard, he leaned his shoulder against her hip. “But we get our house back soon.”
Betsy smiled and nodded.
“Think you’ll miss ’em?”
She shrugged. “A little.”
Ty watched her carefully, trying to catch a chink in her armor, but she gave nothing away. She rested her arm on his shoulder, but her eyes remained steady on the girls. Addie had left her plucked dandelions in a pile and now approached Walsh on the swing. She whispered something to Walsh, and they both laughed.
“We keep talking about getting away, but I’m going to call tomorrow. Maybe check into that little place in Perdido Key with the wooden boardwalks and the sunsets over the river.”
Betsy looked at him. Raised her eyebrows. “My field trips can’t pay for that kind of place.”
Ty wrapped his arm around her waist. “Don’t worry about that. I have a little money put away for something like this. Something for us.”
“You do?”
She seemed so surprised that he wanted to kick himself for waiting so long before taking her away somewhere. He should have done it months ago.
“Okay then,” she said.
“Yeah?”
Betsy nodded. “I could use a vacation.”
nineteen
Jenna
On her last night of the retreat, Jenna walked toward the barn to meet Gregory, her mind somersaulting with mixed emotions—hope and dread, nerves and confidence. She readjusted the camera strap that hung across her shoulder, as if the camera were heavier with all the photos it held. She’d taken hundreds during her stay at Halcyon. Not even half of them were worth showing anyone, but some—a few dozen—gave her hope. Maybe she was even a little proud of them.
That morning he’d caught her on her way out of the dining hall and asked her to meet him in the barn after dinner. “We both know you won’t show up at workshop, but it’s part of my job to make sure you get the most out of your time here. Why don’t you meet me in the barn? We can go over your work there.”
The lights in the barn were dim, except for the gallery spotlights shining on the photos on the wall. When her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw it—her own photo on the far wall. It was a shot of a tall, thick cypress tree on the bank of a bayou in The Bottoms wrapped in the “arms” of a strangler fig. Also called a love tree, the fig both embraced and strangled its host. A flyer in the dining hall detailing plant life around the preserve noted that the host trees often died, their life snuffed out by the determined fig.
She’d been struck by both the sadness and the determination of the two intertwined trees. At some point, the fig would likely win the battle, absorbing all the available light and water, leaving the cypress to wither and die. But right now, they were balanced, both sporting bright-green leaves and healthy bark. Both determined to thrive.
And now, that moment was housed in a black frame, standing out from the pale wall behind it, only Jenna wasn’t the one who’d framed it.
“I didn’t hear you come in.” Gregory entered the gallery from a room in the back. He dropped his bag on the floor and sat on one of the chairs across from her photo on the wall. “What do you think?”
“You did this?”
“It’s one you left hanging to dry. I had an extra frame in a closet . . .” He shrugged. “Just thought you might like to see it.”
Snappy comebacks and sarcastic brush-offs skirted through her mind, then leaked away. “Thank you. It’s hard to believe I took it, really.”
“It’s all you. You have a knack for getting just the right angles, but you also see things others might not notice. Like that tree there.” He nodded to the picture. “A lot of people, myself included, probably would have walked right by it in search of something less . . . mangled. But you saw a different kind of beauty. Sometimes perspective is more valuable than technical skills. You’ve got that instinct.”
“I’m not so sure.” She sat in the chair next to him.
“Trust me. I’ve been doing this a while.” He leaned forward in
