“It’s hard to imagine you ever looking pathetic.”
“Imagine glasses, straight hair and acne. The epitome of a high school geek.”
“No way.”
“Oh, yes. I was a charmer. Samantha was the beautiful one. Emily was the bubbly one. I was the serious student dedicated to making my father proud, not that he noticed.”
“What changed?” he asked. “You said that was your sophomore year.”
“I met a boy, of course. He didn’t know I was alive, but thanks to Samantha’s efforts, I traded the glasses for contacts, got a decent haircut and with the help of a very skilled dermatologist my skin cleared up. I even went on a date or two, though never with the boy who’d caught my eye.”
“Was he here?” Wade asked, prepared to find him and cut his heart out.
“No, in Raleigh.” She fell silent. “You know, I think that was the best part of summer for me. When I was here, there was no pressure to be with a boy like there was in high school. I met plenty of them, of course, at the restaurant, but we hung out on the beach as a group. There was always a crowd. I never felt weird about not being paired off.”
“I’ll bet I would have fallen for you even back then,” Wade said.
She chuckled. “Maybe I should let you see that sophomore yearbook, after all. I doubt you’d be so sure of that then.”
“Try me,” he said.
“Maybe I will. Good night, Wade.”
“Talk to you tomorrow.”
As he disconnected the call and turned to go inside, he saw his sister standing just inside the door, blatantly eavesdropping.
“Not a word,” he warned quietly. “Not one single word.”
“Not even if I’m scared to death for you?”
“Not even then,” he said.
What he didn’t dare admit was how scared he was for himself. Contrary to what his sister might think, he wasn’t totally blind to the obstacles in his path. Nor was he oblivious to the comparisons to his past with Kayla. He was just choosing to ignore all that, because at heart he was an optimist. He couldn’t let himself believe that happiness would be snatched away twice.
10
After she’d gone to bed the night before, Gabi hadn’t been able to stop thinking about those paintings she’d mentioned to Wade. Something he’d asked had triggered a memory for her. He’d wanted to know not how they’d turned out, but how she’d felt when she’d painted them. It had suddenly struck her that though she’d been frustrated by her lack of skill, she’d loved the process.
While Samantha had been off on dates and Emily had been with Boone under Grandmother’s watchful eye, she’d been on the pier out back or on the porch with her watercolors. She recalled being completely aware of her surroundings in a different way, the nuances of light and shadow, the richness of colors, the complexity of textures. Not that she’d been able to capture a single one of those things on paper, she thought ruefully.
Still, it might be interesting to take another look at them. She had a hunch her grandmother had never thrown them out. Cora Jane had saved too many other mementos of those years to have thrown the paintings away.
With her grandmother and Samantha gone, Gabi had the house to herself and time on her hands. Her only chore for the day was to call her father and then Amanda Warren. Postponing those uncomfortable conversations seemed like an excellent idea.
While her grandmother’s master suite was downstairs, there were three upstairs bedrooms in the house. Gabi and her sisters had used the largest almost like a dormitory when they’d visited. Another was reserved for other guests, including the occasional visit by both of her parents. The third was cluttered with things Cora Jane couldn’t bear to part with. Gabi decided to start there.
She smiled as she came across old dolls, even a miniature baby carriage for one of Emily’s prized babies, an expensive toy she’d begged for for months before Christmas. Now, the doll had been tossed haphazardly in the carriage, dressed in nothing more than a diaper and wearing a ragged pink bow in its skimpy remaining hair.
“Well, one thing’s for sure, I would take better care of my child than Emily did of you,” she told the poor doll, cradling it in her arms as she continued to poke through the clutter.
She found boxes of puzzles, kept for rainy days, along with board games faded from frequent use. She could still hear the squabbles that had accompanied those afternoon endeavors echoing in her head. How often had Cora Jane lost patience, bringing them into the kitchen with her so she could referee as she baked?
Finally, when Gabi was starting to think that perhaps her grandmother’s sentiment hadn’t extended to her paintings, she opened a dresser drawer and found them, lying flat, tissue paper layered protectively between each page. The beginner’s box of watercolors, dried out now, was there, too.
Setting Emily’s doll aside, she took out the drawings and studied them with a critical eye. Oh, they were awful, all right. Her memory definitely hadn’t gotten that part wrong!
One featured several blobs of blue on a mostly green background. She could only assume it had been an attempt to capture the image of the hydrangeas at the end of the porch. It was memory, not execution, that suggested that. In another, gray boards with no shading stretched out over a flat blue surface. A stick figure—it couldn’t be described as anything more—sat at the end of the pier with what surely must have been meant to be a fishing pole in hand.
“Not a lot of subtlety here,” she commented, amused by her ineptitude. “It’s little wonder I never picked up a paintbrush again.”
And yet she could almost feel the sun on her shoulders as she’d painted, smell the tang
