“Enough!” Juliette roared, cutting her off. She looked again at the image. She could feel white-hot fury rising in her like a terrible tide. “You are forbidden from ever painting again! How dare you?”
Something changed in Lucie’s face then, and Juliette didn’t like it one bit. It wasn’t her daughter’s usual sadness and hurt. It was something else, something obstinate, something angry. Lucie drew herself up a bit straighter. “Maman, you cannot stop me from being who I am.” Her voice was quiet but firm. “This is who I am.” She pointed at the painting. “I am an artist, Maman. This is me.”
“This is not who you are!” The air seemed to go still around them. Juliette looked once more at the painting. Lucie seemed determined to spite her at every turn, and now, her stubborn obsession with Olivier LeClair had gone too far. She looked back at Lucie, whose eyes were welling with tears, and for a second, just a second, she hated what she knew she had to do. But there was no choice, not if she wanted to remind Lucie once and for all of who she was. She looked once more at the painting with its violet skies and amber roofs and then, refusing to look at Lucie, she ripped it straight down the middle.
“Maman!” The word was somewhere between a yelp of pain and a cry of anguish, but Juliette ignored it. It was for the best.
She twisted away as Lucie lurched forward, trying in vain to take her vile painting back. But the quiet hiss of the ripping paper had been too satisfying, and Juliette ripped again and again, severing the painting into fourths, then eighths. She was just about to tear it once more when Lucie lunged around her and wrenched the pieces out of her grasp.
“Maman! How could you?” Lucie demanded, her voice choked, and when Juliette finally looked up at her daughter, she was surprised to see tears coursing down her face. All of this over some foolish painting?
“You’ll thank me one day,” Juliette said. “You’ll see.”
Lucie’s reply was a muffled sob, and she turned quickly on her heel and strode toward the door, clutching the remnants of her betrayal.
“Don’t you dare walk away from me!” Juliette called after her. But her daughter was already gone, the door swinging closed behind her. “Well,” Juliette said a moment later, brushing off her hands. A tiny scrap of paper on the floor caught her eye, and Juliette picked it up. The image on it looked like a window, a shadow of a woman alone in front of the pane. She looked skyward. “I was right, Paul,” she said. “Wasn’t I?”
But there was no answer from her husband this time, and as the silence swirled, and the lonesome woman in the window stared up at her, Juliette had the terrible feeling that perhaps she’d gotten it all wrong.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Lucie could hardly see, tears clouding her vision, as she strode quickly away from the store, the pieces of her ruined painting clutched in her fist. I should have known better. The words echoed again and again through her head, not anger at her mother, but anger at herself for believing that things could be different. Life wasn’t magical, though, and people didn’t surprise you. Not in the real world. She was a fool, both to believe that she could be a painter and to think that her mother would embrace the idea.
Sniffling, she opened her hand, spreading her fingers wide, and let the pieces of thick paper fall just as she turned right at the corner onto Lexington. Perhaps it was time to let that dream go, because it wasn’t just about the art, was it? It was about resetting the clock, bringing her mother back, taking what she could from the past to move into the future. But the past was as dead as her father and her brothers, and her mother was mired inescapably in it. Those were things Lucie couldn’t fix no matter how vivid her brushstrokes were.
“Wait!” a man’s voice called out several yards behind her after Lucie had walked another half block. “Miss, please, wait!”
She kept walking, because there was no one who would be calling her, but then there were footsteps behind her, and a shadow at her elbow, and when the voice asked her to wait again, this time, she stopped and turned.
She vaguely recognized the man standing there, panting. He was the other owner of the art gallery on the corner, the one who wasn’t French, the one with paint-stained fingers who was always disappearing into the back somewhere without saying a word while the French owner in his immaculate suit oozed charm at wealthy customers.
“Is this yours?” he asked, holding up something in his hand, and that’s when she realized, to her horror, that he was holding the pieces of her destroyed painting.
She stared at her torn work. “It was a mistake.”
“Art is never a mistake.”
A bitter laughed erupted from her throat. “Sure. Whatever you say.”
The man was studying her picture, or what remained of it, his eyes roving over the ruined rooftops. Finally, he looked up at her. “Why is it torn?” His tone was so gentle that it brought tears to her eyes.
“My mother,” she said simply, and though that wasn’t really an explanation at all, the man seemed to understand.
“You’re the daughter of the woman who owns the French bookshop, aren’t you?” he asked. “Lucie, is it? You’ve been in several times with a young man.”
She nodded, surprised that he knew who she was. Perhaps she wasn’t as invisible as she thought. “And you’re the man from the gallery.”
He nodded, too. “Jack Fitzgerald,” he said as he looked back at the pieces of her ruined work. “Lucie, this is very good.”
She could tell from the way he said it that he meant it, and the compliment made heat rise to her cheeks. “My mother says painting is a waste of time.”
“Well, your mother is wrong, of course. She is the one who tore your painting?”
Lucie hesitated. It felt wrong to betray her mother, but a lie would have felt worse. “She is… troubled. It’s hard to explain, but my father and my brothers died during the war, and… I think she looks at my painting as a betrayal.”
She had said too much—and at the same time, not enough—but confusion didn’t cloud his features, as she expected. Instead, he simply nodded, still staring at the pieces of her painting like they were tea leaves that would tell him something important. “Above the gallery, we have eight artists’ studios,” he said simply.
“Artists’ studios?” This was news to her. She had thought the gallery was simply a place for beautiful art to find its way into the hands of wealthy patrons, something that felt entirely out of her reach.
Mr. Fitzgerald smiled slightly. “It was my only condition when I agreed to partner and open the gallery. We could display art, but only if we fostered its creation, too. I run the studio space upstairs while my business partner runs the gallery itself.”
“The Frenchman in the nice suits?”
Mr. Fitzgerald chuckled. “An apt description indeed. Yes. In any case, two of our studio spaces upstairs are currently open. Would you like one? A place to work?”
Lucie stared at him. “Me? You want me to paint in an artists’ studio?”
He smiled and made a show of looking around him. “Is there another artist standing here with us on the street?”
“But I’m not an artist, sir.”
“Of course you are.” He looked at the pieces again and shook his head in disbelief. “Don’t you ever let anyone tell you otherwise, Lucie. Now about that studio space…”
“I—I couldn’t possibly afford it.” Her eyes welled with tears again. Her stepfather had the money, but she knew he wouldn’t do anything to upset her mother.
“Oh, there’s no charge,” Mr. Fitzgerald continued cheerfully. “Well, not until you’ve made a sale. And then you only pay a small percentage until your rent is covered.” He leaned in conspiratorially. “It’s the only way I could justify the endeavor to my partner, but the rent is only twenty-five cents a day.”
“Twenty-five cents? But what if I never sell anything?”
“Then you don’t owe me a thing.”
“Why?” Lucie asked. “I mean, why do you do this? Run the studios, I mean.”
His smile was kind. “Because artists should have a place to be themselves.”
Her heart pounded a bit more quickly at the thought. “Are you an artist?”
“I am.” He smiled. “And I firmly believe that the only thing more important than art itself is letting an artist know that it’s okay to spread his or her wings and fly, even if that flight path doesn’t look the way the world thinks it should. Do you agree?”
The words nearly cracked her open. They were the absolute opposite of everything her mother was always telling her. But they felt true and right, and she found herself nodding vigorously. “I do. I do agree.”
“Good. Then shall I get you set up?”
Lucie could only nod as Mr. Fitzgerald took one last look at her torn painting. “This is really very good, Lucie,” he said, and hope floated up within her like a ghost rising toward the sky.
* * *