“I’m . . . great. You?”
“Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.” She smiles at everyone. “We have much to catch up on. We’ll talk once everyone is settled.” Claire gives Natalya’s hand a friendly squeeze.
“Okay.” Natalya drags out the word. “I wasn’t expecting an extra person, but I guess you can stay in my room with me.”
Claire waves her hand. “Don’t worry about me. I have a room at the St. Regis. Do you mind giving me a lift to Princeville? Or . . . should I get a cab?” She looks at James.
“I can drive you,” Natalya says, then also looks at him as though wondering what to do about Claire.
James sighs and rubs his face with both hands. “Give us a moment,” he says to his mother.
Claire smiles. “I see my suitcase. Julian, help me out.”
Julian and Claire walk away in pursuit of the moving luggage. James turns to Natalya. “I didn’t know she was coming.”
“I don’t understand. How do you know each other?”
“Her name is Claire. She’s my mother.”
Natalya backs up a step. “Your mother?” She watches Claire with an appalled expression and James imagines she’s thinking about the amount of time Se?ora Carla spent with them. She’d fooled them all.
He scrunches his lips and nods.
Natalya just stares at him. “That’s messed up.”
The corner of his mouth lifts. “Which about sums up my family.”
Marc pats James’s hip. He points at the carousel. “Your bag.”
“Thanks, buddy.” He taps the bill of Marc’s cap and turns back to Natalya. Her expression has changed, unreadable. James shifts uneasily. His mother’s duplicity is probably sinking in, as well as the fact that Carlos hadn’t trusted the Donatos, and here he is with their matriarch. It’s probably also hitting her that she doesn’t know him. He’s not her Carlos, just like Claire isn’t Se?ora Carla. But the difference is that he never lied to her.
He casts Claire a look. “The boys don’t know about her yet. With everything they’ve been through lately, I’m not sure how they’ll take the news,” he explains to Natalya, turning back to her. Their gazes meet again and he hears her sharp intake of breath. He feels it in an unexpected place deep inside him. He moves a step closer. She’s welcomed him into her home and he wants her to feel comfortable having him there. He wants her to get to know him.
“By the way,” he extends his hand, “I’m James.”
She clasps his hand, quickly covering the tremble in her lower lip with a tentative smile. “Aloha . . . James. I’m Nat. Welcome to Hawaii.”
CHAPTER 14
CARLOS
Five Years Ago
August 13
Puerto Escondido, Mexico and San Jose, California
It took two weeks after Natalya left for me to work up the courage to book my travel reservations to California, which I made for another two weeks out. Even though I gave myself time to prepare, nerves twisted my stomach days before my flight, and not solely because of my fear of traveling with my condition. Going to California meant that I trusted Thomas’s word, that my identification wasn’t forged and that I wouldn’t be stopped by Customs and imprisoned or deported.
Despite my fears, I had to go. I had to learn whether I could trust James to care for Julian and Marcus. I also wanted to know more about why and how Jaime Carlos Dominguez came to be. Thomas wouldn’t give me the answers over the phone. He had to tell me in person. If that was the case, then it would be on my own terms, which was why I didn’t tell Thomas I was coming. I didn’t want him censoring who and what I saw just to convince me to stay, or to provoke me from the fugue state.
The boys would stay with the Silvas while Pia would manage the gallery. Carla had been taking weekly classes from me, so the morning of my flight I went to her house to reschedule for when I returned.
She invited me upstairs. “I want to show you my studio.”
I followed her up. “Wow!” Natural light spilled across the loft like liquid gold, but what astounded me was the number of paintings she’d produced in the last four weeks.
“I found the art store you mentioned.”
“Yeah, you did.” Three easels had been erected by the windows with canvases in various stages of completion. Paint tubes, brushes, palette boards, and mason jars filled with turpentine crowded the table in the middle of the room.
“I’m trying my hand at watercolors, too.” She showed me a smaller table in the corner of the loft. She drew a brush from a jar and rolled it between her palms. The handle clicked against her rings. “I can’t stop painting. It’s like I’m making up for lost time.”
The corner of my mouth lifted. I was well acquainted with the feeling. The glide of paint across canvas, the pungent scent of solvents, and the scratch of the palette knife through pigment. They lured me back to the studio like the scent of a woman in my bed. I thought of Natalya, back home in Hawaii. I missed her. November couldn’t come soon enough.
I studied an oil canvas set aside to dry. The color layering was technical and advanced. “These are masterful.” The brush clicked faster in her hands and I loosely gestured at it. “I do that, too, when I want to paint.”
“Oh.” Carla stared at the brush, then stabbed it into a mason jar and grasped both my hands. “Thank you for bringing art back into my life.”
“You’re welcome.”
She grinned and released my hands. She capped an oil tube and a turpentine flask.
I picked up a clean brush and stroked the bristles. They snagged underneath a nail bed. “I’m curious. Why did you stop?”
Carla was quiet, her back to me. She sorted pigment tubes by color, then gracefully laid a hand over them. “My father didn’t approve of a decision I’d made and the punishment was severe. He took away the one thing I was most passionate about.”
“Painting. He made you stop?”
“He did more than that. He forbade it. He also threatened to disown me should he find a single paintbrush in the house.” She raised a finger. Already thin-boned and delicate, Carla appeared smaller and more fragile with the admission. I sensed her withdrawal and my heart went out to her.