“It might not change anything, but you wouldn’t have to endure it all alone. I know you didn’t tell Alice a lot—she wrote about that in her journal.”
“That’s because she judged me. She was angry with me for giving him up so easily, but she didn’t know that I cried myself to sleep every single night. I never married or had kids. I didn’t have any will to after losing him and Lillian, because I knew that I had a son and I wasn’t allowed to be in his life.”
“Said who?”
“Lillian.”
“Why was she the only one with a say in this matter?”
“I was the quintessential starving artist. I had nothing to offer. She’d been unfaithful to her husband, and knowledge of that would’ve caused a messy divorce. She’d have lost everything. But that aside, she told me she regretted it. She felt terribly guilty, and said she would spend the rest of her life being the perfect wife to make it up to him. We agreed to keep it quiet and Luke would have a wonderful life, a life grander than anything I could’ve offered. He went to top schools, he had the best upbringing money could buy. And now look at him.”
She sat there, letting this information sink in. But at the same time, she felt like Luke should know.
“You said he paints?” Frederick asked, interest on his face.
She nodded. “He’s amazing.”
He put his fingers to his lips and lifted his eyes up toward the ceiling, all that pain welling up again. The anguish seemed so great that all she wanted to do was help him. She thought about Luke and his passion for art, how he lit up whenever he talked about painting, how thrilled he was as he painted the horses for her. She couldn’t imagine the pain that must have caused Frederick to put a halt to that kind of passion.
“So he painted for you? The horses?” he asked, pulling her out of her thoughts. He had life behind those aging eyes all of a sudden.
She nodded.
“I painted them for Lillian.” He stretched his wrinkled fingers out and inspected them as if he’d still see the paint under his nails all these years later. “I wonder what she did with the painting.” His mouth turned down, uncertainty showing.
What had she done with it? Had she hidden it somewhere, thrown it out, or was it on display to remind her…?
“I sometimes think about painting again,” he said. “It’s a delicate thing though, creativity. Art is a manifestation of our feelings, our soul, and my expression was of love and happiness. Without those two things, I couldn’t do it anymore. After she and Luke had left my life, I stared at a blank canvas for days, paint dripping from my brush onto my boots, and nothing would come from my hand. So I stopped.”
Callie eyed the lockbox sitting on the floor. “Did you keep all those articles in there? Or did Alice?”
Frederick looked up and rubbed the scruff on his face with his dry hands, making a scraping sound.
He shook his head as if it didn’t matter. “I clipped all those, yes. I miss the Outer Banks so much. I miss my art. And I miss seeing Luke. I wish I could be strong enough to be near him, but the older we both get, the harder it becomes because there are so many lost years between us.” The tears started brimming again, his nose red, his cheeks flushed. He looked away, his lip beginning to quiver. All those years were welling up to the surface and spilling over, and it was breaking Callie’s heart to watch it. He’d held himself away from his home, from Luke, from Alice, from his passion…
“Would you paint the mural for me at The Beachcomber?” she heard herself ask, the final word coming out before she snapped her mouth shut. What was she saying? She shouldn’t have said it, but she knew why she had: He could come back to the place he loved and be with boy he’d lost. If it could only be that easy…
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just couldn’t.”
Callie nodded, feeling like a complete idiot for even asking. How would she have explained herself to Luke if Frederick had been there and it had all come out? How would she have ever answered to the fact that she had actually invited him there? She was so relieved he’d said no.
After she left and all the way home, flashes of her conversation with Frederick filled her mind, like rapid-fire clips, making her second-guess everything she’d said and done. She shouldn’t have interfered. She might ruin Luke’s life, not to mention Lillian’s, if this got out. Could it? Hopefully not. She promised herself she’d never utter a word of it. She wouldn’t tell Olivia anything, which was causing her anxiety because she told her best friend everything. But with Olivia’s ties to Aiden, she just couldn’t risk it. She worried about how she’d ever face Luke again. How could she look at him, knowing what she knew, and not tell him? The more she drove, the more upset she became, the thoughts eating away at her, making her wish she’d never found that box and journal.
“So, did you meet him?” Olivia said as she poured them both a glass of wine and peered out the window into the darkness to try to see if there were any changes in the weather. The radio was spitting out the latest report; the storm was gaining speed instead of losing steam as they’d hoped.
Callie only realized just then that Aiden was there. She focused on the large, circular clock they’d put up over the table, her heartbeats winning in the race against the second hand. He’d just come in to get settled and was looking on, drinking his own glass of wine. She smiled at him, trying to keep her thoughts to herself. Had Olivia told him about the box and all the articles about the Sullivans? Olivia was whistling—actually whistling—while making their dinner: lemon chicken casserole with her famous bread crumble.
“So?” Olivia looked over her shoulder. “Did you meet Frederick?” she asked again.
“Yes,” Callie said.
“And what was all that stuff he had in the box?”
Callie smiled nervously. “Turns out the contents of the lockbox were nothing too important.” She felt terrible telling her friend that, but she knew that with Aiden there, she couldn’t risk telling Olivia the truth, even if she wanted to.
“Did he say anything about his son?”
Callie wished she’d never mentioned what she’d read to Olivia, but in her curiosity the other day, she had.
Aiden was watching her from behind his glass, completely oblivious to the reaction going on in her body. Her shoulders were pinching, heat sliding up her neck.
“No, I didn’t think it was my business,” she said calmly.
She gazed out the window at the things left by the workers who had finished hours ago. Because of the vaulted ceilings, they’d hired painters for the family room. More furniture was also coming—she’d gotten the call for the delivery—and Aiden’s guys were finishing the small back expansion and the porches.