“Is everything alright?” I ask, standing and stretching myself.
“Mm-hmm,” he says. His eyes stay on his canvas, his mouth a pinched, troubled line. “That will be all, thank you.”
Chapter Fourteen
It feels like I’m doing something wrong.
Every day I expect Claude to seem happier. Better. He loves painting, so surely it will lighten his mood. But instead, it seems to sink lower each day. He makes my breakfast, drinks from me, and passes at least an hour in the studio while I sit in silence.
But every evening, his expression seems more troubled, his shoulders drooping lower. He is slower to smile, less prone to conversation. During our session at the end of the first week, he doesn’t say anything, just sets down his paintbrush, shakes his head, and walks away.
I’m so tempted to steal a peek at the canvas. It’s right there, taunting me… but I respect his wishes. It’s the least I can do when he’s treating me like royalty. And I feel helpless to do anything else for him, as much as I try to think of ideas.
One evening, as he sits across from me at breakfast looking particularly forlorn, he says, “It occurs to me that you still haven’t told me what you didn’t like about my last painting.”
I blink at him, taken aback. I thought he had given up on that line of inquiry from the ball.
“Why do you care so much?” I ask. He just looks at me, awaiting a response, and I sigh. I think back to that painting, and my reaction to it, trying to remember exactly what it was thatmade me speak out about it. I can still recall some of his other paintings with a striking clarity—the interplay between light and darkness, beauty and ugly truth—but the last one is just a vague blur in my memory. It was a vase of flowers, I think. Just flowers. “There wasn’t anything wrong with the painting, Claude. It just… seemed to lack something that your other work had,” I say. “It wasn’t bad. It just didn’t feel likeyou.”
He looks away, his expression unreadable.
“But I hardly know you,” I say. “You shouldn’t care what I think.”
“You’re right,” he says. “You barely know me at all. That’s what bothers me.” He rakes a hand through his curls, leaving them messy. “You barely know me, but you alone…” He shakes his head. “I hate that painting too. But most people think it’s my best.” His gaze slowly drifts back to me. “And the house. Ambrose had it built for me. I was grateful because he expected me to be. But you… youknewthis wasn’t the sort of place that suited me. How? How do you see these things so clearly?”
I stare at him, taken aback.
“And you, the one person who seems to understand me so well, cannot stand me,” he says quietly.
My stomach twists with guilt. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t lie to me now, after all of your brutal honesty,” he says. “You were the one who first insisted upon no intimacy between us.”
“That wasn’t about you,” I say, then hesitate. “Well, it wasn’tjustabout you. It was about me, my future, what I wanted from our arrangement.”
“And what is it that you want, Nora?” he asks. His gaze climbs up the curve of my neck, to my lips, to my eyes. His gaze is arresting.
I swallow, and force myself to be honest. “I want to finish this year and move on to the future I’ve planned for myself,” I say. “I want… I want to be able to walk away without a broken heart.”
He smiles, though there’s a sadness in it. “You think I’ll break your heart?”
“No,” I say, “because I won’t let you.”
“Mm.” His gaze drifts downward again, lingering on my mouth, my neck, before dropping away. “Maybe you don’t understand me as well as I thought. You were never in any danger of that from me.”
I’m not sure if he’s a liar or just oblivious. Even now, with all of my effort to hold myself back, it feels like he’s reached into my chest and is squeezing hard. “I understand perfectly well,” I say, my throat tight. “I understand how people like you love, and I want none of it.” I think of my mother, of how it felt to be in the spotlight of her affection—so intense it’s blinding, and then gone just as quickly. Brief warmth that only made me realize how cold I was the rest of the time. It would be better not to experience it at all.
Claude studies me in the silence. “People like me?”
“You’re an artist,” I mutter, poking at the remains of my breakfast though my appetite is gone. “Your art will always be what you love the most.”
“Mm.” He shifts in his seat, still watching me. “My art is my raison d’être, I’ll not deny that, but… I’m not sureloveis an appropriate word. To love one’s own art so much would be a form of narcissism, would it not?”
A flash of memory: my mother waving away my question without ever turning her gaze from her sketchbook. Me, all of six years old, standing with a dented can of soup I couldn’t figure out how to open on my own.
Narcissism.I can’t manage anything more than a tiny nod of a response.
“All that is to say…” Claude leans forward. “I’m sorry for whoever made you feel that way, but I’m not them.”
