Everyone turned to look at her.
“At the edge. In the window.” Bea pointed. “There’s someone looking in.”
They looked. And one by one, they saw her.
Sam. Rendered in softer strokes, less defined than the others, almost dreamlike. Standing outside theShack, looking through the window at the family inside. Her face was turned away—you couldn’t see her expression—but her posture said everything. Longing. Distance.
“Mom,” Tyler said.
“Sam,” Anna whispered.
“She’s part of this family too,” Margo said, her voice steady despite the tears now falling freely. “Even when she’s not here. Even when she’s somewhere else, chasing whatever she’s chasing. She’s still ours.”
“You painted her outside,” Meg said. “Looking in.”
“Because that’s where she’s always been. That’s where she’s chosen to be.” Margo wiped her eyes. “I thought about not including her. About pretending the family was just... us. The ones who stayed. But that would have been a lie.”
“It would have been,” Anna agreed quietly.
“I wanted you to see her the way I see her. Not as someone who abandoned us. Just as someone who couldn’t figure out how to stay.”
Silence. Heavy and full.
Then Stella spoke.
“She’s looking at me.”
Everyone turned.
“In the painting.” Stella stepped closer, studying the angles, the sight lines. “She’s looking through the window, and she’s looking at me. At the version of me you painted.”
Margo hadn’t consciously planned it that way. ButStella was right. The angle of Sam’s gaze, the direction of her attention—it led straight to Stella, the granddaughter she’d never met, the newest branch of the family tree.
“She would love you,” Margo said. “If she’d known you. She would have recognized something in you.”
“What?”
“The artist’s eye. The way you see things.” Margo smiled through her tears. “Sam always said the Walshes were made of salt water and stubborn hearts. You have both.”
Tyler put his arm around Stella. Anna reached for Meg’s hand. Bea leaned against her mother’s shoulder. Luke stood slightly apart, bearing witness, part of the family in his own quiet way.
“What are you going to do with it?” Tyler asked finally.
“I don’t know yet. I thought about hanging it at the Shack. But maybe...” Margo looked at the painting—at her life’s work, at her family’s story, at fifty years made visible. “Maybe it belongs here. Where I can see it every day. Where I can remember.”
“Remember what?”
“That I built something that mattered. That you all grew into people worth painting.” She smiled, old and tired and happy. “That the Shack isn’t just a building. It’s this. All of you. Together.”
Anna hugged her—fierce and sudden, the way Anna did everything.
“Thank you,” Anna whispered. “For seeing us. For painting us. For all of it.”
“Thank you for giving me something worth painting.”
One by one, they all hugged her—Tyler and Meg, Stella and Bea, even Luke. Margo held each of them, felt the solid reality of the family she’d built, the legacy she was passing on.
“Okay,” she said finally, wiping her eyes. “That’s enough crying for one evening. There’s pie in the kitchen and I refuse to let it go to waste.”
