“You needn’t apologize, Will. Not to me.”
He clears his throat. “When I came here before, I hadn’t meant to—”
“I know. I shouldn’t have been so hard on you.” She pauses kneading. “I want to see you happy, and I’ve attempted so many wrong ways to go about happiness myself. I was hoping to save you the trouble.”
“Y-y-y-you’re right, you know. It’s s-s-selfish. Being cross with the world all the time.” He breathes deeply. “Only…I don’t know hownotto be. After…well, there’s nothing left for me to be.” He runs his thumb along the edge of the table. “Something broke inside. And it isn’t fixable.”
She continues kneading, pouring her whole body into it. “That’s the trouble with ‘moving past’ things, as they say. We’re convinced that healing means returning to exactly what we were before, but it doesn’t work that way, does it?”
He closes his eyes and embraces the flicker of hope that insists on surfacing.
“You needn’t pretend you’re the same shape you were before the war, William, but you’re still you, and your wife deserves to have you back.” She places one floury hand on his. “For your sake as much as hers. Your love for her won’t go away.”
“How do you know I still love her?”
“Because you’re angry. Pent-up love with nowhere to go turns into powerful emotion.” She turns back to her bread dough. “What can I do to convince you to try? To find new life?”
“Actually, I came to ask you something last time. A favor, I suppose. Never got ’round to it, but it’s for her, a start at making things right.”
She pauses, torso bent over the bread, heels of her hands still resting in it.
“It’s…this painting. I need to know who painted it and…and why. I believe it was Rup-rup-rup—”
“Rupert Covington.” Merryn pauses, then continues dividing the dough into strands, crossing one over the other. “I supposeit would be.” She crosses the kitchen to fetch a bowl of yellow liquid—egg mixture, perhaps—and brushes it over the bread.
As she moves about, he catches sight of something that belongs to him behind her on the windowsill—the jar. The ancient jar he broke at Dunn Cottage. He recognizes the odd swirls of blue and green, like the sea. Did he leave it here? He must have.
But this jar isn’t broken. It cannot be the same one.
He squints. No, itisbroken, for he can see the cracks, but someone has bonded the pieces together, propped it up on the shelf just in front of the blue vase he’d knocked over. Both are now brimming with freshly cut flowers. It isn’t a perfect repair, but he cannot look away from those two broken vases…holding up flowers.New life…New life.Those words waft in on the sea breeze from somewhere unknowable. They stir at the sparks buried in him.
“And why is it you’re asking me about this painting?” She pinches the dried herbs hanging from the rafter overhead and crumbles them over the braided strands of dough, carefully keeping her attention on the work.
He clears his throat. “I…found it. And I wondered if it is truly a Rupert Covington.”
“Because you wish to sell it. If it’s worth something, that is.”
Heat rolls up under his collar. “It’s not for me.”
She slides the bread on wooden boards into the warm windowsill and lowers into the chair across from him. The calm in her face makes him even more unsettled. “Does she need money? Your Helen?”
He shrugs. “Who doesn’t? The war was hard on everyone.” He looks away, yet her gaze remains on him. He can feel it. “It’s…it’s all I have to offer.” He cannot stop seeing those vases. Now that she’s moved, they’re in clear view again. As the sun sets, light filters through the cracks. They’ll never hold water again,those vases. But the way they support those giant blooms, so sure and elegant…one might mistake them for museum pieces.
“True humility doesn’t mean thinking of yourself less, but thinking less about yourself. There’s a difference.”
“You have clever thoughts.”
She smiles. “C. S. Lewis does. He said that.”
He tears his gaze away from the vases and lets out a giant puff of breath. “Going back to Helen wouldnotbe the loving thing.” There’s so much she doesn’t know. Cannot know. “It’s all extremely complicated.”
Her smile is soft and knowing. “Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?”
He studies her. “Lewis again?”
“Hardy. Thomas Hardy.” She rises. “I’d like to give you the book that comes from. Have you read it?”
She leaves the room and returns a moment later, pressing the cloth-bound copy into his hands.
