Moonlight in the Morning (30 page)

It was late when she reached New York City, and she went directly to Andrea’s gallery. Her apartment was still sublet to Sheila’s cousin, so she couldn’t go there. She could have gone to a hotel but she didn’t want to.

She was so exhausted she could hardly remember the alarm code, but she managed to turn it off, then back on. She unzipped her suitcase enough to take out a jacket, wrapped it around her, then stretche thhe cod out on the hard bench in the middle of the gallery. She wadded up a blouse to use for a pillow.

Tomorrow, she thought as she started to fall asleep. Tomorrow she’d figure out what to do. And maybe tomorrow Tristan would . . . No, she couldn’t think of that.

She fell into an uneasy sleep and didn’t awaken until the burglar alarm went off, then was quickly shut off.

“Jecca!” said a quiet, solemn voice. “I was hoping it was you. The alarm company said there was activity last night.”

It was difficult to wake out of her deep sleep, but the voice was of a person one didn’t ignore. She looked up to see Garrick Preston—Andrea’s father—staring down at her. Since he was six foot four, that was a long way down. Behind him was his secretary, a tall, beautiful young woman who changed every year, and his bodyguard, a young man trained in several forms of combat.

“Sorry,” Jecca said as she struggled to stand up. The long drive and the hard bench, combined with emotional trauma, had taken a toll on her body.

Mr. Preston was staring at her. Andrea said that as far as she knew her father had never smiled in his life. He’d recently divorced his fourth wife, and Andrea said he was now looking for a younger one.

“Red eyes. Sleeping on a bench,” Mr. Preston said. “Boyfriend breakup?”

“Yes,” Jecca said and felt tears welling in her eyes. She hadn’t yet fully realized what had happened in her life, couldn’t believe Tristan wasn’t going to walk through the door.

Mr. Preston saw the unshed tears and turned away. “How about some work to take your mind off your troubles?”

“I’d like that,” she said.

“My daughter has decided she wants me to buy her a house in—” He glanced at his secretary.

“Tuscany,” she said.

“Right,” Mr. Preston said. “Andrea saw a movie, read a book, something. So she and that guy she married are going to stay there. I can sell this gallery, or Jecca, you can run it. Which do you want to do?”

“Run it,” Jecca said, but there wasn’t much conviction in her voice.

He turned back to look at her. “You do any painting while you were in . . . wherever you were?” He nodded toward the art box she’d brought in last night.

“Some, not a lot,” she said. “I worked on other things.” She didn’t elaborate, as she didn’t want to bore him, but she thought of Kim’s ad campaign and all the children’s clothes she’d designed.

“Hang your pictures up,” he said as he headed toward the door. He turned to his secretary. “Call Boswell and tell him to work out the contracts.”

The bodyguard opened the door for Mr. Preston, who paused. “Welcome back, Jecca,” he said, then left, his entourage behind him.

Jecca sat down hard on the bench. “One door closes, another one openotht,Rs,” she mumbled. Her first impulse was to fall down on the bench and start crying.

But she couldn’t allow herself to give in to that. She’d leaped into Tristan’s arms with her eyes open. From the beginning she’d told him—told herself—that it couldn’t work between them. She’d warned him that at the end of the summer she would leave. He’d said he could take the pain. In her naïveté, Jecca hadn’t thought about her own pain.

She dug into her bag for her phone. How many messages had Tristan left her? What about her father? Would he call to apologize for conspiring with Tristan behind her back?

When she saw that there were no messages from either of them, she was shocked. No voice mail, no e-mail, no text messages. She checked the phone listing. No calls with hang-ups from either of them.

She was sitting there blinking, unable to decide what this meant when the gallery phone rang. It was Mr. Boswell, the lawyer who handled anything to do with Andrea, and he wanted to come by with new contracts. “And there’s an apartment you can use until you get your own back.”

“All right,” Jecca said.

He hesitated. “Forget your old apartment. I think we should get you something in a Preston building. There’ll be a substantial pay raise for you.”

“Good,” she said, but without feeling.

Mr. Boswell paused. “I hear you had a bad breakup.”

Jecca couldn’t say anything. If she did, she’d start crying. She could not believe that Tris hadn’t at least called.

“How about if I give you so much to do you don’t have time to think?” Mr. Boswell said.

“I need that.”

“All right,” he said, “I’ll have someone call the artists and tell them you’re reopening. They’ll bombard you with sob stories of how miserable their lives have been because
you
closed the gallery.”

Jecca didn’t even defend herself by pointing out that she hadn’t been the one to close it.

“You are in a very bad way,” Mr. Boswell said. “I have to clean up some paperwork, then I’ll be there to take you out to lunch. And Jecca?”

“Yes?”

“People don’t really die from a broken heart. It just feels like you will.”

“I guess I’ll find out, won’t I?” she said and hung up.

Mr. Boswell was true to his word. Thirty minutes later, there were three artists in the gallery, their arms full of what they’d done in the last weeks. And just as Mr. Boswell had said, they blamed Jecca for the gallery being closed.

“You could have talked to Andrea,” they said. “At least tried to persuade her.”

At first Jecca had explained that she’d wanted time to do her own work, but by the third accusation she gave up. She said, “That’s me. Selfish to t. S0emhe core. Now what do you have to show me?”

At one, Mr. Boswell arrived with a young woman fresh out of college with a degree in fine arts. “She’s your Jecca, your perfect assistant,” Mr. Boswell said, then before she could reply, he escorted Jecca out the door.

They had lunch at a tiny Italian place, and Mr. Boswell didn’t give Jecca a chance to think about what had happened in her life. He tried to entertain her with stories of Andrea and how she’d nearly driven her father insane since she left.

But Jecca wasn’t in a laughing mood. She listened to the stories, but she surreptitiously checked her phone every few minutes. No messages.

She went back to the gallery. She’d been told the young woman’s name was Della, but she didn’t ask more than that. They spent the afternoon going over paintings and small sculptures.

“These are great!” Della said. “Who did these? They aren’t signed.”

Della had opened Jecca’s art box and had removed the work she’d done in Edilean. Spread out on the floor were about thirty paintings and drawings of Tristan. In one he was holding Nell. In another one, he was looking up from a book, his eyes full of love. Jecca knew that he’d been looking at
her.

“Talk about gorgeous,” Della said. “Is he a professional model?”

“No!” Jecca said sharply. “He’s a doctor and he—” She began to gather up the paintings. “These aren’t to be put on display.”

“But those will sell. I’ll buy the one of him looking over a book. If a man looked at
me
like that I’d—” She broke off because Jecca was glaring at her. “Oh. Is he the ‘bad breakup’ Mr. Boswell mentioned?”

Jecca didn’t reply, just put the paintings away. She wanted to sell, but right now she couldn’t bear to spend her days looking at Tristan.

At five, Mr. Boswell sent a young man to take Jecca to look at apartments. She wasn’t surprised when he told her he was single. It looked like Mr. Boswell was trying to patch up Jecca’s heart with another man.

She took the first apartment she saw. It was in a building owned by Mr. Preston, had a balcony, and windows with a view. It was the kind of apartment a New Yorker dreamed of, but Jecca hardly looked at it. It had a few pieces of furniture but no linens. The young man offered to go shopping with her and afterward have a late dinner, but she turned him down.

She went out to buy sheets and towels, and when she got back she was too tired to put them on. She unfolded a sheet, stretched out on it, checked her phone—nothing—then went to sleep.

In the morning when there were still no messages from Tristan, she felt a bit better. If he could cut her off so easily, so could she.

She showered, put on her jeans, and went out to breakfast. On her way to work she stopped in a store and redressed herself more appropriately. As she left and saw her reflection in a window, she thought she looked more New York and less Edilean.

There were two artists waiting for her at the or an to tgallery, their arms full of their work.

“That’s good,” Della said. “I like it. Although I hope someone steps on his blue crayon.”

She and Jecca were looking at a series of oils of landscapes. They were part modern, part Ashcan School, with a hint of Salvador Dali thrown in. What united them was what seemed to be a thousand shades of blue.

“He read that Picasso had a Blue Period, so this guy wants his biographer to say the same thing about him,” Jecca said.

“Or he watches
Avatar
six times a day,” Della said. “Besides, he has a bigger ego than that. It’s biographers plural.”

“Think he’s chosen the spot for the library that will be erected in his honor?” Jecca asked, and Della laughed.

Jecca stood back and looked at the paintings. In the weeks that she’d been back from Edilean, she’d worked hard to put her emotions in the background. She hadn’t been fully successful, but she was beginning to recover.

In those weeks she hadn’t heard from anyone except Kim—and she had refused to even mention Tristan.

“I’m not going to say ‘I told you so,’” Kim said.

“I know,” Jecca replied, “but you deserve to say it.”

“No, I don’t. I wish . . .” She didn’t say what she wished. Instead, the two women talked about work. They made a silent pact to keep their conversation away from men.

It hurt Jecca that Mrs. Wingate and Lucy didn’t seem to want anything to do with her. She’d thought they were becoming friends, but it looked like she had only been a tenant.

Lucy was the worst. On their single phone call, she’d acted like Jecca was an enemy trying to get information from her. Jecca didn’t call her again, and after three e-mails that Lucy answered in a cool, reserved way, she stopped those too.

When Jecca called Mrs. Wingate, she was charming. But there was no laughter over pole dancing, no information about the playhouse, and no talk at all about Tristan or Nell, or anyone Jecca had met in Edilean.

Those calls also stopped.

But the most hurt, the very deepest, was her father. For two weeks Jecca had been so angry at him that the only thing she wanted to hear from him was an abject apology. Groveling. Begging for her to forgive him.

But there was nothing, not a message of any kind, and certainly no apology. As time passed, in spite of her resolve, Jecca began to soften toward her father.

At the end of three silent weeks, one Sunday afternoon, Jecca called the house in New Jersey. To her horror, Sheila answered. Jecca almost hung up.

“He’s not here,” Sheila said, “and he won’t be—”

Joey snatched the phone away from his wife. “Hey, Jec, ol’ girl, how’s New w didnYork?”

“The same as always. Where is Dad?”

“Out.”

“Out where?”

“So when are you coming to visit us? The kids miss you. And I got some rototillers that need cleaning.”

“Joey, stop avoiding me and tell me where Dad is.”

“I, uh . . . Jecca, he asked me not to tell you about him.”

She was shocked. “He did what?”

“Look,” Joey said, “he’ll call you later, okay? Don’t worry about anything. He’s not mad at you anymore. I gotta go. Come see us. Or look online. We put up new pictures of what we did to the store. ’Bye, little sister.”

“’Bye, Bulldog,” she said, but her brother had already hung up.

Jecca stood there for a few minutes, unable to think clearly. Her father was no longer angry at
her
?! She was the one who had a right to be furious.
He
was the one who’d overstepped the boundaries of . . .

Who was she kidding? When it came to his children—especially his daughter—Joe Layton’s interference knew no bounds.

By the fourth week, Jecca was beginning to recover. If the people of Edilean wanted nothing to do with her, she wouldn’t bother them. She quit calling them, quit trying to keep in contact with them. Instead, she turned her attention fully on the work of getting the gallery going again. She put on a champagne party and invited some of Mr. Preston’s richest friends. It was a great success.

Della said, “If you’d hang your own paintings you’d be selling them too.”

“There are some things more important than selling your art,” Jecca said.

Since Della had her own work and desperately wanted to hang it, she didn’t understand what Jecca meant.

Jecca knew that Della was her just a few months ago. When she’d gone to Edilean all she’d wanted was to create paintings that sold. Now she . . . The truth was that she no longer seemed to know what she wanted.