No One Can Know(31)
Emma certainly wasn’t the center of his world. That much had become clear, however well he thought he had covered his tracks. Anger burbled inside her. Emma deserved better. Daphne would never understand how her sister had let herself settle for a man like Nathan.
Daphne found the location tracking app easily. She checked the usage statistics—it hadn’t been opened in the last three months. Perfect. She entered her own information, confirmed the link on her phone, and granted herself permission to track Emma’s location. Then she closed the app, turned off the phone, and positioned it exactly where Emma had left it. Another quick trip to put the toast on Emma’s nightstand—and then Daphne took a risk, and leaned over, pressing the softest kiss against Emma’s brow before retreating. Emma, deep in sleep, did not stir.
She looked peaceful, Daphne thought as she exited the house. But you could see the signs of sickness in her. That was what all of this was; a restfulness that concealed infirmity. It couldn’t last.
She walked back to where Winston was waiting, tongue lolling out. She gave the carriage house one long look. The door was locked, with no other good way to get in. She’d have to leave it for now. At least she felt better now, with Emma’s location easily accessed. Hopefully it would prove an unnecessary precaution. But Emma had always been curious. Her artist’s eye quick to pick up on things out of place. And if she started to see the things that had been hidden all this time …
Daphne shook her head, making her way quickly back to the street with Winston trotting alongside her. It wouldn’t happen that way. Daphne would be there, to shape what happened next.
And she would do whatever she had to.
15
EMMA
Then
Two months, more or less, before she burns her sister’s bloody clothes in the fireplace grate of an abandoned house, Emma stands examining a painting.
It has taken half a year of pleading to convince Emma’s parents to let her buy oil paints. She has made do with acrylics and watercolor, but she glories in the romance of the oils. She researches their origins and ingredients, imagining herself the painter of older eras, grinding pigments from minerals and roots, mixing them into the oil herself. Her paints come, of course, from tubes, purchased with her carefully hoarded money one color at a time, so that the bloom of new hues across her canvases become a way to mark the march of time.
Lorelei teaches her. The hardest part is the patience, waiting for each layer to dry, unfinished, the promise of possibility shimmering in her mind’s eye. Her mother hates the stink of it—the oil, the turpentine. The way it stains her fingers and her clothes, splatters and lines of paint crawling up her forearms, decorating her face. There is nothing ladylike and pristine about painting. She emerges streaked in umber and sienna, cadmium and vermilion.
Her work is always sloppier, clumsier than she would like. She rushes; she waits too long; the paint cracks, it smears. Lorelei tells her patience, patience. Worry when it looks perfect, because that means you’ve caught up with your own ambition and judgment. Dissatisfaction is the engine of creativity.
Lorelei is the one who encouraged Emma to consider schools farther from home. She has a talent, but that’s not what Lorelei prizes. The girl has drive, the kind of hunger that won’t be sated until she has the chance to give herself over to it completely, and that means instruction, proper instruction, more than Lorelei can give her. She needs to be surrounded by other people as hungry and obsessed as she is. The schools she tells Emma about are in Georgia, California, even Europe. Emma says again and again that she has to stay close to home, but the hunger says otherwise.
Emma has filled out the applications. It’s absurdly early, she knows, but she wants the essays and forms out of the way so that she can focus on her portfolio. She needs eight—wants ten. She has, over the last year, managed seven she deems adequate. Three watercolors, two in acrylics, one in charcoal, and one, the painting of Juliette at her piano, in oil.
Today she stands in her room, scrutinizing what may be the eighth piece. It sits on her bed, propped against the wall, as she paces back and forth, examining it from every angle. With this, she will have enough to make her applications, and a few more months to manage a final two—or to replace some of those she is less certain about, like the watercolor that shows the bridge over the river near the house, with its curls of water folding in on itself and the light slanting low. It is competent, but it says nothing, and she worries that the judges will think her point of view is shallow.
This piece, though—she thinks she likes it. It is nothing special, in a way. Only a portrait. Gabriel, a three-quarter view, strong shadows over his face. He leans against a doorway, neither inside nor outside the room. He looks like he is about to ask a question. The question was “How long do I have to stand like this,” but she has left out the glint in his eyes, made him wearier. In his eye is the shadowed reflection of a woman. A girl. She calls it Intruder: A Self-Portrait. She worries it is too obvious, not obvious enough, pretentious, common.
She likes it.
She is not satisfied with it, the way Lorelei cautions her against; her colors are muddy in places, the anatomy just off enough to bother her, the reflection of the girl not as distinct as she’d hoped.
Gabriel likes it, too. But he doesn’t like the title. “You’re not intruding on anything,” he’d said.