She gestured at the canvas, said, “I look at this and I am so proud. I don’t have any right to be, but I am.”
“It’s…” He trailed off, looking at the canvas. “It’s not what I wanted it to be, but thank you. The truth is I would never have become an artist if not for that summer.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is.”
“It isn’t. You were meant to be an artist. You didn’t need some silly little romance to make you one.”
Jamie’s pulse of displeasure at silly and little were countered by the avidity in her gaze. He had the sense she was trying to memorize him, too. “It wasn’t just that,” he said. “No one had encouraged me before. You gave me a sense of possibility. Not just you. It was your mother and your father, even though…” He hesitated, then hurried on. “And being around all that art. It was an education, a beginning.”
He was breathless, surprised by his own earnestness. She was beaming. She said, “Well then, the heartache was worth it.”
Just then, a man slid from the crowd, putting his arm around Sarah’s waist. He kissed her temple, drew back, and pressed his palm to her forehead. “You’re burning up. Are you feeling all right?”
Flustered, she pulled away, then turned back apologetically, pressing his shoulder with hers. “Yes, just warm.”
“You should get some air. I’m sorry—hello.” The man offered his hand to Jamie, who, gripping it, imagined he could still feel the dampness of Sarah’s brow on its palm. Whose heartache? he wanted to demand of her. Yours? What did you mean? The man said, “Lewis Scott. I interrupted. I was distracted by concern for my lovely wife.”
“Lewis, this is Jamie Graves,” Sarah said. “The artist and my old friend. Jamie, this is my husband, Lewis.”
“Oh!” Lewis said. “I’ve been wanting to meet you for ages!”
Jamie had been too intent on Sarah’s face to notice her wedding band. This man, her husband, was sandy-haired and genial-countenanced behind tortoiseshell glasses. A prominent, slightly humped nose did not detract from his handsomeness. His tuxedo fit perfectly.
Leaning in, Lewis gestured, as Sarah had, over his shoulder at the Cannon Beach painting and lowered his voice. “It’s the best one here. I don’t know a fraction of what Sarah does about art, but even I can see it’s a knockout. Everyone’s been saying so. Congratulations.”
Miserably, Jamie thanked him.
“I can tell you’re not the kind of artist who eats praise for lunch. I’ll stop embarrassing you right after I tell you those old portraits you did of the Fahey girls are spot-on. Sarah’s hangs in our house still, and it’s one of my favorites of all our art. I’m biased, of course, but there it is. Now I’m done. No more torturing you with compliments. Down to business. How long are you in town? We’d love to have you over for dinner. You should meet the boys.”
Almost apologetically, Sarah said, “We have two sons. They’re four and seven.”
Jamie cleared his throat, said, “You’ve been married awhile, then.”
“Eight years,” said Lewis. “Sarah wasn’t even twenty. I was a medical student at UW and relentlessly persistent. Could you come tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Sarah said. “We have to go to my parents’。”
“Couldn’t we skip it?”
She gave Lewis a look rich with the silent communication that comes from a long and intimate history. Jamie felt contorted with envy. She’d married only two years after he’d left Seattle, maybe even when he’d still been drunkenly rattling around Wallace’s house, mooning over her. He said, “Don’t change your plans because of me.”
“I would dearly love to change our plans,” Sarah said, “but my father would be difficult about it. You remember how he is.”
“I didn’t realize you knew the mighty patriarch,” Lewis said, and Jamie understood that Sarah must have told him very little about their past. （Because it did not matter? Or because it did?）
“I’ve seen some of your family’s pieces on loan here,” he said to Sarah a little stiffly. “Is your father still thinking about a museum of his own?”
“Oh, I never know what he’s thinking. Sometimes he wants a museum, sometimes he wants to sell everything. Then when he does sell one, he immediately wants to buy it back. I’ve stopped trying to keep up.” To Lewis, she said, “Jamie was the one who discovered those Turner watercolors. They were moldering in a box somewhere.”