Chapter 15
Weeks later, Emily turned the key in her studio door and listened to the lock catch.
The sound was small, ordinary, and hers. She stood with one hand on the knob, breathing in the familiar scent of paper, wood, and fresh paint. Sunlight spread across the worktables. In the front window, the girls’ drawings hung behind clean glass, bright and safe.
Tess had drawn a purple house with a door wide enough for all four of them. Nora had covered a page with careful blue circles. Belle’s picture was mostly yellow, with three long ribbons streaming from a crooked tree.
Emily straightened the drawings until their edges lined up. Not because they needed to be perfect. Because she could.
Behind her, the girls were busy at the big table with crayons and a sheet of thick paper. Their mismatched ribbons—red, blue, and green—were tied in their hair. They bent over the page together, then pulled back to inspect it as if it had secrets.
“Is it ready?” Emily asked.
“No,” Tess said quickly.
“Almost,” Nora corrected.
Belle pressed both hands over the paper. “It’s a surprise.”
Emily put on a show of being puzzled and turned toward the window. She had learned that home could be made of ordinary things: a lock that worked, sunlight on a floor, a surprise that needed protecting until its makers were ready.
A knock sounded at the door.
The girls looked up. Emily felt the moment gather in the room—not danger, not exactly, but the weight of a choice. She had invited Nathaniel. She had told the girls he was coming, that he was their uncle, and that they could decide whether to show him anything.
She didn’t tell them they had to like him.
“Would you like to answer?” she asked.
Tess glanced at Nora. Nora glanced at Belle. Belle lifted one shoulder.
Emily opened the door.
Nathaniel stood on the step alone, in a dark coat, his hands empty. No aide waited behind him. No driver hovered at the curb. His left hand was bare where the signet ring had been.
“Thank you for inviting me,” he said.
“You’re welcome to come in.”
He stepped inside, then stopped just past the threshold. His gaze moved to the drawings in the window and back to Emily. He didn’t comment on the new lock or the studio’s repaired doorframe. He didn’t ask what it had cost her to reopen.
“I wasn’t sure you’d want me to bring anything,” he said. “So I didn’t.”
“That was probably wise.”
A faint smile crossed his face, cautious enough not to ask for more.
“Hello, Tess. Nora. Belle.”
The girls answered in a chorus that was polite but not quite welcoming. Nathaniel nodded as if he understood the difference.
“The pictures in the window are yours?” he asked.
“Our pictures,” Nora said.
Nathaniel looked at her. “They’re beautiful.”
Tess took one step toward the table, then another. “We made something else.”
Emily stayed where she was. Nathaniel did too.
The girls gathered around the table. Belle lifted her hands from the paper. It was a picture of the airport: a row of tall windows, a little cluster of people, and four stick figures beneath a sky filled with looping lines. Across the top, in large, uneven letters, someone had written WELCOME HOME, MOMMY.
Emily recognized the drawing. She remembered the girls running toward her, three small bodies colliding with her knees, their voices calling her theirs before she could put down her bag.
Now the picture had three new marks. A red ribbon curled around one corner. A blue ribbon crossed the bottom. A green one looped near the drawn stick figures, each color placed apart from the others.
“Those are ours,” Belle said, touching the green mark. “So nobody gets mixed up.”
Nathaniel lowered himself onto one knee but stopped several feet away. “Would you like to show it to me?”
The girls looked at one another. Tess held the page by its top edge. Nora reached for the bottom. Belle kept one hand on the table.
Then Tess carried it over.
Nathaniel didn’t reach to take it. He waited until Tess held the picture out, and she waited until he asked with his eyes.
“May I?”
She nodded.
He accepted the page carefully, his fingers gripping only the edges. For a moment, he didn’t speak. Emily saw his throat move as he swallowed.
“This is the best welcome I’ve ever received,” he said.
“You weren’t at the airport,” Tess pointed out.
“No,” he said. “I wasn’t.”
There was no excuse after it. No attempt to pretend he could make up for a moment he had missed.
Tess took the picture back. “We can show it again later.”
“I’d like that,” Nathaniel said. “If you want to.”
The girls returned to the table, bringing the drawing with them. Emily watched Nathaniel watch them—not as heirs, not as proof of a family secret, but as three girls deciding what to do with paper and crayons.
“Would you like coffee?” Emily asked.
“Yes, please.”
She poured two cups at the small counter. Nathaniel stayed near the table, far enough away that the girls could keep working without feeling crowded.
“I don’t know how to talk to you without sounding like I’m asking for something,” he said when she brought him a cup.
“Then don’t ask for anything.”
He took the cup. “All right.”
A pencil rolled off the table. Belle retrieved it and set it beside the others.
Nathaniel looked down into his coffee. “I used to think being the one with the answers meant I was helping.”
“You used to think being right meant you didn’t have to listen.”
“Yes.” He met her eyes. “I did.”
The admission landed without ceremony. It didn’t erase the years when she had measured her words against his temper or learned to recognize concern that was really contempt. But he wasn’t asking her to say those years had meant nothing.
“I can’t go back and be different in our marriage,” he said. “I’m sorry I made you feel small in the life we were supposed to share.”
Emily’s fingers tightened around her mug. “I did feel small. For a long time.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to decide you understand it now and call that enough.”
“I won’t.”
She looked toward the girls. “Whatever you become to them will take time. And it will be their choice. Not yours, not mine.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
Nathaniel set his coffee down. “I’m trying to. If they want to see me next week, I’ll come next week. If they don’t, I’ll wait. I won’t ask you to make them ready for my sake.”
Emily watched his face for the old reflex: impatience dressed up as certainty, an argument waiting behind his eyes. She saw pain there, and restraint. Neither was the same as trust. But restraint, practiced over time, could become a place to begin.
“Then we’ll see,” she said.
Tess held up a fresh sheet of paper. “Uncle Nathaniel, what should we draw next?”
His eyes went to Emily, asking without words whether he could answer.
Emily gave him a small nod.
“Whatever you want,” he said. “You get to choose.”
The girls huddled over the blank page. Tess suggested a house with a taller roof. Nora wanted a garden. Belle said the picture needed “a very big sun,” and the others began negotiating how big.
May you like
Emily sat beside them, and Nathaniel took the chair at the far end of the table. The girls kept the airport drawing between them, its three ribbon-colored marks bright against the paper.
Emily rested an arm around her daughters. Nathaniel stayed where they had let him sit. Together, they bent over the new page as the girls decided what story to draw next.
