17. Lincoln
17
LINCOLN
Something about how she said, “Money doesn’t solve everything , ” hit. But right along with that came another blow I wasn’t expecting.
Doubt.
I wondered if I tossed cash around with too much callous disregard—just like my father.
Arden lowered her burger and set it on the coffee table. “I was just joking. I didn’t mean?—”
I waved her off. “It’s fine.”
Her expression hardened, and that stubborn fire blazed to life. “It’s not.”
I opened my mouth to speak, to let loose some sort of brush-off, but Arden cut me off.
“Don’t lie to me.” Those gray-violet eyes were pleading now. “You don’t have to talk about whatever put those shadows in your eyes, but don’t lie. Not when I told you about the hardest moments of my life.”
A curse slipped free. She was right. I’d be a bastard of the highest order if I fabricated some elaborate alternate reality for why her words had tripped my trigger. But laying that shit bare? That wasn’t in my nature.
When you laid it all out there, it meant people could use it against you. Just like my father had.
My gaze moved to the painting in the center of the room. It grabbed hold—like Arden’s art always did. But this one was different somehow. Even more honest. More raw.
I stared at the bleeding heart. The brambles could be protecting it or imprisoning it. Or maybe they were simply an allegory for the harshness of the outside world. But then there were the flowers. Blooming despite it all.
“It’s beautiful,” I whispered.
Arden’s gaze followed mine, and she stared for a long moment. “I think I like it.”
I glanced back at her. “You don’t always like your work?”
She shook her head, some dark brown strands falling free of her bun, more than a few splatters of paint decorating them. “No. But this one…it makes me nervous.”
“And that’s good?” I wanted to know more, wanted to know everything . How her beautiful mind worked in all the ways, but especially when she created. And wasn’t that fucking unfair? Here I was, keeping all my secrets locked away while demanding hers.
“Nervous, uncomfortable. It means I’m feeling. Art should always make you feel.” Arden stared at the piece. “Sometimes, when I’m lucky, the pieces align, and I find real truth.”
My heart hammered against my ribs. “And what is this one’s truth?”
“Sometimes, you need to bleed to bloom.” Her voice wasn’t a whisper, but it held a quiet strength, coated in a rasp that resembled the brambles in the painting.
Those words painted themselves over the ones from earlier, coating them so thickly it drowned out the ones from before. And they made me reckless.
“My dad killed my mom.” My truth. My blood on the canvas.
With that sort of shocking statement, I expected a jolt, maybe a gasp. But not from Arden. She simply watched me and took in my truth. And then she waited. She didn’t give me any of the countless platitudes I’d heard before.
“I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“She’s with the angels now.”
“She’ll always watch over you.”
It was nothing as simple as that for Arden. She let the silence do the talking. And in that quiet was acceptance. One that invited me to keep going. To share a little more of my bloody truth.
“He didn’t put a bullet in her brain or a knife in her heart. But he killed her just the same.”
Arden gave me words then, and with them, more acceptance and understanding. “There are countless ways to kill someone.”
My fingers tightened, curling around my kneecaps and digging into the denim there. “There are. And my father is an expert at not leaving any evidence behind.”
Arden simply met my gaze and waited, pools of understanding in her irises.
“He has a pathological need for power and control. To know that he can exert his will over everyone around him.” Images of his face flashed in my mind, that stone-cold calculation. “He built the perfect trap for her, promising her forever and a beautiful life. Then he locked her in a tower while he cheated on her daily, belittled her, and made her feel like she was worth nothing. That she was nothing more than expensive window dressing.”
My mom’s tower had been that Upper West Side penthouse. The one that overlooked the park and held the promise of forever. But forever had become a prison.
My hands gripped my knees so tightly my fingers started to go numb. “He choked the life out of her little by little, snuffed out her light. She tried to fight it. There were times when she fought. Took my sister Ellie and me out of school and surprised us with a trip to Coney Island. Let us stay up late, eating all the junk our dad never let us have while bingeing Goonies , E.T. , and Hook . Read us stories and made all the voices. ”
My words caught, tying in a knot at that last memory. I could still see her, clear as day, reading Where the Wild Things Are and making me laugh until my sides ached. “She tried to leave,” I croaked. “He found out the moment she talked to a lawyer. Dropped a file of so-called evidence in her lap, showing what an unfit mother she was.”
There was a fire in Arden’s eyes now, the violet flaring to life. “He was threatening to take you away from her.”
“Ellie doesn’t remember much. Doesn’t remember how she simply faded. She was breathing but no longer living. She didn’t play as much or create the voices when she read. She slid into a bottle and never came out.”
I didn’t see Arden move. Didn’t know she had until slender fingers wrapped around mine. But those fingers weren’t delicate; they were far stronger than they appeared—like the woman herself.
She slid them under my death grip, forcing me to hold on to her instead. In that moment, I could feel everything about her. The strength of steel. The gentle kindness. The flecks of paint on her skin, marking her with the price she paid to create art that reached people. That reached me .
I stared down at our joined fingers. Another type of art. “She drove off a bridge upstate when Ellie was six and I was seventeen. Her blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit. Dad played it off to everyone as a horrible accident and painted himself the grieving widower. But there were no skid marks at the scene.”
Arden’s fingers tightened around mine, holding on to me as tightly as I held on to her. “Loss and theft.”
My gaze lifted from our hands to her face, questions in my eyes.
“It’s a tangled web,” she rasped. “The grief of losing her. The anger that part of you feels like she didn’t fight hard enough for you and Ellie. The fury at your father for his cruelty, his killing.”
“A tangled web,” I echoed. “Just like your painting.”
Her mouth curved the barest amount, those berry pink lips just starting to part. “True.”
“I’m not good at sharing this sort of stuff.”
“Seems like you’re doing a pretty good job to me. ”
I let out a breath, finally exhaling fully and releasing some of the oxygen that had been held hostage in the deepest recesses of my lungs. “Sometimes, you need to bleed to bloom,” I said, repeating her words.
“Sometimes,” she agreed. “I find it’s what you do with the pain that matters the most. What do you turn it into? Something that brings light, or something that brings the darkness?”
“You bring the light.”
A genuine smile spread across Arden’s face. “Not everyone would say that. Not when you look at my art.”
I shook my head. “Then they don’t see it. Don’t see you . Facing that darkness is exactly what brings the light.”
“That’s what I like to think. And you can’t have one without the other.”
No, you couldn’t.
“I know that tangle, Linc.” My nickname on Arden’s tongue was a sensuous stroke. “I know what it’s like to miss someone and despise them in the same breath. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to forgive my father for what he cost us all. Not sure I’ll be able to forgive my mother for possibly being complicit. But that doesn’t stop me from loving them both.”
Each word was like a blow to the chest. Because I felt that same battle when it came to my mom. I forced myself to release Arden’s hand, even though it was the last thing I wanted to do. Shifting, I pulled out my phone, tapped in my code, and opened the photo album to the very last image.
“She’s both. The darkness and the light,” I rasped, turning the phone around so Arden could see the screen. I’d memorized the photo. If I’d had any sort of artistic skill, I could’ve etched it on paper without even looking at the original image.
I was twelve in the photo, and Ellie was only one. I held one of her hands while my mom held the other as we walked over the grass in Central Park. Ellie beamed up at us with a gummy smile, and my mom was so alive . Her hair was the same mix of light blond and brown as Ellie’s, but her eyes were a gray that none of us shared.
“She was beautiful,” Arden whispered .
I didn’t reply, simply swiped my finger across the screen to the next photo. It was a formal portrait from five years later, just a month before she died. There was no life in it; not even in six-year-old Ellie perched stiffly next to my mother—a woman whose eyes had gone completely dead.
“So much pain.” Arden’s voice was barely audible. “And rage,” she said as her gaze moved to my father with his perfectly styled dark brown hair so much like mine. And those dark hazel eyes.
“I look like him, and I hate it,” I muttered.
Arden’s gaze flew to me. “The hell you do.” Her hand lifted, fingertips grazing the skin beneath my eyes. “There’s light here, life. There’s nothing in his. You couldn’t look more different.”
Something shifted inside me, a recalibration I had no control over. “Thank you,” I whispered.
Her hand dropped away. “Thank you for giving me that.”
We stared at each other for a long moment, and then I forced my gaze away. “Not sure you’ll be thanking me when your burger’s cold.”
She chuckled. “I’ve eaten much worse than a lukewarm cheeseburger.”
I popped the top off my vanilla shake and dipped a french fry into it. “At least this won’t be ruined.”
Arden looked on in horror as I popped the fry into my mouth. “You did not just do that. French fries dunked in a milkshake ?”
I barked out a laugh. “You sound like I’m putting liver and onions over ice cream or something.”
“You might as well be,” Arden accused.
“Have you ever tried it?” I challenged.
“I don’t need to try it to know it’s gross.”
I plucked up another fry and dipped it in my shake. I held my hand under the concoction as I extended it to her. Arden shook her head, making a face.
I just grinned. “Chicken.”
That had the fire lighting again. Arden opened her mouth, and I slid the fry inside. Her lips closed around it, and I watched, transfixed as she chewed. Slowly, her brows lifted, and her expression shifted into delighted surprise.
“Good?” I didn’t know what it said that everything hung on her enjoyment of my favorite eccentricity.
A smile stretched across her face as she shook her head. “Damn you, Cowboy. Now, I’m a weirdo who likes dunking my french fries in milkshakes.”
“I think you’ll survive.” I leaned forward, my thumb swiping across her bottom lip where a speck of milkshake remained.
Arden’s lips parted as she took a sharp breath. Our eyes locked, and need swirled in hers, making the violet deepen to nearly black. My thumb stilled, resting on that perfect swell of her mouth, relishing the delicate silkiness beneath my callused fingertip.
Arden leaned in, and my hand slid along her jaw, fingers tangling in her upset hair. God, I needed to taste her, to know if it would grab hold the same way her art did, showing no mercy. Closer. So close our breaths mingled.
Brutus let out a demanding bark.
Arden startled, jerking back and out of the haze we’d both been lost in. She let out a laugh, her cheeks heating. “He’s mad. I’ve usually given him a fry by now.”
I sent Brutus a frustrated stare. “I’m not sure he deserves one,” I mumbled.
Damn dog was a cockblock.