Chapter Three
ARIA
I don’t cry until I’m in my car.
The parking garage is mostly empty—three-thirty on a Monday, and no one’s in a rush to leave except the woman who just got fired. I sit in the driver’s seat of my beat-up Honda with my hands wrapped around the steering wheel and try to breathe through the panic clawing at my throat.
I pull out my phone and open my banking app with shaking fingers.
There’s barely enough in checking and savings to cover next month’s rent, plus utilities, groceries, and gas.
Not to mention there’s Brookhaven to pay for.
It’s almost ten thousand a month. The kind of money that made me stay late, come early, grind my teeth through every dismissive look Everett threw my way.
Without this salary, I can’t afford it. We already sold my childhood house to pay off his medical bills for the month he was in the hospital after the accident, and the final funeral costs for my mother.
My father will have to be moved back to the memory care facilities that his insurance will cover.
But those are basically glorified adult daycares.
The four weeks of severance pay will at least give me one more month to try to find a replacement job, but there’s nothing out there with my skill set that will pay that kind of money.
A sob catches in my throat, and I let it out, harsh and desperate.
The steering wheel absorbs the impact of my forehead.
Once, twice, until the pressure in my chest finally cracks open and everything—every held-together breath, every swallowed comment about his grimaces, every morning I showed up hoping to prove I was worth noticing—comes pouring out.
I sit there and cry like an idiot for what feels like hours but is probably only ten minutes.
When I finally pull back, the tears draining out of my body, I try to shake off the shock and gut punch that I suppose I knew was coming.
I could sell the paintings that I moved to a storage unit, along with all my parent’s things when we sold their house. The art curator keeps calling, asking if I’d sell them to a collector who loved them at my showing, but I can’t bring myself to look at them.
Not since that night. Not since my opening night as a real artist is the reason my parents got in the car accident that killed my mother and left my father in memory care facilities.
I don’t go home.
Instead, I drive to Brookhaven. The drive takes thirty minutes. I use them to compose myself, wipe the tear streaks from my cheeks, practice a smile in the rearview mirror that doesn’t quite work. My hands are still shaking on the steering wheel.
Gladys sees me coming, and her smile falters. She knows that face. She’s seen it before, the one families wear when they’re bringing bad news.
"Aria, sweetheart. What’s wrong?"
I can’t tell her. If I tell her I lost my job, then it means that it really happened, and I just can’t face reality seeping into the rest of my life right now. I just need an hour with my father where I don’t have to think about it.
"Just a long day," I say instead. "Is he having a good one?"
Her expression softens with something like pity, and that’s when I know the answer before she gives it.
"Actually, it’s been a long day for him. He had occupational and physical therapy. He’s pretty wiped out. He’s resting in his room. Be patient with him today."
A long day of therapy means that his brain is fried from all the exercises they worked on today. And "be patient with him" means that his brain might be too tired to remember me. Of all days, today is the day I need him to be okay. I need him to tell me that everything will be alright.
I push through the familiar hallway with its warm lighting and fresh flowers and soft music playing from somewhere I can never quite locate.
Everything is the same. But it all feels different now—borrowed. Something that’s about to be taken away.
The Kauffman plaque catches my eye, but this time I want to rip it off the wall and throw it through a window. Though being mad at Everett for having more assistants than he needs isn’t his fault either. Life just isn’t fair, and today, I feel that stronger than most.
If life were fair, my father wouldn’t need this facility, my mother would be alive, and I would be a thriving painter living in the French Riviera like my mother and I always dreamed I would be.
Instead, pictures and memories are all I have left of her, and the paintings from my first gallery opening sit collecting dust in the storage unit.
My father’s door is partially closed. I knock gently and push it open. He’s in his recliner, hands folded on his lap, staring out the window at nothing in particular. For a moment, he doesn’t notice I’m there.
"Hey, Dad," I say softly.
He turns, and I see the moment his eyes try to place me. The slight frown as his brain works to fit this stranger into a file it can’t quite open.
"Hi there," he says, polite and distant. The way you greet someone you’re supposed to know but don’t quite. "Are you… Do I know you?"
The question lands hard against my chest. I sit down in the chair across from him and smile through the pain.
"I’m your daughter, Aria," I say gently.
He blinks for a second, and then when he opens his eyes, there’s something more familiar in them this time.
A smile starts to form on his lips. "Right, of course, Aria," he says, reaching out a hand. "I’m sorry, I—"
Shame flickers in his eyes that it took him a second to recognize me, but what he doesn’t understand is that he eventually did, and that’s the best I can ask for.
It still means progress even though he thinks he failed.
Because three years ago, after the car accident that took my mother’s life, he never would have recovered that fast and pulled me from his memory. The therapy is working.
That wasn’t a step back, just a stutter.
"It’s okay, Dad. You remembered. It just took a second."
He nods and then glances up at the picture of the three of us from my high school graduation on his dresser.
"Tomorrow’s the anniversary of when I met your mother," he says, and it warms my heart that no matter what else he forgets, he never forgets her. "Did I ever tell you how we met?"
I smile and place the box of cookies beside him. I remembered their anniversary, which is why I bought cookies from her favorite bakery today.
"Yes, but why don’t you tell me again over some cookies?"
He smiles when he reads the stamped logo on the white bakery box, then opens it carefully, like he’s handling something fragile. His big hands—still strong, even if his mind has become a revolving door—lift out a chocolate chip cookie.
"She was painting," he says, like that explains everything.
I laugh softly. "Of course she was."
He points the cookie at me. "Not in some little studio either.
Out on the promenade in Villefranche-sur-Mer with the sea behind her and sunlight everywhere.
She had this straw hat on and a scarf tied around her ponytail, and she was standing in front of an easel like she belonged there more than the boats did. "
Even though I’ve heard this story a dozen times, I settle in deeper.
"I was twenty-four and stupid," he goes on. "Thought I was sophisticated because I’d spent six months backpacking through Europe after college and could order wine without pointing at the menu. Your mother clocked me for exactly what I was in under ten seconds."
That makes me smile. It sounds like her.
"I’d stopped at the little open-air market that morning and bought peaches," he says.
"Too many peaches, because I didn’t know the French word for half kilo and accidentally asked for far more than one person should reasonably eat.
I was trying to carry them back to the guesthouse I was staying in, and one rolled out of the bag and straight across the promenade. "
I’m already grinning.
"It stopped right under your mother’s easel."
He pauses for effect, taking a bite of a cookie.
"She looked down at it, then up at me, and said, in French, ‘If this is your way of flirting, it needs work.’"
I laugh, because that part has always been my favorite.
"And because I was trying very hard to impress her," he says, "I answered in my terrible college French, ‘Then maybe you should teach me.’"
"Which you pronounced wrong," I remind him.
He squints at me. "I did not."
"You absolutely did."
He ignores that. "Your mother laughed anyway. Not a polite laugh. A real one. The kind that made her whole face change. She told me my accent was tragic, my peaches were bruising in the sun, and if I stood there staring at her another minute, I’d ruin her painting."
I can see it so clearly I almost forget I wasn’t there—the blue water, the tiled roofs, my mother with paint on her fingers and salt in her hair, my father young and hopelessly gone already.
"So naturally," he says, "I came back the next day."
"And the day after that," I say.
"And the day after that," he agrees. "At first I pretended I was there for the view."
"You were there for her."
"I was absolutely there for her."
He smiles down at the cookie, softer now.
"She was spending the summer with her aunt in Villefranche, painting every day, taking commissions when she had to, speaking French so fast I only caught every fourth word.
She said the light there was different. Kinder.
That the sea made everything look like it had been brushed with glass.
" He looks up at me. "She loved that place before she loved me. "
My throat tightens.
"She told me once that if she ever had a daughter, she wanted her to grow up speaking French and knowing there were places in the world where life could be beautiful and slow and full of color. Places where you didn’t have to earn joy.
You could just stand in it." He smiles. "She said maybe that daughter would live there one day. Maybe she’d paint there too. "
My eyes sting, but I blink it away.
"So you eloped," I say softly, because I know this part too.