Chapter 3 #2
In return, I encourage him to believe he's more than his reputation, though it takes weeks of small, patient chipping before he stops deflecting every compliment with a joke.
I tell him I don't believe the version of him the town's decided on.
He tells me nobody's ever un-decided it before, not really, not all the way, and I tell him I intend to be the first.
"Bold words, preacher's daughter."
"I contain multitudes," I say, and he laughs so hard he nearly falls off the back step, and something in my chest, some long-locked door, creaks another inch open.
"You stole that line from me."
"I improved it."
"You did not improve it, you're just using it against me now, which is deeply unfair given I invented it."
"Nothing in the terms and conditions said exclusive use."
"There were terms and conditions?"
"Implied ones. You should read more carefully."
My father notices before I do. That's the trouble with a small town and a father who's spent twenty-five years reading my every mood like scripture.
"You've been at the shelter a great deal," he says one evening, not looking up from his sermon notes.
"The project's nearly finished."
"I hear you've been spending time with the Mercer boy specifically."
I keep my face carefully neutral, a skill I've had a great deal of practice with. "He's been helpful. Knowledgeable about the roofing work."
My father sets down his pen. Looks at me directly, which he doesn't do often — usually his attention is somewhere half a step removed, on his notes, on the congregation, on the next thing needing tending.
"Ruthie. Men like that — men who live the way he lives — they have a certain effect on women like you. Women who've been sheltered. Protected. It can feel like excitement, at first. Like freedom. But it rarely ends well, and I would hate for you to learn that the hard way."
"I appreciate your concern," I say, which is true, and also nothing, a sentence built entirely to end the conversation without agreeing to anything.
He seems satisfied by it. Goes back to his notes.
I sit across from him at the kitchen table, hands folded, the very picture of the good, obedient daughter he raised, and think, for the first time in my life, a thought I don't dare say aloud.
He might be wrong.
I don't say it. I don't even fully let myself think it in full sentences.
But it sits there anyway, small and stubborn and entirely new, and I go to bed that night with my father's warning in one ear and Gabriel's voice — that's not how unhappy works — in the other, and I already know, somewhere underneath all my careful composure, which one is going to win.
There's a moment, before all of that, that I keep returning to when I let myself. Back in the studio, after the tears, after he'd asked how long I'd been painting, he picked up the smallest canvas in the stack — a portrait, unfinished, of a woman I barely remember.
"Who's this?" he asked.
"My mother."
He went very still. "You said you found her paints in the attic."
"I did. I found a photograph too. This is from the photograph.
" I took it from him gently, set it back against the wall, face out, because I don't usually let it face out, but that day it felt right to.
"She died when I was four. I don't have real memories of her.
Just the ones my father's told me, and one photograph, and a set of paints she apparently loved and never got to use nearly enough. "
"What was she like? According to your father."
"Warm. Funny. She used to sing while she cooked, badly, on purpose, to make my father laugh.
She wanted to travel — that's the part he doesn't tell me often, but Mrs. Petraki let it slip once, years ago.
She wanted to see the ocean. The mountains.
All the places I paint without ever having been anywhere. "
"You're painting her dreams," Gabriel said quietly. "Not just your own."
I hadn't thought of it that way before, not in so many words, but the second he said it, I knew it was true, and something in my chest ached with the rightness of it.
"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe I just needed something to want that felt like mine, and this was already sitting in the attic waiting."
"Can be both things."
"Can it?"
"Sure. Most true things are more than one thing at once.
" He looked at the portrait a moment longer, something soft and unguarded in his face that I hadn't seen from him before, not even in the club, not even joking with Diesel.
"I never knew my mother at all. Not even a photograph.
So I think it's a gift, actually. Having one thing of hers, even secondhand. Even through a paintbrush."
I hadn't known that about him — the total absence, not even a single photograph — and it landed somewhere deep, a small shared ache neither of us had asked for and both of us apparently carried anyway.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Don't be. Can't miss what you never had, not really. Not the same way." He said it lightly, but I'd already learned enough about Gabriel Mercer to know that lightly was often exactly where his heaviest things lived.
We didn't say much else that afternoon. We just sat on the floor of my closet-studio, backs against opposite walls, looking at years of my secret paintings in comfortable, unhurried quiet, and when he finally left — out the side door, two streets to his bike, gone before my father's truck could round the corner — I stood in the doorway of my own studio for a long time afterward, feeling like something in the room had shifted permanently, in a way I couldn't quite name and didn't especially want to name yet.
The following week, Briar stops by the shelter site with a delivery of flowers for the front planter boxes, part of the same charity push, and she and I end up talking longer than either of us plans to, sitting on the tailgate of her delivery van while the crew finishes up for the day.
"You're the one Saint's been asking about," Briar says, matter-of-fact, arranging stems into a bucket of water like it's the most natural conversation in the world.
"He's been asking about me?"
"To Wren. Who told Gemma. Who told me. Small club, smaller grapevine." She glances up, smiling. "Don't look so panicked. It's a good sign. He doesn't usually ask about anybody."
"We're just friends."
"Sure," Briar says, in exactly the same tone Nadia used, like it's a phrase the whole club has agreed to say back to me until I stop believing it myself. "You know, if you ever want somewhere to actually show your work — not hide it in a closet, show it — my shop's got wall space. Just saying."
"How do you know I paint?"
"Small club, smaller grapevine," she says again, laughing, and I realize, sitting there on the tailgate with the last of the daylight fading gold across the shelter's half-finished roof, that my careful, contained secret has already traveled further than I ever intended it to, and instead of the panic I'd expect, I mostly just feel relieved.
Lighter. Like a weight I've been carrying alone has quietly, without my permission, started being shared.