Chapter Ten
Hannah tugged at the edge of her wide-brimmed hat to help block out the June sunshine. She’d already slid over one tail of the scarf she’d tied around the brim and spread it out a bit, so the draped material created a further shield from the glare. That was why she hadn’t seen him until just that moment, when she’d turned to squeeze a little more paint onto her palette.
Will was sitting at the very back of the amphitheater. With . . . was that Bailey?
Hannah squinted and shielded her eyes. She shouldn’t stare; it was just so unexpected. Not that he would see her anyway. She had positioned her easel and canvas east of the stage, so she could capture the sweep of the broad-beamed awning that extended outward from over the stage toward the seats that had been built into the slope of the hill, amphitheater style. The top of the hill leveled off, providing lawn seating, but the way the pavilion-style stage had been built, down in the hollow, provided wonderful, natural acoustics. The venue was rustic and seemed to fit organically into the lay of the land, as if it was meant to be there, had always been there.
The mill was not quite a quarter mile away, through a copse of pine, cedar, and sycamore trees that dotted the edge of Big Stone Creek. Cars were parked in a cleared stretch between the two venues for those who wanted to drive in. Natural footpaths and trails that connected the mill and the music venue had been cleared of fallen limbs and leaves, widened where necessary, and clearly marked, so guests could wander from one location to the other. A series of hand-hewn benches created by a few of the mill artisans had been added in several spots near the water. A small number of picnic tables, grills, and fire pits would eventually be added along the riverside trails as well, hopefully before summer’s end.
Hannah had wandered the footpaths several times with her sketch pad and pencils, doing some rough drafts of scenes that had caught her attention. The venue itself was beautiful, rich with color, and now with the music filling the warm, late afternoon air, she’d given in to the urge and gone and gotten her paints and supplies from her Jeep, thankful she’d had a small, blank canvas tucked in her large tote along with her watercolor pads. Just in case. She didn’t work with oils often, preferring the soft wash of watercolors, but she’d given in to the urge to dabble, and was pleased with her results so far.
At the moment though, her painting was forgotten, as she tried not to watch Will, watching his son play the fiddle . . . and failed miserably. Jake had been onstage several times over the past two hours, playing and singing both, sometimes pairing with Seth’s wife, Pippa, other times with various other musicians, and a few times he’d taken that big stage by himself. He was a remarkable talent both singing and playing, and Hannah simply couldn’t believe he’d only picked up a bow just a year before. Jake was an amazing musician, and watching him, it was clear his passion for the instrument matched his talent. She remembered his excitement about growing grapes and wondered which passion would win out when it came time to pursue a career path.
Hannah had no idea how long Will had been there, but it filled her heart to see he’d come. She and Jake hadn’t spoken much since her talk with Will in Vivi’s bedroom, just enough to give her a chance to make sure Jake knew she wasn’t put out with him for any reason. Hannah knew, however, that Will didn’t involve himself in Jake’s musical ventures, and that it apparently had something to do with Jake’s mom.
It was funny, Hannah mused, as she watched Bailey talking animatedly to Will after they finished applauding the song that Jake and the other musicians had just finished playing. When she’d been trying to find ways to learn more about Will McCall without coming out and asking, she’d been stymied at every turn.
Now that he had finished the work on the fireplaces and chimneys out at the farmhouse, and hadn’t yet begun the other stonework Vivi had discussed with him, Hannah didn’t see him regularly anymore. Or at all, actually. Yet, it seemed that all anyone did when they were around her was talk about Will and Jake McCall.
Hannah had told herself it was for the best that he wasn’t in her daily orbit, that she’d had the chance to make sure Jake knew she wasn’t upset with him in any way, but that he, too, was off doing other things and they no longer crossed paths with any regularity. Will was still dealing with his past, and had his hands full raising a smart, energetic, brilliantly talented young man. Hannah had her hands full, too: Lavender Blue’s welcome party was all but upon them; the learning curve of getting the farm up and producing was still an overwhelming factor; and she was painting again, producing work that she, as a full member of the Bluebird Crafters Guild now, would be making available for sale, both at the mill and out at the farmhouse.
Better for the two of them to pursue their own paths forward. That not-kiss-that-had-totally-been-a-kiss was a pleasant memory. Okay, maybe a thrilling memory in many ways. Nothing wrong with that. A good piece of information to know about herself as she moved onward with her life here in her new home. She could feel things again, things a woman felt, separate and apart from being a mother or a businesswoman. That was good to know. Some future time, maybe she’d be fortunate enough to meet someone, and who knew . . . maybe she’d open herself up to that part of her life again. Once the farm was going, and she was more settled into her new routine with the mill and her work. Maybe.
So why does just looking at Will McCall make your heart pound and your mood brighten right up? She was going to stop staring at him, go back to her painting. Any second now.
And then it was too late. He turned his head, and despite the great distance between them, she felt the moment he laid eyes on her as surely as if he’d reached out and touched her. Feeling pinned to the spot by the weight of his gaze, she floundered. Should I wave? Nod? Acknowledge that we’re staring at each other?
“Should you stop being a complete and utter ninny about the man?” she muttered under her breath, feeling ridiculous and all pent up, all at the same time.
But she didn’t look back at her painting. And he didn’t look away.
Then Bailey glanced her way, too. They were too far away for Hannah to see clearly any nuances in their expressions, but Bailey lifted her hand and waved. Hannah started to wave back, realizing too late that she still had the brush in her hand, and flung bits of sierra orange onto her shirt and face.
Hannah spluttered and laughed, immediately reaching for her rag to wipe the paint from where it had splattered across her mouth. Bailey clapped a hand over her own mouth, clearly not so far away that she hadn’t figured out what had happened. Hannah turned to clean up as best she could, thankful she’d donned her apron and an old cotton shirt before starting. Fortunately, she hadn’t splattered the painting itself. When she’d set things right, she turned back toward the duo in the farthermost reaches of the amphitheater, only to discover their seats were now empty.
She scanned the area and finally saw Bailey talking to Jake, who was seated at the edge of the stage, his legs dangling over the edge, fiddle propped in his lap. Hannah scanned the area again, wondering if Will had taken off now that rehearsal was apparently over, wondering why he, too, hadn’t stopped to talk to Jake first.
“Hannah.”
She spun around, thankfully with no loaded paintbrush in her hand this time, to find Will standing just a few yards behind her. “Will.” Beaming at the mere sight of him, her expression faltered as she caught sight of his face. He looked . . . gutted. She immediately walked toward him, her determination to put him in her rearview window instantly forgotten—again—concern for him now the only thing on her mind. “Are you okay? What’s happened?”
“I’m sorry to interrupt your painting,” he said, his voice a bit rougher, a bit deeper than usual.
“No, I’m just dabbling,” she said, waving off her work.
He looked past her at the canvas. “That’s more than dabbling.” He cleared his throat, kept his gaze on her work. “You’re capturing the exact essence of the place.”
“Thank you,” she said, still looking at Will, trying to figure out what was really going on. “I don’t usually work with oil paints,” she added as he continued to look at the painting. “But it’s something that’s been in my mind for a while.”
“With good reason, it looks like. What will you do with it when you’re finished?”
She started to brush away his polite comments in order to turn the focus back to him, then thought maybe the small talk was helping him work his way to whatever it was he’d sought her out to say. She turned to look at the piece, which was only partly done. “Addie Pearl and the guild have accepted me as a fellow Bluebird. I’ll be selling my work from my own spot in the mill. Eventually,” she added. She turned back to the painting, which still held his attention. “I’m not sure I’ll finish this one, though. I just needed to start it to get the image of it out of my mind and onto canvas.” She shifted her gaze back to his. “I know, sounds like a big waste of time and paint, but it’s sort of like bookmarking an idea for me. If it pulls me in, I’ll keep going. If not . . .” She lifted a shoulder. “I’ll move on to something else.”
That earned a brief smile as he looked from the painting to her, though his eyes still looked hollow. “How many unfinished canvases do you have?”
Her expression turned a shade wry. “I might have had one or two or thirty stacked up against walls in my studio before I moved out here. I did manage to part with them when I packed up.” She gestured to the canvas on the easel. “This might be the beginning of my new unfinished collection.”
His lips curved briefly again, nodded, but that haunted look remained.
Hannah was at a loss as to what to say that would help. Should she mention Jake’s amazing talent or how wonderful it had been to hear him play and sing? Or be more direct, and ask what had made Will decide to attend the rehearsal? It wasn’t something they’d spoken about directly before, so that seemed perhaps a bit too forward.
The silence drew out, but before she could decide on the best path to take, Will finally spoke and made the decision for her.
“I know you have a great many things to do before the welcome party out at the farm,” he began. “And now with your guild membership. Congratulations on that, by the way. They don’t just accept anyone, though with your obvious talent and career as an illustrator, they’re lucky to have you.”
“Thank you, that’s kind of you to say,” she said, briefly ducking her chin. “And I’m not so busy I couldn’t find time to waste on a new canvas. What do you need? Is it about Jake? Does he need a ride up to Seth’s?” She suspected it was about far more than that, but didn’t know how else to help him into a conversation he was clearly struggling to find a way to start.
He shook his head. “Pippa is driving him and Bailey on up. Addie Pearl will get them later and take them both to her place.”
“I got here just before Pippa rehearsed. She’s amazing.”
Will nodded and an even bleaker look flashed across his face. “She is that.”
“I understand she donated the proceeds of her last album to help build this entire venue. That’s incredible. Jake has spoken of her many times, and all she’s done. He’s so fortunate to have her as a teacher,” Hannah went on, keeping the conversation steady, when what she wanted to do was walk up to Will, wrap her arms around him, and hold on. Let him hold on to her. “I confess I wasn’t familiar with her music before. I never listened to much folk music before moving here, but I can understand why she’s the big deal she is in the music world.”
Will nodded, and if it were possible, looked even a bit more lost than he had before.
Hannah couldn’t keep up the pretense of normalcy any longer. She walked to him, put a hand on his arm, and looked him directly in the face. “Will, what is it?” she asked quietly. “Talk to me.” She searched his face. “You can, you know. About anything.”
He nodded, and a glassy sheen entered his eyes. “It’s hard,” he said, at length, but held her gaze. “Asking for help.”
Her heart squeezed painfully tight at what was clearly a difficult admission from him, and she reached up without thinking that they were in a public place, or what it might look like. At the moment, it was simply the two of them, and one of them was in need. She cupped his cheek with her hand, placed her other hand on his chest. It was a far more intimate gesture than she’d have made had she taken any time to think it through. She’d simply moved to him instinctively, feeling his pain, needing to soothe it. “One of the hardest,” she said softly. “I’ll help any way I can.”
He looked down into her eyes, not moving away from her touch. If anything, he moved into it. “I don’t want to drag you through your past,” he said, his voice no more than a rough burr, so quiet it just reached her ears. “You’ve done the hard work. I just . . .” He broke off, searched her gaze, then said, “I want to figure out how to do that, how to be able to listen to my son sing and play the fiddle, and not get swamped with feeling . . . everything.”
Hannah’s mouth curved into a tender, sad smile then. “That is the hard work,” she told him. “Letting yourself be swamped.”
She hadn’t thought his beautiful eyes could look more bleak. It was the other thing she saw there, though, that tugged her heart even more firmly toward him. Fear. She understood that intimately.
“It feels brutal at the time,” she said quietly, “like you’re just pummeling yourself, like you’re going to drown in sorrow if you don’t do something, anything, to keep yourself from feeling like that, from remembering things that are so painful.”
“How long?” he asked, and she understood that, too.
If someone could just tell you how long it was going to take until you started to come out the other side, to find a way to manage the tidal wave of emotion, harness it and turn it into something manageable, you could stick it out. But it didn’t work that way. At least it hadn’t for her. “You can’t just suffer through it,” she told him. “You have to let yourself feel it, and find new ways to think about what you’re feeling, so you’ll eventually be able to recall past events in the context of what they meant to you then. If it was a lovely memory before, you need to find a way to remember it as a lovely memory now. Poignant, yes, heartbreaking even, but honor the lovely part, and in time, it helps mitigate the heartbreaking part. At least, that’s how it worked for me. Not everyone processes things the same.”
He took a steadying breath, closed his eyes tightly for a moment, then opened them again, casting his gaze downward. “I don’t know how you did it,” he said, sounding overwhelmed by the task ahead.
“I didn’t,” she said simply. “In the end, I let Liam do it for me.”
His gaze lifted straight to hers. “How do you mean?”
“I started trying to live through the avalanche of memories that seemed to bombard me every waking minute of every single day from his perspective, not mine. For example, I used to see kids playing and I’d get hit by this wall of crippling grief, realizing that I would never get to watch my son play like that ever again. A cavalcade of images of him would assault me—that’s what it felt like, a physical assault—of Liam laughing, Liam playing, all the most beautiful images of him that I would never be able to add to.”
She saw Will’s throat work, and he looked away, past her shoulder for a moment. “I shouldn’t be asking this of you.”
She urged his face back to hers. Her eyes were a little glassy now, too, but that was okay. “Sometimes it still overwhelms me. You saw that up close and personal. But most of the time, I can look at things through his eyes. Remember how much joy he took, like in the example I just gave. Instead of seeing through my sad, grieving lens, I started looking at life through his. How much joy he’d taken in swinging on those swings, sliding down that slide. And I’d hug that joy so tight. Revel in his joy, his laughter, remember all the good and wonderful things he was. Honoring that, honoring who he was, instead of honoring my grief, my loss.”
He nodded, and when she went to slide her hand away, he simply covered it with his own, held it there. Maybe her throat worked a bit then, too. His hand was warm, strong, and remarkably steady, and she drew strength from it, even as she hoped he drew strength from her words.
She waited for him to meet her gaze again. “I began making those memories about him, not about me. I told myself it wasn’t fair to remember him and be sad.” She smiled. “He was a great kid, flaws and all. He deserved to be remembered happily, joyfully. He’d want to bring me joy, not pain. That should be his legacy, you know?”
Will nodded, and his gaze stayed on hers then, as if he was holding on.
“Once I started to think about it that way . . . well, I won’t say I began to heal, because there is no healing. Not really. You can’t expect to get over it. Nor did I want to. I don’t want to forget Liam, or never think about him. This is who I am now, this is my life now. So I had to find a way to live life and keep him in it, but in a way that was good and positive. It was when I started to figure that out, instead of just wishing the suffering would end, that I found a way to move forward. For me, that meant taking Liam forward with me, too. He’s not here physically, but that doesn’t mean I can’t share my life with him.” She smiled more fully then, even as she blinked away a few tears. “I guess you could say he’s like my guardian angel. I want him to be watching over me and feel happy to see what I’m doing, how I’m living my life. I work hard to be the person, the mom, the whatever, he’d want me to be. Maybe that’s nuts, or weird, but I also gave up caring about what my choices looked like to anyone else. If I’m finding a way to live a life that feels good, honest, and positive, then that seems like a healthy outlook to me. It’s a livable one, at any rate. And I’ll take that.”
Will continued to study her eyes, her face, looking at her, into her, and seemed to take her words truly to heart. “You’re a remarkable person,” he told her, and she saw that the grief, the pain, and the fear had ebbed from his eyes. “I’ve seen a lot, done a lot,” he said, “here, and overseas when I was in the military, and I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone as strong or as resilient.”
She let out a short laugh. “Trust me, I’m not all that. I’m just . . . finding my way.” She looked up into his eyes. “I’m like that canvas, a work in progress that never quite gets finished. I just have this vision about how I want my life to be, like a giant painting, and I work toward filling it all in. I wish I could say it stops being work, but it doesn’t. Not for me, anyway. I can say that after a while, the work feels normal, and okay. Like doing a good day’s work feels good, this does, too.”
They were all but standing in each other’s arms, and so it shouldn’t have surprised her when he pulled her the rest of the way in, but it did. He hugged her, tightly. She slid her arms around his waist and hugged him back.
“Thank you,” he murmured against her ear. “I don’t know if I deserved the gift you just gave me.” He leaned back then but didn’t let her go completely. “You’ve given me a lot to think about,” he said, his gaze directly on hers again. “And a new way of looking at things. It’s a way forward, or at least a way to start getting unstuck. I don’t know how to properly thank you for that.”
“If it helps you, then it was my pleasure,” she said. “And I mean that. More of that good work, you know?”
He smiled then, and it warmed his eyes. “I do. I can tell you this. If you’re trying to live a life that would make your son proud of you, you’re succeeding. You’re a hell of a woman, Hannah Montgomery, whether you understand or believe that or not. Thank you.” He took in a breath and she could feel the shakiness of it, and again when he let it out, but some of the tension left him along with it. “And I hope it’s okay to say this, but thank Liam for me, too.”