CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

THE PARLOR WAS PACKED with people, both hotel guests and locals. Serena stood to the side, watching the event but not mingling. Selma McCann, the artist whose canvases were on display this month, had that part under control: she chatted easily with the guests, her expression as bright as the line of silver hoops that edged her left ear. Serena smiled, basking in the sensation of a job well done.

To say her idea had gotten off to a rough start would have been an understatement. After the initial gallery launch, she’d been so buried with work at the hotel that she’d had to rush to complete the next exhibit on time. Now she was glad she had. Selma pointed the man she’d been talking to in her direction, and Serena put on a friendly smile as he approached. Selma’s first sale.

By the time they were finished for the day, two of Selma’s eight paintings had sold. It might not have been the curation work to which Serena had once been accustomed, but somehow this gave her even more satisfaction. At nineteen, a young artist had made her first sales and gotten the encouragement she needed to continue with her art.

Even so, Serena was glad when the reception ended and she could grab a few minutes of quiet while she cleared abandoned appetizer plates and straightened the brochures and information cards on the rack. For the thousandth time in the past six weeks, she felt a wash of sadness at Malcolm’s absence. He would have been proud of what she’d accomplished, she thought. She just wished he could have been here to see it through to the end.

Well, she wished for a lot more than that. But in the past month, the anger and the grief had faded into a sort of gentle resignation, even acceptance. Yes, she’d loved Malcolm. She loved him still. But she had to accept that perhaps it hadn’t been the right time for them, that her true purpose for coming back to Skye was so she could shed her decades-long history of hurt and distrust.

She took the remaining plates to the kitchen, then strode back to the storage room, her mind already whirling with the other items on her to-do list. The housekeeper would come in to do a quick cleaning, and the sold paintings would need to be carefully packaged so the guests could take them when they left. First, however, she had to select new paintings to take their places and rearrange the remaining pieces in a way that showed them to their best advantage. Carefully she sorted through the paintings in the stack leaning against the back wall, choosing them more for their themes, sizes, and colors than any artistic merit. She had plenty to choose from, and the fact they were her own work no longer gave her pause. She’d forgotten how many paintings were stashed in the attic of her house in Nairn, wrapped to keep them from prying eyes, all but forgotten. Now they played a supporting role to other artists in her little gallery. She was comfortable with that. She didn’t need the acclaim or the validation to prove she was a great artist, because she wasn’t. It was enough to put them out there, to acknowledge that part of her existed, and it was okay if it wasn’t her identity. Because it was her choice.

Now that she’d admitted that to herself, the pile of paintings in the storeroom just kept growing, fueled by the art supplies and easel propped in the corner of her front lounge at home. Painting had become her respite, a way to pour out her feelings as she once had, something of a visual prayer. She’d forgotten how she felt God’s presence when she painted, as if He chose to communicate with her in a medium she was guaranteed to understand. Even if she could barely stand in front of the easel without thinking of the first time she had shown Malcolm her artwork, she recognized that too as an answer to a silent prayer. Without his little nudge of encouragement, she might have succumbed to that critical inner voice that had smothered both her creativity and her spirit.

Still, whatever she might have gained from the experience, six weeks was not enough time to erase love. And she could finally face the truth: she’d made a mistake in not fighting harder for her future with Malcolm, in not trying to work things out. Somehow. Any way they could manage.

Slowly she removed a rectangular piece of cardstock from the reception-desk drawer, where it had been stashed for the past month. It was a pastel version of the Callisto painting, drawn on one side of a heavy postcard, the other side already addressed to Malcolm in Baltimore. She just hadn’t been able to bring herself to send it. She still didn’t have the words to adequately express her feelings. But maybe it didn’t need to be complicated. The truest words were often the simplest.

She took out a felt-tip pen and scrawled a message on the back side before she could talk herself out of it.

I miss you. I love you. Serena.

She put a stamp on the corner and dropped the postcard into the basket of outgoing mail on the front desk, the pounding of her heart nearly as strong as her urge to take it out.

Instead, she went back to the storeroom for a second painting. When she returned, a man was standing in the gallery examining the details of one of Selma’s charcoals.

“That one is sold, but the one next to it is still available if you fancy landscapes.”

The man straightened and turned, and her heart nearly stopped. “Malcolm?”

He smiled uncertainly. “Hi, Serena.”

She stared in disbelief. His hair was a bit longer, his face clean-shaven, making him look younger and even more handsome than she remembered. Was he really standing there in the hotel parlor, or was she at home in bed, dreaming? It wouldn’t have been the first time her imagination had summoned him in her sleep.

He shifted uncomfortably under her stare. When she didn’t speak, he moved to her and took the painting from her numb fingers. “Let me help you with that. I assume you’re replacing the pieces that have been sold?”

He held the painting up, taking in the swirl of colors against the dark-blue background: a woman, chained with threads of stardust, looking with longing across a star-bright sky. “Wait. This is Andromeda. Like your Callisto.”

Serena nodded dumbly, using the time to find her voice. “What are you doing here?”

He carefully set the painting down against the wall. “Is there somewhere we could talk?”

“Yeah, I . . . Let me get Catriona. I brought her in to help while I worked the art reception.” Feeling unsteady on her feet, the thrum of blood whooshing through her ears with each heartbeat, she went back to the manager’s office to let the woman know she was stepping out.

She followed Malcolm out the front door, and he led her across the car park to the meadow alongside the hotel. The green field was now studded with summer wildflowers that swayed in the cool breeze blowing off the sound, brilliant bursts of white and yellow and purple. The whole time Serena stole glances at him, trying to reconcile his presence beside her with the fact she’d thought she’d never see him again.

“You lost the beard,” she said finally.

He ran his hand over his smooth chin. “It was time for a change.”

“You’ve gone all clean-shaven and professional now that you’re a software engineer again?”

“Something like that.”

“How’s Kylee adapting to Boston?” If she kept talking, kept asking questions, maybe it would keep the answers from hurting so much.

“She’s doing well. She starts classes next month. She stayed behind while I came back to deal with the house and ship the rest of our things.”

So he wasn’t back for her. Thank God she hadn’t yet sent off that postcard. Serena forced down the spike of pain and made her voice strong. “I’m glad you came by, but I should finish up inside now. It’s good that things have worked out so well for you two.”

His hand shot out to grip her arm, and her traitorous heart did its customary leap the minute his fingertips touched her skin. “That’s the thing. They really haven’t.”

“I thought you got your job back. The one you wanted.”

“I did.” Malcolm took a deep breath and pulled her to face him. “Everything fell into place. I got my job back—a better one, actually—and rented a house. We went to Boston to look at apartments and roommate listings, but everything was too expensive or too rowdy or got rented out from under us. I was starting to get worried that we’d moved there just to have no place for Kylee to stay.

“And then one Sunday, Kylee and I happened into this church in Boston, one we randomly picked as we walked by. And who should we meet there but the Mitchell family, originally of Edinburgh, now Boston residents. They just happened to have a daughter who is a sophomore at Berklee.”

The slow, steady creep of understanding came over her. “Someone to show Kylee the ropes?”

“More than that. They have a vacant apartment over their garage. The daughter wanted to live there, but they also needed the rent. So now Kylee has a roommate.”

“And a Scottish family to look out for her.”

“Exactly. Completely opposite of the situation we were seeking, but it was an answer to prayer.”

He paused for a moment and took her hand. Her heart gave another leap at his touch. “Here’s the thing. The whole time, I knew I was doing the right thing in helping Kylee reach her dreams and making sure she was looked after. And when we met the Mitchells, I realized that just because Kylee is supposed to live in America doesn’t mean I am.”

Serena caught her breath, her free hand going to her chest in a vain attempt to loosen the sudden tightness there.

“Serena, I love you. I’ve been miserable without you. I couldn’t figure out how to reconcile my responsibilities with the feeling I’d just made the biggest mistake of my life. And now I know it was because I was only supposed to get Kylee started on her way and let her go. My place is here with you.”

Serena just stared, unable to form words. Tears welled in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. “I don’t know what to say. I’d resigned myself to the idea that we weren’t meant to be, and now—”

“Say you love me, that you’ll forgive me for leaving you. Say you’ll marry me.” He reached into his inner pocket and pulled out a ring, holding it between two fingers so that the stone glinted in the sunlight.

Her eyes rose to his face, and the earnestness and love there took her breath away. She realized then that she had no need for fancy words or an elaborate proposal. It was all just window dressing for the fact that after all her tears and loneliness and doubt, God had heard her after all. He had brought Malcolm back to her.

“Yes,” she said simply. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”

He slid the ring onto her finger, then threaded his hand through her hair and bent to kiss her—gently, sweetly, and with such tenderness that the tears returned in force. When they parted, she held out her hand to admire the ring—an old-fashioned white-gold band with the most unusual purple stone she’d ever seen.

He followed her gaze and smiled. “There’s a story behind this one. This is the ring I had picked for you, but I never went back for it. I didn’t expect that it would still be there when I returned to Scotland. But the jeweler had misplaced it and never completed the restoration work, so it hadn’t been put on display. It was waiting there for me when I got back. Some coincidence, huh?”

“I don’t believe in coincidence anymore,” she said, stretching up on tiptoes to steal another kiss, her heart full. “Some things are just meant to be.”