Most days it was all right; or almost all right. Most days she could forget the loss and concentrate on the many gains. After all, whether she was in Canada or in Scotland, she could count on old and beloved friends for company and support. How many women of her age could say the same? She was blessed in so many ways. Except one.
Lawren was gone and the loss was just as huge now, as on the day, years before, when he died.
Of course, she could not go around moaning and complaining about the loss when so many others in the world had much more to worry about. When so many had lost children, or jobs, or their very homeland from wars and disasters for which the sufferers were never to blame.
Anna Mason Drake acknowledged all this and kept her mouth shut and her head up. Most days.
But in the dark, lonely night when she awoke and turned to seek warmth and comfort and found only an empty space, she lay awake and bereft.
How could it be that she had found the perfect man after giving up all hope of a fulfilling relationship and then lost him too soon?
Why did she hesitate to commit to him and waste all that time they could have spent together?
What difference had it made in the end that Lawren was several years her junior?
Why didn’t she jump into his arms the first time he made his feelings known to her?
Was it her failure with Richard that had caused such caution? If so, who cared? Richard was part of her youth, her inexperience, and he too was gone.
In the darkest moments she dreaded the thought that she would never again feel the strong arms of a man who loved her above all things. And yet, when the sun shone and the day was clear and cool with trees and flowerbeds in full bloom, she knew how lucky she had been to be loved at all by a man as special as Lawren Drake.
The world knew him as a consummate artist. A painter who could draw out of his human subject’s feelings and emotions they hardly knew existed. A portrait painter whose work had spoken to Anna’s heart the first time she saw it on the walls of a legal office boardroom in London, Ontario. She had not realized it then, but she later discovered his psychic ability to see the future in the faces of even young children. Liam and Annette were evidence of this. The children were now verging on their teen years and yet, the McLennan family portrait Lawren had completed when they were little ones, contained the essence of the young adults they were becoming in the present.
Anna had the ultimate evidence of this magical ability in her bedroom upstairs in the McCaig Estate Farmhouse in Oban. Lawren had created a large canvas showing three generations of McLeod women arranged in such a way that they were interconnected even although he had not met two of the generations and never knew the places he had hinted at in the background.
It was the one solace Anna had. She wished she might have it with her wherever she went but it was perfectly placed above the fireplace in their Scottish house and it would have risked damage to the priceless work to trail it around the world whenever she went on a plane.
And yet, the impulse to re-visit the portrait grew stronger the longer she was in Canada. It felt like coming home to be within sight of it again, but there was a reverse side to proximity, for this room was where they had lived and loved together in their happiest hours and there, eventually, was where she felt the most alone.
There was no answer to this quandary. The bottom line was simply that she missed Lawren Drake and always would.