Moonlight in the Morning Read online

  Jecca didn’t even defend herself by pointing out that she hadn’t been the one to close it.

  “You are in a very bad way,” Mr. Boswell said. “I have to clean up some paperwork, then I’ll be there to take you out to lunch. And Jecca?”

  “Yes?”

  “People don’t really die from a broken heart. It just feels like you will.”

  “I guess I’ll find out, won’t I?” she said and hung up.

  Mr. Boswell was true to his word. Thirty minutes later, there were three artists in the gallery, their arms full of what they’d done in the last weeks. And just as Mr. Boswell had said, they blamed Jecca for the gallery being closed.

  “You could have talked to Andrea,” they said. “At least tried to persuade her.”

  At first Jecca had explained that she’d wanted time to do her own work, but by the third accusation she gave up. She said, “That’s me. Selfish to t. S0emhe core. Now what do you have to show me?”

  At one, Mr. Boswell arrived with a young woman fresh out of college with a degree in fine arts. “She’s your Jecca, your perfect assistant,” Mr. Boswell said, then before she could reply, he escorted Jecca out the door.

  They had lunch at a tiny Italian place, and Mr. Boswell didn’t give Jecca a chance to think about what had happened in her life. He tried to entertain her with stories of Andrea and how she’d nearly driven her father insane since she left.

  But Jecca wasn’t in a laughing mood. She listened to the stories, but she surreptitiously checked her phone every few minutes. No messages.

  She went back to the gallery. She’d been told the young woman’s name was Della, but she didn’t ask more than that. They spent the afternoon going over paintings and small sculptures.

  “These are great!” Della said. “Who did these? They aren’t signed.”

  Della had opened Jecca’s art box and had removed the work she’d done in Edilean. Spread out on the floor were about thirty paintings and drawings of Tristan. In one he was holding Nell. In another one, he was looking up from a book, his eyes full of love. Jecca knew that he’d been looking at her.

  “Talk about gorgeous,” Della said. “Is he a professional model?”

  “No!” Jecca said sharply. “He’s a doctor and he—” She began to gather up the paintings. “These aren’t to be put on display.”

  “But those will sell. I’ll buy the one of him looking over a book. If a man looked at me like that I’d—” She broke off because Jecca was glaring at her. “Oh. Is he the ‘bad breakup’ Mr. Boswell mentioned?”

  Jecca didn’t reply, just put the paintings away. She wanted to sell, but right now she couldn’t bear to spend her days looking at Tristan.

  At five, Mr. Boswell sent a young man to take Jecca to look at apartments. She wasn’t surprised when he told her he was single. It looked like Mr. Boswell was trying to patch up Jecca’s heart with another man.

  She took the first apartment she saw. It was in a building owned by Mr. Preston, had a balcony, and windows with a view. It was the kind of apartment a New Yorker dreamed of, but Jecca hardly looked at it. It had a few pieces of furniture but no linens. The young man offered to go shopping with her and afterward have a late dinner, but she turned him down.

  She went out to buy sheets and towels, and when she got back she was too tired to put them on. She unfolded a sheet, stretched out on it, checked her phone—nothing—then went to sleep.

  In the morning when there were still no messages from Tristan, she felt a bit better. If he could cut her off so easily, so could she.

  She showered, put on her jeans, and went out to breakfast. On her way to work she stopped in a store and redressed herself more appropriately. As she left and saw her reflection in a window, she thought she looked more New York and less Edilean.

  There were two artists waiting for her at the or an to tgallery, their arms full of their work.

  “That’s good,” Della said. “I like it. Although I hope someone steps on his blue crayon.”

  She and Jecca were looking at a series of oils of landscapes. They were part modern, part Ashcan School, with a hint of Salvador Dali thrown in. What united them was what seemed to be a thousand shades of blue.

  “He read that Picasso had a Blue Period, so this guy wants his biographer to say the same thing about him,” Jecca said.

  “Or he watches Avatar six times a day,” Della said. “Besides, he has a bigger ego than that. It’s biographers plural.”

  “Think he’s chosen the spot for the library that will be erected in his honor?” Jecca asked, and Della laughed.

  Jecca stood back and looked at the paintings. In the weeks that she’d been back from Edilean, she’d worked hard to put her emotions in the background. She hadn’t been fully successful, but she was beginning to recover.

  In those weeks she hadn’t heard from anyone except Kim—and she had refused to even mention Tristan.

  “I’m not going to say ‘I told you so,’” Kim said.

  “I know,” Jecca replied, “but you deserve to say it.”

  “No, I don’t. I wish . . .” She didn’t say what she wished. Instead, the two women talked about work. They made a silent pact to keep their conversation away from men.

  It hurt Jecca that Mrs. Wingate and Lucy didn’t seem to want anything to do with her. She’d thought they were becoming friends, but it looked like she had only been a tenant.

  Lucy was the worst. On their single phone call, she’d acted like Jecca was an enemy trying to get information from her. Jecca didn’t call her again, and after three e-mails that Lucy answered in a cool, reserved way, she stopped those too.

  When Jecca called Mrs. Wingate, she was charming. But there was no laughter over pole dancing, no information about the playhouse, and no talk at all about Tristan or Nell, or anyone Jecca had met in Edilean.

  Those calls also stopped.

  But the most hurt, the very deepest, was her father. For two weeks Jecca had been so angry at him that the only thing she wanted to hear from him was an abject apology. Groveling. Begging for her to forgive him.

  But there was nothing, not a message of any kind, and certainly no apology. As time passed, in spite of her resolve, Jecca began to soften toward her father.

  At the end of three silent weeks, one Sunday afternoon, Jecca called the house in New Jersey. To her horror, Sheila answered. Jecca almost hung up.

  “He’s not here,” Sheila said, “and he won’t be—”

  Joey snatched the phone away from his wife. “Hey, Jec, ol’ girl, how’s New w didnYork?”

  “The same as always. Where is Dad?”

  “Out.”

  “Out where?”

  “So when are you coming to visit us? The kids miss you. And I got some rototillers that need cleaning.”

  “Joey, stop avoiding me and tell me where Dad is.”

  “I, uh . . . Jecca, he asked me not to tell you about him.”

  She was shocked. “He did what?”

  “Look,” Joey said, “he’ll call you later, okay? Don’t worry about anything. He’s not mad at you anymore. I gotta go. Come see us. Or look online. We put up new pictures of what we did to the store. ’Bye, little sister.”

  “’Bye, Bulldog,” she said, but her brother had already hung up.

  Jecca stood there for a few minutes, unable to think clearly. Her father was no longer angry at her?! She was the one who had a right to be furious. He was the one who’d overstepped the boundaries of . . .

  Who was she kidding? When it came to his children—especially his daughter—Joe Layton’s interference knew no bounds.

  By the fourth week, Jecca was beginning to recover. If the people of Edilean wanted nothing to do with her, she wouldn’t bother them. She quit calling them, quit trying to keep in contact with them. Instead, she turned her attention fully on the work of getting the gallery going again. She put on a champagne party and invited some of Mr. Preston’s richest friends. It was a great success.

&nb