“You don’t like the Rolls-Royce?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s a limo. With a uniformed driver.”
“So?”
“Well, the whole thing’s a little bit much, isn’t it?”
As much as he wanted to please her, Leonidas wasn’t quite ready for the subway. They compromised by having his driver, Jenkins—wearing street clothes, not his uniform—take them in Leonidas’s Range Rover.
When the two of them arrived at the Brooklyn co-op overlooking the river, the building’s doorman greeted Daisy with a warm smile, then glared at Leonidas.
“You all right, Miss Cassidy?” the man asked her.
She gave him a sweet smile. “Yes. Thank you, Walter.” She glanced at Leonidas, clearly enjoying his discomfiture.
“Thank you, Walter,” he echoed. The man scowled back. Obviously their last meeting, when Leonidas had threatened Daisy with lawyers, had been neither forgiven nor forgotten.
But Leonidas was even more discomfited, ten minutes later, when, upstairs in Bain’s apartment, Daisy announced she was entirely packed.
“That’s it?” Leonidas looked with dismay at her two suitcases and a large cardboard box full of books and a single canvas painting. “That is everything you own?”
Daisy shrugged. “I sold most of our family’s belongings last year, to pay for my father’s legal defense.” She hesitated as she said quietly, “The rest was sold to pay for the funeral.”
Her eyes met his, and his cheeks burned. Though she didn’t say more, he imagined her silently blaming him. When would she realize it wasn’t his fault? Not his fault that her father had decided to sell forgeries and needed a lawyer. Not his fault that Patrick Cassidy had died of a stroke in prison!
But arguing wouldn’t help anything. Choking back a sharp retort, he tried to imagine her feelings.
He took a deep breath.
“I’m sorry,” he said slowly. “That
must have been very hard.”
Looking down, she whispered, “It was.”
Leonidas glanced at the painted canvas resting in the cardboard box. It was a messy swirl of colors and shapes that seemed to have no unifying theme.
Following his glance, Daisy winced. “I know it’s not very good.”
Reaching down to the cardboard box, he picked up the painting. “I wouldn’t say that...”
“Stop. I know it’s terrible. I did it my final semester of art school. All I wanted was for it to be spectacular, amazing, so I kept redoing it, asking advice and redoing it based on everyone’s advice. I wanted it to be as good as the masters.”
“Maybe that’s the problem. It looks like a mash-up of every well-known contemporary artist. What about your own voice? What were you trying to say?”
“I don’t know,” she said in a low voice. “I don’t think I have a voice.”
“That’s not true,” he said softly, looking at her bowed head. He thought of her years of love and loyalty. “I think you do.”
Looking up, she gave an awkward laugh. “It’s okay. Really. I tried to be an artist and failed. I never sold a single painting, no matter how hard I tried. So I threw them all away, except this one. I keep thinking,” she said wistfully, brushing that canvas with her fingertips, “maybe someday, I’ll figure it out. Maybe someday, I’ll be brave enough to try again.” She gave him a small smile. “Stupid, huh?”
Before he could answer, their driver knocked on the door. He’d come upstairs to help carry the suitcases. Leonidas lifted the big cardboard box in his arms. But he noticed Daisy continued to grip the painting in her hands. She carefully tucked it on top of everything else, so it wouldn’t get crushed in the back of the Range Rover.
“Do you mind if we stop at the diner before we go back?” she said into the silence. He turned to her.
“Sure.”
Her lovely face looked a little sad. “I think I need to talk to my boss.”