Chapter 3
We opened the archive that night.
Camellia kept it in a storage apartment across town.
Of course she did.
Not in her gallery.
Not in her home.
Somewhere she could claim distance.
Rafe brought the boxes.
Thirty-two.
Sketchbooks.
Letters.
Canvas rolls.
Charcoal studies.
Then I found my father.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Young.
Middle-aged.
Laughing once.
Angry twice.
Never posed formally.
Eleanor had drawn him as if she knew his face when he forgot anyone was watching.
That disturbed me.
My father did not let people see him that way.
I looked at Mavis.
“What was their relationship?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t know.”
Camellia did.
Her silence told me.
I turned.
“Say it.”
She sat down.
“My mother believed Eleanor was in love with him.”
I felt nothing at first.
Then irritation.
“My father was married.”
“So was Eleanor.”
“That answers nothing.”
Camellia continued carefully.
No affair had ever been proven.
But Eleanor had been around Ashcroft for years.
Commissioned privately by my mother, Helena, to sketch family members informally.
Why?
Because my mother hated official portraits.
She wanted people as they actually looked.
So Eleanor drew everyone.
My father most often.
Then one year, suddenly stopped.
“What year?”
Camellia looked at Mavis.
“1999.”
I was twenty-two.
The year my younger brother Julian disappeared from the family.
Not physically.
Socially.
He left Ashcroft after a catastrophic argument with my father and never returned.
My brother was alive.
Somewhere in California, last I knew.
We had not spoken in sixteen years.
“What does Eleanor have to do with Julian?”
No answer.
Then Mavis pulled one sketchbook from the bottom of the box.
Different from the others.
Red leather.
She opened it.
Page after page of Julian.
At seventeen.
Eighteen.
Nineteen.
Then one drawing stopped me.
Julian sitting at our old library table.
Beside him, a girl I recognized immediately.
Camellia’s mother.
Much younger.
And beneath them, half-finished in charcoal—
my father watching from the doorway.
The expression on his face was not anger.
Fear.
I had never seen my father look afraid.
Mavis whispered:
May you like
“My mother drew what people were trying not to say.”
Apparently that was exactly why someone had wanted the archive buried.
