My First Love Abandoned Me For His Family’s Inheritance — Now I’ve Been Hired To Paint His Portrait.

Part 1

I had passed through the wrought-iron gates of Hayes Court a hundred times as a girl.

I never once went through with my hands shaking.

They shook now, slightly, as the carriage rolled up the long gravel drive.

It had been eight years since I was here last.

The imposing gatehouse looked exactly the same, but I did not.

I had been twenty the last time I sketched in this park.

Back then, I was lying on my stomach in the damp grass with a young man of twenty-four.

He had refused to keep his chin still long enough for me to capture the line of his jaw.

I had never finished that sketch.

I told myself for years that it didn’t matter.

It was just an unfinished thing, like so many unfinished things between us.

I had not expected, at twenty-eight, to be driving back through these gates as a hired tradeswoman.

Inside, Mrs. Collins, the housekeeper, was waiting.

She was a woman of perhaps fifty, gray-eyed, with the particular stillness of someone who had spent thirty years learning exactly how much to say.

She led me up the sweeping staircase without speaking.

At the landing, she paused just for a moment.

You would be Tom Miller’s girl from the cottage by the mill stream.

Her mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile.

You used to come up through the orchard gate.

Young Brian would meet you there before—

She stopped herself, the practiced discretion of a lifetime closing over whatever she had nearly said.

We let it lie there between us, unexamined.

I did not see him until the next morning in the gallery itself.

By then, I had composed myself into something steadier.

Then he walked through the heavy oak door.

The composure went out of me like breath.

He had grown into the height that had always threatened him as a young man.

But the eyes were exactly the same.

Gray and direct.

He stopped dead in the doorway.

Megan.

Just that.

Eight years and an entire social class of distance between us.

Yet he said my given name as though no time had passed at all.

It sounded as though it cost him something to say it.

Mr. Hayes, I said with careful precision.

I watched something in his face flinch at the formality.

You are the painter Evans recommended.

I am a painter Mr. Evans recommended.

He does not know there is a difference.

A muscle moved in Brian’s jaw.

The house party gathered in full by the second week.

Neighboring families and a clutch of young ladies arrived.

Their mothers had clearly calculated the value of an unwed, wealthy heir’s attention.

I dined apart from the formal table, as my position required.

Nevertheless, I found myself drawn into the drawing room one evening.

It was Miss Davies, pretty and sharp-tongued, who raised the subject lightly between hands of cards.

Miss Miller, is it true you and Brian were childhood playfellows?

Her smile was bright and knowing.

How droll to think of the heir to Hayes Court running about an orchard with a tradesman’s daughter.

The table’s attention shifted toward me.

I felt Brian’s eyes on me.

We were neighbors, Miss Davies, I said, keeping my voice perfectly even.

Children share a great deal of time together in the country with rather less to remark upon than the city imagines.

It might have ended there had Brian not spoken.

He chose his words with considerable care.

Miss Miller’s father was a man I respected a great deal, he said to the table generally.

His voice was even, almost bored.

He was the finest painter in the county.

I will not have his daughter’s skill discussed as though it were a curiosity rather than a craft.

I would take it as a kindness if we return to the cards.

It was the mildest possible defense.

A wealthy heir correcting a guest’s manners rather than a man laying bare an old wound.

But I, watching his face, saw what the table could not.

He had chosen deliberately to spend a little of his authority shielding me.

I found him afterward in the dim corridor outside the drawing room.

The noise of the card party faded behind a heavy closed door.

We were alone in the candlelight that left half his face in shadow.

You did not need to do that.

Perhaps not.

He did not look remotely repentant.

I find I no longer particularly care for the kind of conversation that treats your father’s trade as entertainment for an idle table, Megan.

I cared a great deal once about exactly that.

I cared about what people concluded, what was owed to the family name, what I could and couldn’t be seen to want.

His voice roughened slightly.

It cost me the one thing I actually wanted.

I find I have lost my taste for the bargain.

That isn’t yours to decide on my behalf.

I dug my fingernails into my palms until they ached.

You don’t get to defend my father’s good name at a card table and call the whole debt settled, Brian.

That isn’t how this works.

I know that.

Do you?

Something in me finally gave way.

Eight years of carefully maintained distance broke against the plain fact of him standing there.

He was sincere, too late by years, and somehow still standing there anyway.

I’m not the girl you left waiting by the orchard gate.

I built a life with my own hands while you were deciding I wasn’t worth the risk of keeping.

I needed you to choose me eight years ago when it would have cost you something, and you didn’t.

I don’t need you to defend me now.