She sat down on a nearby rock so that their faces were level. "Anne has a marvelous talent. If she decides to work hard at her drawing and if she has a passion for it, I think she could someday be a fine artist."
"Yeah." He kicked at a clump of grass.
"Different people have different kinds of talents," she said. "It's true that Anne has a gift for drawing. But the fact that you could see that her picture was so good means that you have another kind of talent."
He glanced at her, still scowling but intrigued now. "What kind?"
"It isn't everyone who can take one look at a picture and know that it is very good."
"Big deal."
"Yes, it is a big deal," she said matter-of-factly. "You have an eye for excellence, and that talent will be an enormous asset to you in the years ahead."
"How do you know?" he grumbled.
"Because it's the same talent I've got."
That stopped him for a few seconds. Then he looked appalled. "The same kind?"
"Yes."
"But I don't wanna run an art store. I wanna run a big company like Granddad Hamilton and Great-Granddad Sullivan. Dad says that's probably what I'll do on account of it's in my genes or something."
"The talent to recognize quality and beauty when you see it will be useful to you no matter what you do with your life," she said.
"You're sure?"
"Positive."
"Cause I don't wanna have to run a little art gallery like yours."
"Don't worry, I doubt if you'll end up doing that for a living. But you may decide to buy art to hang in your home or on the walls of your office someday, and with your talent you'll be able to buy really excellent art. You won't have to pay a consultant to tell you what's good and what's not so good. You'll be able to make your own decisions."
"Huh." But he was clearly somewhat mollified by the prospect of making decisions.
"Who knows?" she said. "Maybe someday you'll be in a position to buy one of Anne's paintings."
"I'm not gonna buy any pictures of her dumb dog, that's for sure."
Dinner went well, Nick thought later. He was unaccountably relieved, even pleased. It had, after all, been a new experience for him. Not that he couldn't do salad and boil a pot full of some of Rafe's ravioli stuffed with gorgonzola cheese, spinach, and walnuts. He had, after all, been cooking for himself and Carson for quite a while now.
But when he had resumed a social life a year or so after Amelia's death, he had consciously or unconsciously confined himself to women who, he was fairly certain, would not have been comfortable sitting at a kitchen table with a precocious kid.
Maybe the women of the Harte family had been right all along, he thought. Maybe he just hadn't wanted to see any of his dates in a domestic light. You looked at a woman differently after you'd seen her hanging out in your kitchen, carrying on an intelligent conversation about dogs and dinosaurs with your son.
Whatever the case, one thing was certain. When he looked across the old kitchen table this evening, a wooden table that had been scarred and scuffed with the marks of three generations of Harte family meals, it had hit him with shattering clarity that Octavia looked perfect sitting here with Carson and himself.
They played all of the ancient board games that had accumulated in the hall closet over the years until Carson reluctantly fell asleep on the sofa. Nick carried him upstairs to bed. When he returned to the living room, Octavia was in her coat, fishing her keys out of her pocket.
"It's getting late," she said, smiling a little too brightly. "I'd better be on my way. Thanks for dinner."
She was the one running away this time, he thought.
"I'll walk you out to your car."
He collected his jacket from the closet and put it on without buttoning it. When he opened the front door he smelled the sea and saw the trailing wisps of a light fog.
"Good thing I'm going now," Octavia said. She stepped out onto the porch and looked around. "This stuff looks like it's going to get heavier."
"Probably." He followed her outside, leaving the door ajar. "Thanks for what you said to Carson earlier. He's feeling a lot better now that he knows you're not going to judge him solely on his art."
"No problem."
"The kid's a Harte, what can I say? He wants you to like him and he'll do whatever he thinks will work."
"He doesn't have to worry. I like him. A lot. He's a pretty terrific kid."
He gripped the railing with both hands and looked out into the gathering mist. "What about me?"
"You?"
"I'd better warn you that this is a case of like son, like father."
She went still on the top step and gave him a politely quizzical look. "You want me to like you?"
"I want you to like me a lot."
She jangled her keys. "If this is about sleeping with me again—"
"It is about sleeping with you again," he said deliberately. "But it's also about explaining why I left in such a rush the other night."
"I know why you left in a rush. You panicked."
He released the railing and swung around abruptly to catch hold of her by the shoulders. "I did not panic."
"Sure you did. You're obviously dealing with a lot of unresolved issues connected to the loss of your wife, and when you get too close to a woman, you panic."
"Bullshit."
She gave him a gentle, sympathetic pat on the arm. "It's all right, I understand. I spent some time going through the grieving process after Aunt Claudia died. I can't even imagine how hard it would be to lose a beloved spouse."
He tightened his hands on her now. "It was hard, all right. But not for the reasons you think. I'm going to tell you something that no one else, not even anyone in my family, knows."
She stiffened. "I'm not sure I want to hear it."
"Too late, I'm going to tell you, whether you want to hear it or not. You probably know that the man at the controls of that small plane that crashed with Amelia on board was a family friend."
"Yes. Everyone knows that."
"Yeah, well hardly anyone else except his wife and me knows just what a very good friend he was of Amelia's."
"Nick, please stop."
"I found out after the funeral that they had been lovers at one time. They'd quarreled and each of them wound up marrying someone else. A couple of months before that plane crash, they had reconnected. It seems they'd both reached the earthshaking conclusion that they had married the wrong people."