Midnight Valentine(96)

Some are unfinished. All are unframed. And every one of them depicts the same subject in various clothing, poses, and stages of undress:

Me.

Me walking in a vineyard with a glass of wine. Me in a bubble bath, laughing. Me riding a horse, washing the dishes, reading a book.

Me walking down the aisle in my wedding dress, holding a bouquet of purple sweet peas, the light of true love aglow in my eyes.

He even got the details of the scalloped neckline and the seed pearls on the bodice right. I press a hand over my thundering heart as tears threaten to crest my lower lids.

Coop’s quiet voice barely penetrates my cocoon of shock and memory. “They’re dated. I didn’t check them all, but enough to gimme the willies.”

I find enough presence of mind to turn my head and look at him.

Keeping his gaze steady on mine, he says, “Theo painted these before you moved to Seaside, Megan. The oldest one I found, near the back of that stack in the corner, is dated one month after his accident five years ago. How’s that possible?”

I drift over to the nearest table and run my fingertips over a half-finished painting of me sleeping, my hair spread over the pillow, a small smile on my lips. There’s a frenzied quality to the style, lots of quick, short strokes, as if he raced through it, abandoning it halfway in dissatisfaction.

You make all my broken parts bleed.

How awful it must have been for him, how terrifying, to finally see in flesh the person who’d been haunting all his waking hours like a ghost. No wonder he looked at me with such fury that first night at Cal’s Diner. He probably thought he was losing his mind.

I murmur, “Maybe he painted them since we met and dated them wrong. He’s been ill, you know that.”

Coop snorts. Spreading his arms wide, he says. “He painted all these since September? I don’t think so. And I found other weird shit in his office in the house too.”

“Like what?”

“Like two hundred fuckin’ recipes for key lime pie. Like an entire folder of clippings from magazines of pictures of Denver fuckin’ omelets. Like almost five years’ worth of invoices from some hydroponic flower growers in Holland and Japan—he’d been having flowers delivered here every week from halfway round the world! Like what the fuck is wrong with all the flowers in Oregon?”

Sweet peas aren’t always in season here.

I turn my face to a ray of light slicing through a crack in the roof and close my eyes.

“And he has all this fancy French wine in a closet—cases of the stuff—and he doesn’t even drink wine! He hates it!”

I form a mental picture of the elegant label of the Château Corton Grancey that Cass and I always drank on our anniversary. The wine we first enjoyed on our honeymoon, served to us by the old man we picked up on the side of a country road who turned out to be the head of one of the oldest and finest wineries in France. I whisper, “Burgundy’s always a good investment. Especially a grand cru.”

There’s a short pause, then Coop says, “I never said it was from Burgundy.”

I look at him.

His eyes intense, he adds more quietly, “Or a grand cru.”

“He told me he’d been collecting,” I hear myself lie, knowing the truth is impossible.

After a long time wherein we simply gaze at each other, Coop looks down at his feet. “You’re right. He’s been sick. This is all just…evidence of that. And him askin’ me how he could remember someone he’d never met, and his obsession with the Buttercup, and him never speakin’ another word after his accident…that’s all part of his sickness too.”

He glances at my wedding band, then once again meets my eyes. “Right?”

There’s a moment, one brief moment where I consider telling him and letting the chips fall where they may. But the moment passes when I decide this thing is so unbelievable, the weight of trying to understand it has almost broken Theo and me—it would be wrong to burden Coop with the knowledge of it too.

Some mysteries are meant to live in the dark, quiet places of our hearts, kept safe and sacred.

“You’re a good friend, Coop. And a good man. And now I have to go, because I need to be there when he wakes up.”

I hug him hard, then scramble down the ladder and run to my car, my spirit soaring and my heart on fire, adrenaline pumping through my veins. I tear out of the driveway so fast, a spray of gravel spits out from the tires.

I have to get to that hospital as soon as I can.

I need to be there when my midnight valentine comes back to me.





30





Only Theo doesn’t come back.

Not that day, not that week, not the next. The doctors take him out of the induced coma, but he doesn’t wake up. They remove the ventilator, and he starts to breathe on his own, but he doesn’t wake up. By the time Thanksgiving arrives, he’s developed bed sores from lying in one position so long, and I’ve developed a hatred for myself so burning, I can’t even look at my reflection in the mirror.