With a deep breath, Daisy lifted her chin.
So be it.
Ahead of her, the empty future stretched as wide as a vast ocean.
She could fill that terrifying void with flowers and sea breezes.
“I need to pack,” she said aloud, hardly recognizing the sound of her own voice.
By the next morning, Daisy, her baby and her dog were en route to California, in search of a new life, or at least a new place, where she could build new memories. And, she prayed, where she could heal and raise her daughter with love.
* * *
“We’ve found it, Mr. Niarxos.”
Leonidas stared at his lawyer.
“No,” he said faintly. “Impossible.”
Edgar Ross shook his head. “I waited to be sure. We were contacted two weeks ago. It’s been authenticated. There can be no doubt.”
The two men were standing in his chief lawyer’s well-appointed office, with its floor-to-ceiling windows and view of the Empire State Building.
When his lawyer had called him that morning, Leonidas had assumed that the man must have heard that he’d separated from Daisy. After all, for the last three weeks, Leonidas had been living in a Midtown hotel suite. It wouldn’t exactly take a detective to figure out the Niarxos marriage was over.
Even though he’d told his wife to go, part of him still couldn’t believe that Daisy and their baby had left New York. He’d returned to the mansion only once since she’d gone, and it had felt unbearably empty.
After that, he’d returned to the hotel suite, where he’d been riding out the scandal ever since the sordid truth about his past had been revealed on Aria Johnson’s website, in all its ugly glory. This visit to his lawyer’s office, on the thirty-fourth floor of a Midtown skyrise, was his first public outing in days. At least the scandal was starting to abate. Only two paparazzi had followed him here, which he took as a victory.
Misinterpreting his silence, his lawyer gave Leonidas a broad smile. “I don’t blame you for being skeptical. But we really have found the Picasso.”
“How can you be sure?” Leonidas’s voice was low. “I don’t want my hopes raised, only to have them crushed. I’d prefer to have no hope at all.”
Just like his marriage.
He could still see Daisy’s beautiful face in the warm Greek sun, surrounded by flowers on the terrace of his villa. I love you, she’d said dreamily. You’re wonderful. Wonderful and perfect.
So different from her agonized, heartbroken face when, on the street outside their New York home, he’d told her he was leaving her.
Leonidas couldn’t get those two images out of his mind. For the last three weeks, he’d been haunted by memories, day and night, even when he was pretending to work. Even when he was pretending to sleep.
“Would you like to see your Picasso, Mr. Niarxos?”
Leonidas focused on the lawyer. He took a deep breath, forcibly relaxing his shoulders as they stood in the sleek private office with its view of the steel-and-glass city, reflecting the merciless noonday sun. “Why not.”
With a big smile, the lawyer turned. Crossing the private office, he reached up and, with an obvious sense of drama, drew back a curtain.
There, on the wall, lit by unflattering overhead light, was the Picasso. There could be no doubt. Love with Birds.
Coming forward, Leonidas’s eyes traced the blocky swirls of beige and gray paint. His fingers reached out toward a jagged line in the upper left corner, where the image was slightly off kilter, clumsily stitched back together. In the same place where he’d stabbed it with scissors, as a heartsick, abandoned fourteen-year-old.
“How did you find it?” he whispered.
“That art blogger found it. Aria Johnson. She found a relative of your mother’s...er...last lover.” He coughed discreetly. “A twenty-two-year-old college student in Ankara. He’d taken the painting to his aunt’s house the day before he disappeared in the earthquake.”
“Took it? Stole it, you mean.”
“Apparently not. The young man told his aunt the painting was a gift from some rich new girlfriend. She never learned who the girlfriend was, and she had no idea the painting was worth anything. She only kept it because she loved her nephew.”