Page 27 of One Last Secret

Instead of answering me, Celeste asks, “Did your sister travel to the vanishing point?”

An image flashes through my mind of the forest path where I last saw my sister alive. The trees seem to stretch until oblivion on either side.

“Not exactly,” I reply. “But she found a vanishing point of her own.”

Celeste takes a deep breath and pouts. “I hate Lisa because she’s a bitch. She shouldn’t be in my house. I hate her, and I want her to go away.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s a bitch.”

“Why is she a bitch, Celeste? What has she done to make you feel this way?”

Tears come to her eyes. “She treats Dad like crap. Dad will work really hard on something, and she’ll call it junk or tell him that no one will ever buy it. Dad argues with her, but she’s the one with all of the power. If she won’t sell his stuff, then he can’t make money off of it, so he has to do a lot of stuff he doesn’t really like just to keep her happy.”

It seems Lila might have been honest after all, or at least correct. “Has he tried selling to different dealers?”

"No." Her lower lip trembles now. "I keep telling him to just ignore her and find someone else, but he won't. He thinks she's a brilliant woman, and he does whatever she tells him to do. But she's stupid. I mean, look. All of these statues in the living room? She said no one would ever want these in their home but Dad. Can you believe that?"

I absolutely can, but I don’t tell her that. Instead, I say, “She’s trying to do her best to make money with this work. It’s a difficult thing to do. She’ll make mistakes sometimes, but—”

“Why are you defending her?” she snaps. “Do youlikeher?”

Her voice is rising in pitch. I need to be careful not to push her over the edge. “No. I don’t care for her.”

“Then why are you defending her?”

“Because I want to find your father, and I want to take care of you. If we fixate on Lisa because we don’t like her or because she argued with your father, then we might not see the truth when it arrives.”

“How areyougonna find Dad?”

I look away. “I don’t know. But Idoknow that if we build our understanding of reality based on emotional assumptions we’ll set ourselves up for disappointment."

She takes a long, slow breath and looks past me back out at the ocean. For a while, she says nothing but just stares at the rocks that form the neck where Fairy Cove meets the oceanproper. I let her process what I’ve told her and process her own emotions.

When she speaks again, she doesn’t mention Lisa. “I keep having a nightmare about Dad drawing a portal in his paintings and walking through it.”

“The Vanishing Point?”

“No. Maybe? I don’t know. I can’t see exactly what he’s painting. It’s just… blurry. But I see him painting, and I call out to him, but he can’t hear me. He starts to walk through, and I try to run to him, but I can’t move. Then he disappears.”

“Nightmares are common after traumatic events like this one,” I tell her. “If you’d like, I can make you some chamomile tea tonight before bed. I find it helps sometimes with my own nightmares.”

She shakes her head. “I’ve been having this nightmare for the past five years.”

“The offer of tea still stands.” I smile at her and take her hands in mine. “Don’t lose hope. I know you’ll worry, and that’s all right, but don’t lose hope. There’s no blood and no sign of your father’s body. No sign that he was injured and nothing in the ocean that suggests he came to harm. I have a feeling that soon enough, he’ll come back to us safe and sound.”

She doesn’t say anything. Her hands are limp in mine. She stares at the ocean, and I watch her face slowly soften as she slips into another fugue. There’s not much more I can do right now. I don’t think it’s a good idea for her to stare at the vanishing point for so long, but I’ll only make things worse if I try to force her to look away.

I prepare to stand, but before I do, she gets abruptly to her feet and brushes past me, nearly knocking me over. I regain my balance and watch wide-eyed as she rushes up the stairs.

I follow, alarmed. I worry that she might run into Victor’s studio. The window is still unrepaired, and in her current mental state, I fear she might harm herself.

“Celeste? Wait!”

“I’m going to draw!” she shouts back.

I follow her to the third floor and hear her run into her room, slamming the door shut. A moment later, I hear rustling and soft thumping. I open the door to see her quickly arranging paper and pencils on the floor. She looks up at me, and her lips pull back in a feral snarl. "Get out!”

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