I pulled the car into a circular turnaround near the front steps and shut off the engine. The silence that fell was thick and almost reverent, broken only by the distant call of a bird and the rustle of leaves.
Climbing out, I stood for a moment just absorbing the scale of what he had kept from me.
“You idiot,” I whispered, the word more affectionate than angry. “You absolute idiot. Why didn’t you just bring me here?”
The answer was there in the letter, of course, tangled up with old fears and old wounds. His brothers. The mess he had left behind to build a life with me.
Still, standing in front of this house, knowing he had poured time and money and thought into it for years without ever so much as hinting at its existence, I felt a hot flare of anger beneath the grief.
“This is not how marriage is supposed to work,” I muttered, wiping my palms on my jeans.
The front steps were wide and shallow, made of stone. The front door was solid oak, its surface carved with a pattern of overlapping leaves. A brass handle gleamed, polished and unweathered.
I fitted the key into the lock.
Inside, the air had that faint, closed-up scent of a place long unused—dust and old wood, a whisper of stale air that had been waiting to move again. Light from the large windows cut through it in bright shafts, illuminating floating motes.
The foyer opened into a great hall, and for a moment I forgot how to think.
The ceiling arched high above, supported by thick wooden beams that crossed in a lattice. At one end, a stone fireplace climbed the wall all the way to the ceiling, its hearth large enough that a person could almost stand inside it. Wrought-iron chandeliers hung down, though they were dim in the daylight.
But it was not the architecture that stole my breath.
It was the walls.
Everywhere I looked, there were paintings.
Large canvases, small canvases, vertical and horizontal, framed and unframed, arranged in grids and clusters and careful groupings. They covered almost every inch of wall space.
And every single one—every single one—was of orchids.
Orchids in lush, velvety purples. Orchids in luminous whites, their centers tinged with gold. Orchids the color of ripe peaches, of pale lemons, of deep, blood-red wine. Close-up petals that seemed to glow, entire sprays of blooms arching gracefully from slender stems, roots tangled around bark, blossoms unfurling from buds.
The style varied. Some were hyper-realistic, the veins in each petal rendered with scientific precision. Others were more impressionistic, brushstrokes thick and textured, colors bleeding into one another in almost abstract ways. A few bore tiny brass plaques with Latin names—Paphiopedilum, Cattleya, Phalaenopsis, Dendrobium.
My knees went weak.
Orchids had been my passion long before I met Michael. I had written my dissertation on the pollination strategies of Orchidaceae. I had spent countless evenings at the kitchen table, flipping through catalogues, pointing out rare hybrids and sighing wistfully over their prices. I had once told Michael, half joking, that my dream was to have a house with an entire room full of orchids—real ones, in pots and hanging baskets and mounted to bark, a jungle of them.
“You and your orchids,” he’d teased, smiling as he sautéed onions in a pan. “Most people fantasize about vacations in Italy. You fantasize about plants that are too finicky to keep alive.”
