Chapter 8 - The Mountain and the Sun
By 10:00 PM, the guests had begun to depart.
The long sweep of the driveway was filled with taillights disappearing into the thick snow falling over Chestnut Hill. The catering staff were quietly packing up crystal glasses, folding gold chairs, and loading floral arrangements into transport vans.
Thorne Manor was returning to its deep, beautiful silence.
I sat on the mudroom bench, wearing a warm wool sweater, watching the catering crew clear the last empty trays from the service corridor.
The wall where Ellie’s mural had hung was empty, clean, and bare.
Footsteps echoed softly along the hallway.
Julian walked into the mudroom. He had taken off his tuxedo jacket, wearing only his white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his forearms, his dark hair slightly messy, looking more relaxed than I had ever seen him in sixteen months.
He walked up to the bench, holding a large, heavy cardboard tube under his arm.
He set the tube down on the bench beside me, pulled out a fresh roll of thick, heavy butcher paper—eight feet long—and laid it flat across the wooden surface.
I looked at him, puzzled. “Mr. Thorne?”
“It’s Julian, Cora,” he said softly, looking down at me with his warm, unreadable dark eyes. “We’re off the clock.”
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a brand-new, unopened sixty-four-pack box of Crayola crayons—the large collector’s edition with the built-in sharpener—and set it on the paper.
I stared at the box in disbelief. “Where did you get those?”
“I sent Mark to the twenty-four-hour store downtown an hour ago,” Julian said with a quiet smile.
He looked up at the empty wall where the mural had hung.
“This wall looks too clean,” Julian said softly. “It looks like a hotel.”
Before I could answer, a tiny sleepy voice called out from the doorway of the rear stairwell.
“Mr. Julian?”
Ellie stood there in her frog sweatshirt, rubbing her eyes with her small fists, her dark hair sticking up on one side. She had woken up from her nap and wandered downstairs to look for me.
Julian immediately lowered himself onto one knee on the mudroom floor, his massive frame coming down to her eye level.
“Hey, bug,” Julian said gently.
Ellie walked up to him, blinking at the massive roll of paper and the huge box of crayons spread out on the bench.
“Is that for drawing?” she whispered.
“It’s for a new mural,” Julian said, reaching out and picking up a brown crayon from the box. “And this time, I’m helping.”
Ellie’s amber eyes lit up with pure, ecstatic wonder. “Can you draw mountains?”
May you like
Julian picked up the brown crayon, looked at the eight-foot sheet of butcher paper pinned fresh against the wall, and offered her a warm, genuine smile that reached his dark eyes.
“I draw exceptional mountains, Ellie,” Julian whispered. “Let’s build some big ones.”
