Set Me Free Read Free

scrub. A sign beside it read, in chipped, colorful paint: Welcome to the Fall Island Artist’s Lodge! Open to the public.
    I hesitated, staring longingly at the sign. Painting used to be my passion, even my calling; but more than that, it was my peace, a flower that bloomed inside my heart in the darkest of nights. It was gone now. I hadn’t finished either of the two paintings I’d started during my year with Rhys.
    I knew, suddenly, that if Step Two after leaving Rhys was getting a new job, Step Three was painting again. The island, it seemed, was providing for me.
    Gathering my courage, I walked up the path and onto the Victorian’s ramshackle front porch. “Hello? Is anyone here?”
    I slipped through the slightly open front door into a spacious living room. Crowded bookshelves lined the walls, and threadbare Oriental rugs lay strewn across the scuffed hardwood floors. A coffee maker burbled on a card table in the corner. I sidled up to it and furtively poured myself a coffee in a paper cup. I had no idea how much coffee I’d had last night and this morning, but it wasn’t enough.
    Next to the card table, honeyed light glimmered around the edges of a wooden door carved with vines and flowers. I knocked, and the door clicked open, as if it had been waiting for me.
    In the small, octagonal room beyond, framed oil paintings covered every inch of the eight walls. The largest, an Impressionist seascape, showed the dawn light piercing through violet clouds, striking the sea and arcing towards the black spine of the mountains along the northern curve of the island.
    Even when I’d been painting all the time, I’d never done anything so bold and vivid. I walked up close to it, my mouth hanging open, with even the coffee in my hand forgotten. I wanted to learn how to paint like this artist, who’d signed her name in slashing black capitals: SUZANNA .
    Eventually, shaking myself, I turned to the next: a small portrait, twelve inches square, with a background of cheerful, cloud-like swirls in bright colors. It wouldn’t have been especially noticeable next to that magnificent seascape, except that it was a portrait of the Viking, Owen Larsen, with his lips curved into a secretive smile and his blond hair falling forwards into his downcast eyes. He looked younger and shockingly happy, but it was unmistakably him.
    I leaned in until I was so close to his portrait I could have breathed on it, if I’d still remembered how to breathe. I desperately wanted to touch it, as if I could run my hands through his hair.
    “Hello.”
    I jumped, sloshing lukewarm coffee onto my hand, but, thank God, not on the artwork. A man had wandered into the art gallery. He wore a sweater-vest and black-framed glasses. A bushy beard and a thick mop of hair warred for dominion over his face.
    “Er, hi,” I said.
    “Welcome to the Lodge!” He smiled vaguely. “I’m Matthew, the curator. Are you in town for the weekend?”
    “Actually, I’ve just moved here.”
    “Ah! Well, welcome!” He sounded pleased, but also a bit perplexed, as if I’d told him I was a Marmite enthusiast. “Are you an artist?”
    “I’m a painter.”
    “No wonder you were drawn to this exhibit,” Matthew said. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
    “Incredible,” I agreed, glancing around the room and wishing I could be alone with the paintings again, to pore over each and every one. There were distant mountains, sunlit forests, a sun shower in a meadow, and, finally, a second, much smaller seascape showing four people on a rainy beach, wading in icy water. The Impressionist style washed out the subjects’ features, turning them into dappled columns of light and rain.
    “Suzanna White was one of the most brilliant painters I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet,” Matthew said.
    “You know her?”
    “I did. She was older than me, of course.”
    I nodded, glancing back at the Viking’s portrait, trying to imagine him looking so happy in real life. That smile was