The Painter & the Pretty Girl

p r o l o g u e

Georgia

WHERE DO YOU GO when you have nobody to turn to?

When you're perennially the outsider, perpetually wandering with no home to return to?

How can you find yourself when there doesn't seem to be any trace that you used to exist somewhere?

I grew up without a father. Though I had no shortage of cousins to serve as my siblings, a part of me always longed for a dad. Even a stern, strict, no-nonsense curmudgeon, like Aaron Steele, would have been preferable to the absence that haunted my life.

Though I loved my mom with all my heart–even to the point of living with her at an age when my friends had long moved out of their apartments–I wanted a father. Part of me was still that lost, lonely, little girl who held up the image of every man who walked into my life, wanting to compare him to a father I'd never known. A father who had been ripped away from me by the military and a bloody death when I'd only been two.

A father who'd left me his name and not much else.

Maybe it was the daddy issues, or whatever else you wanted to call it–though I despised that term, hated the way it dumped the blame of poor parenting at a woman's feet–but I never expected to meet a perfect man.

I know what you're thinking: Georgia, the perfect man doesn't exist.

But I meant the perfect man for me. If I had no father, no good man, nor any man, to compare him to, how could be certain I was making the right choice?

How could I be certain he wouldn't disappoint me?

How could I be certain he existed at all?

So I didn't bother. I wandered through life dissatisfied, and yet self-perpetuating my own dissatisfaction by expecting the least in men.

I just didn't realize there was one Man who could fulfill my expectations, one Man who already loved me–even to the point that He had died for me.

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George

I WAS BORN A disappointment.

That isn't an exaggeration. I was born two months early, several pounds lighter, and expected to have severe deficits or at least some kind of problems. All I got from my post-birth ordeal was nearsightedness, which I corrected first with eyeglasses in elementary school, then contacts as the glasses became constantly smudged with paint.

Despite being halfway blind, I had an eye for art.

My father, however, never approved of that eye. And after the death of my mother–who, for all her ladylike ways and composed demeanour, was a great appreciator of the arts–my father all but locked up my paintbrushes and forbade me from artistic pursuits. My rebellion turned into a tug of war, each of us locked behind one end of the rope, neither refusing to give way. One person would have to let go and send the other flying, tumbling back in the dust.

I let go of that rope. No, more like I drove a chainsaw through it, took my end, and ran.

I'm not proud of what I've done.

But I'll never be able to make up for it, other than doing my best to salvage my relationship with her. My sister.

That includes her new family.

That includes Georgia Philips, Alexander Steele's aggravating, infuriating, incorrigible, eccentric, dazzling cousin. The cousin who's been my muse for far too long; the one whose face haunts my canvases and stares back at me from unmolded clay. The one who makes it impossible for me to make any art, anymore.

I've always been an artist. I just didn't know that what I created would ever lead me to the Creator.