Page 77 of My Sweetest Agony

My gaze sweeps over the stacks lining every wall, each canvas filled with something hauntingly beautiful in black, white, and grays. Every piece monochromatic. “Why don’t you ever paint in color?”

We have far more important things to talk about, like the reason I followed him here in the first place, but now that I know who he is, what he’s been hiding from me, I can’t stop the questions from rolling out.

Cam hedges slightly, averting his eyes back to the canvas on the floor before they cut up to meet mine again. “Because I can’t see it.”

“Can’t see what?”

He shrugs. “Color.”

My mind races, trying to follow what he’s telling me. “But Drew wasn’t color blind…”

“No.” Cam shakes his head. “He wasn’t. And I wasn’t born this way, either. When we were four, we were playing in the yard, and I fell. My head hit a large decorative rock in the garden. It caused cerebral achromatopsia, which basically means my brain can’t process color signals anymore.”

Every moment I’ve spent with Cam, every conversation I ever had about him with Drew and their mother, all of it flickers through my head. Not once did either of them mention Cam suffering a brain injury that affected his life so deeply. “How did I not know about this?”

He lifts a shoulder and lets it fall, offering me a sad smile. “Because I’m not Drew. It’s not something you should have known.”

His answer makes me stagger back a step, pressing my hands over my chest at the sudden flash of pain there.

Cam never wanted me to know him.

It wasn’t just that Drew didn’t want to talk about him. He couldn’t. Because if he did, he might have let something slip that could have led to me discovering who he was—and hiding his identity, keeping that anonymity was the most important thing to him.

My head spins as I continue to scan all the various pieces he’s painted that now stand almost haphazardly in this studio.

So many of them.

Many that I recognize.

A few that are so stunning, so poignant that I have to pause and swipe a tear from my eye.

I move toward the small kitchen in the corner of the space where a large number of paintings are clustered against the wall, and Cam sucks in a sharp breath, barely audible over the music playing.

And my footsteps falter again.

What the…

At first, it’s just the flash of color that draws me toward one particular stack of canvases.

Bright red in a sea of monochromaticity.

But as I draw closer, my confusion only grows along with the tightness in my chest.

What?

This isn’t just another portrait.

It’s me.

My face turned up slightly, lips parted in invitation.

Bright red lips against the black and white paint.

But my gaze zeroes in on the earring I’m wearing in it—the peony.

A gift from Drew that I got to wear once before I lost one of the pair.

How could Cam have painted this?