Chapter Two

PRESENT TIME

An hour drifts by, and the light in the studio changes its angle, slipping across the tall windows and stretching across the floor in soft golden strips that land quietly between the scattered paint jars and brushes.

I sit back against the linen-covered couch near the far wall, one leg tucked beneath the other, the phone resting on my thigh, its screen dark. My other hand still holds the brush, its bristles weighed down with deep red, the color I had reached for without thinking, instinctively, as though it could express what words could not. The painting stares back at me from across the room, unfinished and erratic, all uneven strokes and layered shadows, a moody reflection of the tight ache in my chest that refuses to settle or soften.

I unlock my phone screen, press her name and wait.

She answers quickly, her voice rising through the speaker with an ease that feels like something familiar, something grounding, something I forgot I needed. “Hey. You alive?”

“Barely,” I murmur, and the sound of my own laughter surprises me by how close it comes to real. “Thought I’d check in.”

“Well, aren’t I lucky,” she replies lightly, and I imagine her reclining in some sterile office, her heels kicked off beneath the desk, papers everywhere. “To what do I owe the honour?”

“Just wanted to hear your voice,” I say quietly, meaning it in that strange, sideways way that grief often demands—indirect, unspoken, but entirely real. “How’s your day going?”

“Long,” she exhales, and I can see her in my mind now, sitting in that corner office where the windows don’t open and the air feels processed, hunched over a screen while the low hum of fluorescent lighting needles at her temples. “I’ve been in the same chair since morning. Reports, emails, more reports. You know how it is.”

“Sounds like a dream.”

“You only say that because you’re not the one buried under five deadlines and also running errands,” she teases, her tone rising just enough to disguise the fatigue beneath it. “Where are you, anyway? Your desk looks like it hasn’t seen life since yesterday.”

“I took the day off,” I answer, reaching for nonchalance but landing somewhere quieter. “Needed to clear my head.”

The pause lingers, not because the conversation has run dry, but because something has shifted. I can feel it. She’s picked up on something in my voice, something I didn’t mean to reveal. It’s a quiet moment, almost too gentle to notice, but I know she’s listening carefully…probably more carefully than I want her to.

“Are you at home… is everything okay?”

The lie comes to me so easily I almost hate myself for it. “Yeah. Got home not too long ago. It’s just one of those slow days. I thought I’d paint for a bit, drink too much tea, ignore everyone.”

“Sounds like therapy,” she says with a laugh, and there’s a warmth in her voice that settles briefly around the edges of mine. “What are you painting?”

I lie again without hesitation. “Haven’t decided yet. It might turn into something awful or something brilliant. No way to know.”

“I’m jealous,” she replies, and the tone of her voice changes slightly. There’s a hint of something unspoken in her words now, a quiet longing she doesn’t bother naming. “I haven’t done anything remotely creative in weeks. Maybe months.”

“You could take a break.”

“Not with the quarter closing,” she answers quickly, a little too quickly. “That’s not even a distant dream.”

Her voice holds steady, but something in it continues to flicker…an undercurrent I cannot yet place, something that trails behind her words like a shadow waiting for shape. I decide not to chase it, at least not now.

“Well, when you do, I’ll lend you some paint and a blank canvas.”

“I might take you up on that,” she says, then lowers her voice just slightly. “I should get back to it. But for what it’s worth, I wanted to hear your voice too.”

I’m not sure how to respond. It doesn’t make me uncomfortable, just… uncertain. I don’t know what she really means, and I don’t have the energy to ask. So I just smile to myself, even though it feels a little empty. “Talk later?”

“Of course.”

She ends the call before I can say anything else, and I set the phone down beside me, my fingers slipping away from the screen as if releasing something fragile. I look back at the brush in my hand and the portrait on the easel, and for a moment I wonder whether her words held something more, something I missed, or if I’ve simply grown too suspicious of kindness to accept it without suspicion. Either way, the thought slips quietly into the corner of my mind and stays there, unfinished.

Two hours pass before the phone rings again.

This time, the name on the screen does not feel grounding. It feels like impact. The moment I see it, a cold ripple moves through my chest, as though every muscle remembers what I would rather forget. My jaw tightens. I do not reach for the phone immediately. Instead, I watch the screen with narrowed eyes, wishing it silent, wishing it were someone else, wishing for the kind of magic that lets you un-know the things you’ve come to understand too late.

But decency has its grip on me still, and even when fury whispers that I should let him sit in the discomfort of being ignored, I cannot stop my hand from moving.

I swipe the screen. Set it to speaker.

“Yes?” I ask, and the word feels stiff in my throat, my voice thinner than I intended, stretched between composure and the truth I’m not sure I can swallow again. I try to sound unaffected, like the silence hasn’t changed me, like I’m not sitting here in a room he once filled with warmth, wondering who I have been to him all this time.

He catches it. Immediately.

“Is everything alright?” he asks, and the tone in his voice is one I’ve heard before, the one he uses when addressing an elder on the verge of collapse or a wolf too injured to be scolded.

I glance toward the painting I had attacked with my brush the moment I came back into this room. It is wild and furious and exactly what I needed. His face, distorted with deliberate cruelty, now sits upon a canvas that holds no mercy. Shirtless and smug, he is depicted like some dethroned deity, lounging on a seat forged from rusted gold and splintered oaths. His horns are twisted, dark and massive, curling into the frame itself. At his feet, a woman bows, faceless and hunched, her head replaced by a drooping daisy that weeps petals into the crimson below.

“Everything is just peachy,” I say with a smile too sweet to be real, dragging a thick line of black paint across the image’s left eye with practiced venom. The brush slaps the canvas, and drops of paint flick across my cheek, warm and careless. I leave them there.

He doesn’t speak. Not right away. The silence on his end is taut, and I can feel the weight of his thoughts as he tries to make sense of my tone, my words, the pieces that don’t add up.

“Where are you?” he finally asks, cautious now, every word chosen with care.

“In my studio,” I answer, reaching again for the red and dragging it across the painted chest that once held my trust. “Where I’ve been all day.”

A breath comes through the line, sharp and sudden, as if he has just stepped on the truth and felt it splinter beneath his feet.

He doesn’t try to lie. Doesn’t reach for excuses.

“I’m coming across,” he says simply, and the line goes dead.

I don’t move. I watch the brush drip into the rim of the jar, thick droplets sliding down and collecting on the floor, one after another, slow and deliberate. They form a small pool at my feet, the color rich and unforgiving.

He knows I heard...He knows that I know and now I know that he knows that I know. I wonder how we will come out from this setback.