“You need to draw,” she said.
“I can’t.”
“Then ruin paper.”
She placed my old sketchbook on a wooden table beside a cup of charcoal pencils. Sunlight moved weakly through the high windows. The studio was messy, warm, alive. Paint stains covered the floor like accidental flowers.
I opened the sketchbook.
The first page was dated eight months earlier.
I had drawn a tiny pair of feet.
My breath caught.
Lena saw. “We can close it.”
“No.”
I touched the edge of the drawing.
That baby existed. Not long enough for the world to know. Not long enough for Grant to change meetings or learn lullabies. But long enough for me to imagine soft hair, midnight feedings, a nursery painted pale green, Grant kneeling beside a crib with wonder on his face.
I turned the page.
And drew a doorway.
Not a beautiful doorway. Not even a finished one. Just a dark rectangle with light beyond it.
At noon, someone knocked.
Lena frowned. “I swear if he hired someone—”
But when she opened the studio door, it was not Grant.
It was Julian Vale.
For several seconds, I forgot how to speak.
Julian stood in the hallway wearing a charcoal overcoat damp from the rain, his dark hair threaded with early silver. He held a cardboard tube under one arm and looked exactly like memory had no right to look after twelve years.
“Evelyn,” he said softly.
Lena’s eyebrows rose with open interest.
I stood too quickly, knocking a pencil to the floor.
“Julian?”
“I’m sorry to come without warning.”
“How did you know I was here?”
He glanced at Lena. “Your gallery assistant called me.”
Lena lifted both hands. “Before you look at me like that, he was already on your emergency list from art school. Apparently you never updated it.”
I had forgotten.
Julian Vale had been my mentor once. More than a mentor, if I was honest in the privacy of my own mind. He was the person who first convinced me my art mattered beyond pretty rooms and charity auctions. At twenty-six, I had nearly taken a fellowship in Florence with his recommendation in my bag.
