16. The Canvas Between Us
The Canvas Between Us
Matthias
Bliss Fontaine stands in the center of the wreckage she has made, and I have to remind myself how to breathe quietly.
Paint covers her hands, her wrists, one cheek, and a loose curl near her temple.
The drop sheet beneath her feet has surrendered completely, stained with red, blue, orange, green, gold, and streaks of purple dragged through all of it.
Canvases lean against walls and chairs, each one wet, each one loud enough to make the room feel awake.
She is not the woman I found inside the institute.
That woman sat beneath filtered light with grey under her nails and fog behind her eyes, answering Strauss because he had trained her to mistake compliance for safety.
This woman is barefoot, paint-streaked, exhausted, and looking at her own work with the fierce concentration of an artist deciding whether the world has earned the truth from her.
I know this version of her.
Not personally.
Not enough.
Never enough.
But I stood in a Montreal gallery three years ago and saw what her hands could do.
I remember the crowd shifting around me, glasses in hand, voices lowered into that reverent murmur people use when art has unsettled them and they don’t want to admit it.
Her canvases had been impossible to pass.
Color lived inside them like weather, grief, heat, music, hunger, and joy, all fighting and holding together somehow.
One painting stopped me completely.
A crowd scene.
Dozens of faces, all movement and noise except one man near the center, darker than the others, still enough that the whole painting seemed to turn around him. Wire-rimmed glasses. Short black curls. A mouth held too carefully. A gaze fixed on something outside the frame.
Me.
I bought it before I understood why.
For three years, that painting has hung in my study.
I passed it every morning. Some days I avoided looking at it because the man on the canvas knew too much.
Some days I stood in front of it longer than I should have, wondering how a stranger across a room had seen a wound I had spent years making presentable.
Now the woman who painted him is standing ten feet away, newly returned to herself, and her clear eyes are on me.
It nearly undoes me.
“You’re staring,” she says.
I should apologize. Instead, honesty leaves me before caution can catch it.
“Yes.”
Her mouth curves, tired but real. “That’s not very subtle, Dr. Cross.”
“No,” I say. “It isn’t.”
She glances at the largest canvas, where a woman emerges through color with a man beside her. I recognize his face because I own another version of it, painted by a woman who didn’t know my name and somehow found me anyway.
Bliss turns back to me, and this time her gaze is steady, knowing, almost amused beneath the exhaustion.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“No,” I say softly. “I’m seeing the artist.”
The color on her fingers catches the afternoon light as her hand tightens around the brush.
Ten years of hunting the people who took my sister taught me how to turn fury into discipline. I’ve studied their chemistry, their conditioning, their patterns, and their cruelty until revenge became a structure I could live inside.
Nothing prepared me for this.
For Bliss Fontaine alive in full color.
For the painting between us.
For the terrible, beautiful realization that the woman I came to rescue had reached me long before I ever found her.
MacLeod’s Baby Bump Hotel, Shared Sitting Room, Sausalito, California. 1530 hours
Professional distance is easier in theory.
In theory, Bliss is still recovering from weeks of chemical manipulation, coercive therapy, and a man like Strauss standing too close while calling harm treatment. In theory, the boundary between us should be clean, visible, and difficult to misunderstand.
In reality, she’s standing in front of me covered in paint, her eyes clear for the longest stretch since I entered the institute. The way she looks at me puts pressure on every careful rule I’ve been holding in place.
I don’t move closer.
That matters.
She was my patient inside the institute only because I needed access to counter what Strauss was doing to her. I monitored her medication, adjusted her protocol, documented her responses, and watched every sign of returning memory with the vigilance of a physician walking through a minefield.
But she isn’t in that room anymore. She isn’t under Strauss’s control. She isn’t swallowing medication from a nurse who calls compliance progress.
She’s here. Safe. Angry. Exhausted. Brilliant. Choosing the color on her own brush.
That doesn’t make this simple. It only makes the truth harder to hide from.
Bliss studies me over the edge of the canvas, and there’s no fog in her expression now. No delayed processing. No careful search for words someone else has approved.
Whatever she sees when she looks at me, she sees it clearly, and I feel the weight of that attention in places I have no business allowing her to reach yet.
“You’re doing it again,” she says.
I keep my hands at my sides. “Staring?”
“Thinking too loudly.”
Despite myself, a small laugh escapes me. “That sounds inconvenient.”
“It is. You have a very serious face.”
“I’ve been accused of worse.”
Her mouth tilts, and color has dried at the corner of her jaw, a streak of green beneath gold. My hand wants to lift. My thumb wants to touch that mark and find out whether the paint is still wet.
I do neither.
Years of distrusting men who mistake access for permission have taught me exactly what not to become. I will not join their ranks because desire has chosen an inconvenient time to wake up in me.
Bliss sets the brush down slowly.
“You don’t have to look at me like I’ll break.”
The words are quiet, but they don’t ask for pity. They ask for honesty.
I draw in a measured breath. “I’m not worried you’ll break.”
“Then what are you worried about?”
You. Me. The space between patient and woman.
The fact that I can still feel the near kiss we never took inside that corridor, and every ethical line I’ve held since then is thinner now that you’re looking at me as though you remember it too.
I give her the answer I can say aloud.
“I’m worried about moving faster than your recovery can carry.”
Her gaze doesn’t leave mine.
“My recovery isn’t the only thing in this room.”
No, it isn’t.
The canvases surround us, wet and vivid, but the real danger stands between them. A woman returning to herself. A man who has wanted her from a distance since before he knew her name.
And her eyes on me now say she knows.
MacLeod’s Baby Bump Hotel, Shared Sitting Room, Sausalito, California. 1545 hours
Bliss studies the largest canvas for another minute before setting the brush down.
“I think I’m finished.”
I look from the painting to her. “I don’t.”
She raises an eyebrow. “With the painting?”
“With painting.”
A small smile appears. “That sounds like something a man who doesn’t paint would say.”
“I freely admit my qualifications are limited.”
She wipes her hands on a paint-stained rag, still watching me with that clear, curious expression I feared Meridian had erased forever.
“What would you have me paint?”
The answer arrives before caution has a chance to interfere.
“Me.”
Her eyes search mine, looking for the joke.
She doesn’t find one.
“You’re serious.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because three years ago you painted a man standing in a crowd. I’ve spent a long time wondering what you saw.”
She holds my gaze for several seconds.
“And now?”
“Now I’d like to know what you see when nothing’s hiding me.”
A slow breath leaves her.
She lifts the finished canvas from the easel and props it carefully against the wall. When she straightens, she presses two fingers briefly to her temple and waits for the dizziness to pass before replacing the canvas with a clean one.
“You should rest.”
“I will after.”
Her tone makes it clear the discussion is over.
Then she gestures toward the chair opposite her. “Sit.”
I obey without another word.
She doesn’t begin immediately.
Instead, she walks around me once, slowly, studying me with an artist’s focus. I imagine she sees the tiny scar near my temple, the faint lines beginning beside my eyes, and the way I hold one shoulder a fraction lower than the other after years bent over laboratory benches.
“You’re very still,” she says.
“I’ve had practice.”
“I know.”
The words are so low I almost miss them.
She lifts a charcoal pencil first.
Not paint.
Quick, confident lines appear across the white surface. She barely looks at the page, spending most of her time watching me instead. Every few moments she tilts her head, narrowing one eye before adding another stroke.
I’ve spent years sitting across from research subjects, grieving families, and survivors trying to explain memories that kept changing shape.
No one has ever examined me this honestly.
It’s strangely unnerving.
“What are you looking for?” I ask.
“The things you don’t know you’re showing.”
“And am I?”
“All the time.”
She smiles to herself and reaches for the first brush.
Blue first. Then umber. Then the smallest edge of gold, worked into the places where the light catches my skin.
Her movements slow as the portrait changes. I can’t see the canvas from where I sit, but I can feel the shift in her attention. She isn’t sketching a face anymore. She’s finding the places I usually keep out of reach.
My throat tightens.
Bliss glances at me, then back at the canvas.
“Don’t hide from me now.”
“I’m trying not to.”
“I know that too.”
The brush moves again, softer this time.
“This won’t look like the painting from Montreal,” she says.
“I know.”
“That man was watching the world.”
Her gaze meets mine again.
“This one is letting the world see him.”
MacLeod’s Baby Bump Hotel, Shared Sitting Room, Sausalito, California. 1630 hours
Bliss sets the brush down with paint still clinging to her fingertips.
She studies the portrait for another few seconds, then lifts the easel and turns it toward me.
I stop breathing.
This isn't the man I see in mirrors.