3 #2
The quiet helps me focus on the handful of vague articles that bubble up in my research.
They mention a local timber businessman killed in a domestic altercation, the son arrested.
Nothing more. No photographs of the accused.
Just a greyscale image of a clean-shaven man in a crisp shirt beneath the name Arthur Crane, sixty-eight.
The text is thin, watered-down. Almost evasive.
Arthur looks like a man moulded by harsh winters and harder opinions.
He bears very little resemblance to his son; his features are drawn tight with an authority that isn’t loud but elicits obedience all the same.
The rigid set of his mouth is but a grim line etched into his face like a scar grown too comfortable.
His eyes look past the camera, as if dismissing whatever is being asked of him.
There’s no obvious malice in his expression, but something in it feels unsettling either way.
My thumb drifts across the screen as if I could press through it and get at whatever he keeps locked behind that composure.
Sighing, I realise I might be doing exactly what I hate people doing when they look at photographs – deciding a face tells me the whole story. Nonetheless, nothing about Arthur’s makes me imagine warmth waiting for a child at home.
And it also hasn’t escaped me that there is no mention of Elias’ mother.
The articles hold nothing of value. They mention raised voices. A neighbour calling the police after hearing someone yelling.
My eyes snag on the only part of the text that suggests something more: ‘The suspect showed no signs of emotional distress at the time of the arrest.’
I recline into the couch in slow motion, staring at the line.
Thinking back on the two sessions I’d had with Elias, I remember he hadn’t shown much then either. Everything I had seen of him so far revealed a man who kept his reactions tightly contained, as though letting anything slip might cost him.
I hold my breath, hoping the pressure in my lungs might be sufficiently painful to untangle my thoughts enough to spit out a solid one.
No. Elias Crane wouldn’t show emotion.
A click and a scroll later, he appears on the display of my camera – jaw set, eyes dark, expression strained. Then I flick to the next photograph: a smile so radiant it might as well be pinned to the sky.
‘I don’t believe that for a second,’ I murmur aloud, my chin resting against my knuckles whilst my focus remains on the ardent blue.
The article has flattened him into a sentence. My photographs refuse to.
I set the camera beside the laptop and look from those clinical words to the man caught in the camera display.
Elias Crane is emotion. Emotion is everywhere on him; in the fine tension at the corners of his mouth. In his silence. In the way he holds himself. In his measured voice, as if every syllable has been weighed before being allowed to be released.
As if he’d trained himself to survive everyday life.
When my chest constricts at the possibilities I dare not voice, I note the journalist’s name at the top of the article – Dougal MacLeish – and email him, requesting a meeting.
I introduce myself as a psychological thriller author researching cases of patricide and send it deliberately from my private email account.
Ron’s words surface uninvited when my eyes snag on my avatar. He’d told me on our first date that he couldn’t resist meeting me after he’d seen my smile in that picture.
We’d met online. A month of emails and texts before we ever sat across from each other.
When the familiar sensation of loss and inadequacy slithers through my ribs, I stand abruptly and shut the laptop, as if that might trap the feelings between its covers. Then I scurry into the basement, shedding that weight with each step.
I want Crane’s photos developed. I want to see them more clearly – his eyes. His smile.
Some time later, as his face starts surfacing slowly in the first chemical-wet print, I don’t yet realise I’ve already begun arranging my life around the next Elias Crane slot.
In the following weeks, my portfolio of the man with the sky in his eyes thickens faster than expected.
Small things. Detail shots. Chain links.
Tendons. His arms. Hands always clenched at first, looser by the end of our conversations.
I’m probably giving myself too much credit for that. But I do it anyway.
When visits fall through, letters take their place – mostly one-line taunts about Mary Shelley’s ‘questionable fondness for monsters’.
We drift into dark romance, where he admits he’s never read a single book in the genre.
I vow to bring something – purely for comparative purposes, of course – to… broaden his literary horizons.
It’s a ridiculous choice, in hindsight. Even when I purchased the stalker-captive paperback, it still struck me as possibly too cruel for a man behind bars.
I keep my word, because by then I’m already in too deep to pretend this is just programme work.
I don’t think he’s getting out. Not unless something in the case changes the whole picture. And that doesn’t sit right with me.
Today he greets me with a smile. After two months of trying to soften him, it warms me more than anything.
He relaxes against the chair as though me being here has become a reprieve.
I offer him a smile right back.
‘You’re in a good mood,’ I murmur. ‘Not many people are fond of Mondays.’
He lifts a shoulder nonchalantly. ‘Not many people get to talk about questionable decisions and kinks on a Monday.’
An alarm blares between my temples. It’s a big change from the usual careful circling he does.
I slide warily down onto the chair as I study the restrained amusement on his face.
He picks up what’s been under his hands – the book I’d sent.
It crashes into me – he means what he read inside.
It was probably stupid of me to send him a book I haven’t read. And just because I’m not entirely sure what he meant, I go for honesty.
‘I have to admit – I haven’t read it.’
He hums low, a smirk spreading. There’s a beat of calculated silence.
‘And I have to admit I’ve developed a taste for chick porn.’
My mouth falls open. ‘Dark romance is literature with tension, plot, and actual character psychology.’
‘Still porn,’ he says with a smirk. ‘You’ve just wrapped it in paperbacks and trauma.’
‘Dark romance is psychology, power, dread and obsession – and yes, sex. In that order, if the writer’s any good.’
‘So… porn with footnotes.’
I exhale.
He turns his palm upside down and flicks a finger, beckoning me closer.
My brows draw together, a lick of coldness moving down my neck.
The chain fixed to the floor gives a short scrape when he shifts, a hard little sound that slices straight through he moment.
No one has yet seen fit to explain to me why Crane’s still coming into the visitation room restrained.
It shouldn’t matter – I know there are guards outside, cameras, protocols, all the layers they stack between men like him and women like me – but the sight of steel at his wrists drags back the reality in by the throat.
I shift forward before good sense can intervene. Curiosity always grips me first. Then fear. I hate that both feel good at once. Neither is safe, but my body apparently hasn’t received the memo.
At my hesitation, he cocks a brow. It almost looks like amusement, except I catch that small fracture of hurt beneath it.
His brow stays lifted in wait.
Two months of silence, aborted conversations and door closing between us lodge in my sternum.
‘Now, now…’ he murmurs, ‘you aren’t afraid of me, are you?’ The cadence of his voice might as well have come from a hearth. But he doesn’t blink once as he says it.
‘Chains ruin the whole trust-me angle,’ I say, trying for dry and landing somewhere breathless. But my eyes betray me, snagging on his hand, then his face.
The worst part is that the uncertainty isn’t only about what he might do if I obey. It’s about what I might do if I stop pretending I’m not already halfway there.
He hums, but it comes out as a growl. ‘It’s going to be hard for you to read from there.’
He opens the book, smoothing out the dog-ear, and watches me from beneath his brows. The crimson of the cover spills across the steel tabletop.
I should let the moment cool and go home to the shambles of my life. My quiet house, the half-finished rooms, the version of myself I’ve been trying to stitch back together.
But weeks ago, he barely gave me three words before calling George. Now he’s asking me to come closer.
I should know better than to mistake that for victory.
The truth sits ugly and hot beneath my tongue, however: I don’t want to go back to an empty house and spend my days avoiding the thought of everything I ever did that made Ron reject me.
I stand.
His eyes follow me.
Positioning the chair perpendicular to him, I sink down.
He shakes his head. ‘Clo-ser,’ he sing-songs quietly.
‘If you give me the book, I could read it just fine from here.’
‘I want to read it to you,’ he cuts in. ‘But I don’t think you’ll want the guards to hear it.’
I freeze for a beat, my fingers hooked around my camera, squeezing the leather strap as my gaze falls to the incriminating piece of literature I now realise I absolutely should not have sent.
My grip slackens on the strap. One breath gets all the way into my lungs. Then another.
Curiosity traps them inside.
Our eyes lock and something in me gives – not all at once, not enough to be called trust, but enough that I stop fighting the pull of him for one terrible second.
Pushing to my feet again, I pull the chair closer until it clicks against his. And sit.
The air around him folds over me at once – clean soap, pine, that cold winter scent that clings to skin after a long walk in harsh weather. It doesn’t belong in this room. Not with the concrete and the steel. I catch it even if I pretend I don’t.