1. Emma
Emma
“This is how we found you.”
Alex’s voice carries across the hallway. My brush stops halfway to the paper.
I have been in his penthouse for a week, and this is the first afternoon he has stayed home for more than an hour.
Most days, he leaves before breakfast and returns after dark.
Sometimes I hear him moving around long after I have gone to bed, but we manage to spend most of our time pretending the other person is not here.
Today, he has been in his home office since noon.
I started painting because there are only so many books I can read and shelves I can dust before the walls begin closing in. I used the meagre supplies I had packed with me.
He stands in my doorway, one shoulder against the frame, looking at the half-finished wash on my desk.
Water drips from my forgotten brush. A blue stain spreads across the wood.
“I pieced it together.” I whisper.
”Trying to sell that painting. That was your first mistake.”
My grip tightens around the brush. “You recognized it?”
“Immediately.”
I shouldn’t be surprised.
In Montana, Alex used to sit on the floor of the studio he built for me and watch me work. He could stay there for hours without speaking, his back against the wall and his long legs stretched out in front of him.
He knew when I was unhappy with a piece before I set down the brush. He knew I pressed harder when I was angry and softened every edge when I was afraid of what the painting revealed.
Alex learned my work the way other men learned a lover’s body.
Perhaps he knew it better than he ever knew mine.
I lower the brush before more paint falls onto the desk.
“What was it?” he asks.
“What was what?”
“The painting.”
My pulse begins to climb.
“You bought it. Didn’t you look at it?”
“Danny bought it.” Alex steps into the room. “By the time I saw it, I was more interested in finding the artist.”
He stops on the other side of the desk. “What was it of?”
“Light.”
“What kind?”
“Late-afternoon light.” I look down at the paper. “The few minutes before sunset when everything changes.”
Alex does not answer.
I can feel him watching me.
“The painting was gray, Belle. I’ve seen you paint light; in fact, those were my favorite. But this one was not it.”
My fingers grow cold around the brush.
No one I know calls me Belle anymore. Hearing it now strips away all my defenses before I have time to strengthen them.
“I remembered it wrong.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“It was long a time ago.”
“You destroyed every painting you made, but you expect me to believe you forgot the one that escaped?”
I set the brush in the water jar. It knocks against the glass hard enough to send ripples across the cloudy water.
“It was just before sunrise,” I say. “Not sunset.”
Alex’s gaze stays on my face.
I know exactly what I painted.
A sky heavy with clouds, caught in the moment before dawn. Every shade of gray had come from memory. Steel at the center. Blue around the edges. Silver where the first light touched it.
His eyes.
I had painted Alex’s eyes across an entire sky and disguised them as weather.
Then I had left the canvas where someone else could find it.
He comes around the desk.
I step back before I can stop myself. My hip catches the edge of the chair, trapping me between it and the table.
His eyes track the movement. His pace slows, but he does not retreat.
“Why did you paint it?”
I glance at the unfinished wash beside me, at the gray gathering beneath the blue.
“I don’t know.”
“Another lie.”
Anger flares through the fear.
“You don’t get to stand there and demand pieces of me whenever the mood strikes you.”
“I asked about a painting.”
“You used it to hunt me down.”
His jaw tightens. “You hid for ten years.”
“And you still found me.”
”Because I can recognize it anywhere.”
The certainty in his voice hurts more than it should.
I turn away and reach for a cloth, pressing it over the blue stain. The color spreads beneath my hand instead of lifting.
“It was the only thing I had left that still felt like mine,” I say.
Everything around us seems to fall away.
I keep rubbing at the paint, though all I am doing is forcing it deeper into the grain.
Alex’s reflection appears in the dark window beside the desk. His expression has changed. The hard set of his mouth loosens, and for one second he looks tired rather than angry.
Somehow, this makes me feel worse.
He understands. That should give me comfort. Instead, it tears through the last of my patience.
I drop the cloth.
“What am I doing here?”
The softness disappears from his face.
“You know why you’re here.”
“No, I know why you claim I’m here.” I turn to face him. “Punishment. Revenge. Justice. You change the word whenever one of them stops sounding convincing.”
His eyes narrow.
“You dragged me into this penthouse. You control where I go, who I see, and who I can talk to. You don’t even let me see my own brother. You hold Liam’s future over my head, and then you stand in my doorway asking what I painted as though you still have the right to know me.”
“Belle.”
“What do you want from me?”
“You know what I want.”
“I don’t.”
My voice rises, but I cannot make myself stop.
“I don’t know if you want the truth or if you only want to hear me confess to the version, you already believe. I don’t know if you brought me here to punish me or because ten years of hating me still weren’t enough.”
His nostrils flare.
I step out from behind the chair. “If you believe I killed your father, why am I still alive?”
His face empties of every emotion.
I force the next words out before fear can pull them back.
“Why not kill me and end it? A life for a life. Clean. Simple. The numbers would finally balance.”
Alex’s hand closes at his side.
“You think I haven’t thought about it?”
The answer steals the breath from my lungs. I should have expected it. Perhaps part of me did. Still, my fingers find the edge of the desk behind me and hold on.
“I think you’ve thought of everything.”
“Then you should know the answer.”
“I don’t.” My voice shakes now, and I hate that he can hear it. “I don’t know anything about what you want anymore. I’m not sure you do either.”
His stare does not leave mine.
“Is this justice?” I ask. “Is it grief? Or do you only need me to hurt as much as you do?”
A pulse beats hard in his temple.
For a moment, we just stare at each other, both of us breathing too hard.
Then his eyes shift past me to the painting.
His face changes.
Only slightly. A breath catches in his chest. His shoulders loosen before he seems to remember himself and pulls them back into place.
But I see it.
For one second, he is the man from Montana again.
The man who built me a studio because he understood I needed somewhere I could shut the world out. The man who would sit on the floor while I painted, quiet when I needed quiet, talking only when I wanted him to.
The man who knew every broken part of me and never once looked afraid.
He looks at me now with that same want in his eyes.
Only now, it is buried beneath ten years of rage.
“Why, Alex?”
His throat works before he answers.
“Because I’m not as good at hating you as I need to be.”
The word hating catches in his voice.
His face hardens the moment he realizes what he has admitted.
“Alex—”
He turns and crosses the room before I can finish. His hand grips the doorframe, and for one breath, I think he might look back.
He doesn’t.
The door closes quietly behind him. He hurries away before he can say something else he cannot take back.
Blue paint has soaked into the wood, too deep to wipe away.
Bee lifts her head from the bed and watches me.
“He recognized it,” I whisper.
She blinks.
One look at the painting, and he knew it was mine.
After everything he has done to prove he hates me, the truth finally slipped out.
He isn’t as good at it as he needs to be.
My eyes fall to the gray wash drying across the page.
The exact color of his eyes.
The call comes while I’m standing in the penthouse kitchen, staring at the espresso machine I’m worried I’d need a college degree to use. My phone vibrates against the marble countertop.
Liam’s face fills the screen.
Not an audio call. Video.
My brother hardly ever calls without turning the camera on. He’ll want to see my face, the room behind me, every detail I’ve been hiding from him for almost two weeks.
My hand hovers over the phone.
I’ve never gone this long without seeing him. A few days, maybe, when he traveled for an away game, but even then we talked every night. Now I’ve been rejecting his calls and sending rushed texts before he can ask questions I’m not ready to answer.
The ache beneath my ribs tightens.
Almost two weeks since I last saw his face anywhere but on this screen. Two weeks of pretending I’m fine. Pretending I’m safe. Convincing myself I’m not trapped inside the home that’s nothing but a glorified cage.
There is one silver lining. The Accord probably has no idea where I am. As long as they don’t, I’m safe here.
Now I just need my body to get the message so I can stop flinching at every footstep and jumping whenever something shifts in the next room.
The phone keeps vibrating.
I can’t keep doing this to him.
He deserves to know where I am.
The rush of starting college and settling into a new place could distract him for only so long. Sooner or later, he was going to notice that my excuses didn’t add up.
“Hey, you,” I say.
“Were you going to tell me?”
No hello. He gets that from me.
“Liam—”
“I was coming home this week. Diego and I mapped the whole drive. I was going to walk into the restaurant and surprise you at the counter, and Elena asks why I’m not stopping in Dallas first. Dallas.” His voice climbs and he hauls it back down. “She thought I knew, Em. She apologized to me.”
“Liam—”
“I had to hear it from Elena! Were you ever going to tell me?”
“I was going to call you today,” I say. It’s a lie. I hadn’t yet worked up the nerve.
“You moved out of our house. Our town?—”
“Everything happened fast.”
“That’s what Elena said.”
My fingers fiddle with the knobs on the machine in front of me. “I should have called you.”