5. Tony
TONY
The laugh came first.
I was in the studio, standing in front of a canvas I'd been staring at for two hours. Blank. White. The kind of white that used to feel like possibility and now just looked like failure. My bare feet were cold on the concrete. I had a brush in my hand and nothing in my head worth putting down.
Then I heard it. Through the glass, from somewhere deep in the house. A woman's laugh.
Not Sophia's. Sophia's laugh was low and warm, the kind that came with a shake of her head and a mutter about someone being impossible. This was different. This was open. Easy. The sound carried through the walls like it had been looking for me.
I put the brush down.
I should have stayed where I was. I had work to do.
I had a deadline I'd already pushed twice and a gallery in Denver that had stopped asking and started begging.
The turpentine was open. The palette was loaded.
Everything was ready except the part of me that used to know how to make something out of nothing.
But my feet moved before my brain gave permission, and I found myself walking down the corridor toward the guest bedroom in the east wing.
The window overlooked the courtyard and, beyond it, the kitchen.
I stood to the side. Not in the center. Not where anyone could see me if they looked up. An old habit. Watching without being watched. I'd been doing it since I was a kid. Back then it was survival. Now it was just pathetic.
She was in my kitchen.
Dark hair. Long. Past her waist, loose and a little wild. Olive skin that caught the light streaming through the window.
She was standing at the counter next to Sophia, and they were laughing about something. Sophia was pointing at a pan on the stove and the woman was shaking her head, hands up in surrender. She said something I couldn't hear and Sophia's whole face lit up.
I watched her move. She had a way of shifting her weight from one hip to the other, easy and unhurried, like she had nowhere else to be. When she turned to reach for something on the counter, her hair swung across her back and I tracked the motion.
Her face.
Something about her face.
I'd seen her before. Not here. Not in Rockford. Somewhere else. A screen, maybe. A photograph. The shape of her jaw, the angle of her cheekbones. It nagged at me the way a word nags when it's stuck on the tip of your tongue. Close enough to taste. Too far to reach.
I couldn't place it. And it was going to drive me insane.
Jamie had come to find me. Of course he had.
"The typist is here," he said from the doorway. He'd been at the house for the brunch Sophia had orchestrated. The one I'd refused to attend. He still had his coat on, hat shoved in his pocket, which meant he'd come straight from downstairs to hunt me down.
"I know."
"She's nice. You should come say hello."
"No."
He leaned against the doorframe. I could hear his patience wearing thin without looking at him. Years of this. Years of him trying to pull me out of whatever hole I'd crawled into, and me digging deeper every time.
"Come on, Tony. Five minutes. Sophia made eggs."
"I'm not hungry."
"You're never hungry. That's not the point."
I kept my eyes on the glass below. Mia was sitting on one of the counter stools now. Sophia had put a plate in front of her. She picked up a fork with one hand and pushed her hair behind her ear with the other.
I tracked the movement. I didn't know why.
"The typist?" I said.
"The transcriber," Jamie said. His voice was flat. Tired. "Her name is Mia. She's here to work on your dad's journals. You approved this."
"Sophia approved this."
"You didn't stop it."
I said nothing. Below us, the woman laughed again. Mia. Her name was Mia. It was a small name. Soft. It didn't match the way it was lodging itself into my chest.
Jamie waited. I gave him nothing. After a minute, he straightened up from the doorframe. "Fine. But I'm running out of ways to explain you to people, Tony."
His footsteps faded down the hall. I stayed at the window like the idiot I was, watching a stranger eat eggs with my housekeeper.
She pushed her glasses up her nose. Reading glasses, small and round.
They'd slipped down and she nudged them back without thinking, without pausing her conversation.
It was such a small thing. A nothing gesture.
The kind of thing a person does a thousand times a day without knowing they're doing it.
I noticed it like it mattered.
It didn't.
Something low in my chest disagreed.
I stepped back from the window. My pulse was doing something I hadn't given it permission to do. A tightness below my ribs. A heat spreading through my stomach that had nothing to do with the coffee I hadn't drunk.
I gripped the windowsill. Steady. Breathe.
I hadn't wanted anyone in years. Not since Ava, and that had been empty from the start. A transaction between two people who were too broken to feel anything real. Before that, there was Charlotte, and Charlotte had been a whole different kind of wrong. Not her fault. Mine.
My body had gone quiet a long time ago. I'd let it. I'd welcomed the silence. Wanting someone meant opening a door I'd nailed shut for good reason.
And then this woman walked into my kitchen with her messy hair and that sound she made when something struck her as funny. And everything switched back on. Just like that. A circuit tripping in the dark.
No. Absolutely not.
I went back to the studio. Picked up the brush. Loaded it with paint. Cerulean. Or what I thought was cerulean. These days it could be anything. The colors lied to me now, shifting under my fingers like wet sand.
I put a stroke on the canvas.
Wrong.
I wiped it off. Tried again. Wrong again. The blue was flat. Lifeless. I knew what the lake looked like at noon in February. The way the ice caught the light and turned it into something between glass and steel. I could see it in my head. I just couldn't get it out of my hands.
I set the brush down. Sat on the stool by the workbench. Stared at the white canvas.
All I could see was dark hair and olive skin and the way she'd tipped her head back when she laughed. That full-body surrender to it, like laughing was something she gave herself to completely.
Who does that? Who laughs like that in a stranger's kitchen on a February morning in the middle of nowhere?
Someone who isn't afraid.
Or someone who's very good at pretending she isn't.
A knock on the studio door. Sophia.
She didn't wait for me to answer. She never did. She walked in with the quiet authority of a woman who'd been managing me for years and had long stopped asking for my cooperation.
"She's gone," Sophia said.
"Who."
Sophia gave me a look. The look. The one that said don't insult my intelligence.
"Mia," she said. "The transcriber. She's gone home. But she'll be starting work in a few days." She paused. Adjusted something on the workbench that didn't need adjusting. "She's lovely, by the way. Smart. Kind. You'd like her if you bothered to meet her."
"I'm sure."
"I mean it, Tony."
"I heard you."
Sophia studied me. I kept my face blank. The studio was quiet. The canvas was white. My bare feet were cold and I was thirty-six years old and I was hiding from a woman I'd never spoken to.
"You can't live like this forever," Sophia said. Not unkind. Just honest. She'd earned the right to be honest with me. She was the only one left who had.
"I'm not living like anything. I'm working."
She looked at the blank canvas. Looked back at me. Didn't say a word.
I deserved that.
"Goodnight, Tony."
"Night, Sophia."
She left. I heard her footsteps in the corridor, then the soft click of the front door.
The kitchen light would be on. She always left it on before she went home to her husband. After that light, there was nothing. Just me and the glass and the lake and the mountains. And the enormous, pressing silence of a house built for a man who died before he could live in it.
I sat in the studio until the light outside faded from gray to black. I didn't paint. I didn't move. I replayed fragments.
The way she'd helped Sophia at the stove. Side by side, natural and easy. They'd only just met.
Her hand on her own neck when she was talking. Fingers resting against her throat like she was holding her own heartbeat.
Her face. That nagging pull. I'd seen her somewhere.
I was certain of it. Not in person. Not in this town.
But somewhere in the blur of images that move through a person's life, screens and headlines and passing glances, her face had been there.
And my brain was chewing on it the way a dog chews a bone it can't crack.
I gave up trying.
I turned off the studio lights. The house went dark around me, all that glass turning into mirrors. I could see myself reflected in the walls. Barefoot, paint on my jeans, three-day beard. A man standing alone in a glass house he'd built to see everything and let nothing in.
I walked through the corridor. Past Dad's study with the lamp that never went off.
The leather chair sat empty under the light, the way it had every night for years.
Three shelves of journals. Small, precise handwriting in every one.
The transcriber would read those words. She'd sit in that room and hold my father's thoughts in her hands.
The thought did something to me I wasn't prepared for.
I kept walking. Past the living room where the lake was a black mirror under the stars. Into the kitchen.
Sophia's light was on. The counter was clean. She'd washed everything, put everything away. But I could still smell it. Cumin and onion and something else beneath it. Something warm and clean that didn't belong to the curry.
I stood there for longer than I should have. The stool where Mia had been sitting was pushed back at an angle. Sophia would have straightened it. She must have missed this one.
I told myself it was the curry I was smelling.
I told myself a lot of things.
I walked to my bedroom. Pulled back the covers.
Lay down and stared at the ceiling. Nothing but sky above me.
The mountains were black shapes against a field of stars.
The house was so quiet I could hear the lake.
Or maybe I was imagining it. Maybe the silence had gotten so deep it was making sounds of its own.
I thought about the gallery in Denver. I thought about the white nothing on the easel. I thought about cerulean blue and how I used to know exactly what it looked like.
I closed my eyes.
She was still there. Behind my eyelids. Dark hair, that open warmth, the way she'd moved through my kitchen like she belonged in it. Those glasses sliding down her nose. Her face pulling at something in my memory that I couldn't name and couldn't shake.
In a few days she'd be back. She'd be in Dad's study, reading his words, filling this house with a presence that had no right to settle this deep under my skin.
I turned over. Pressed my face into the pillow.
She was going to be a problem. I could feel it in my bones.