7. Tony
TONY
She laughed again.
I heard it through the studio wall. Two rooms away, maybe three. Warm. Unguarded. The kind of laugh that came from the belly, not the throat.
I set my brush down and told myself I wasn't going to look. I'd been telling myself that for a week now. Every day she came to work, every day her voice carried through this house, and every day I lost the argument with myself before it started.
I looked.
I made it to the kitchen doorway before I caught myself. Sophia was at the counter, chopping something. And she was there. The transcriber. Mia.
She sat on the stool with her legs tucked under her, those small round glasses perched on her nose, hair spilling over one shoulder. She was talking with her hands. Big gestures. The kind of person who told a story with her whole body.
Sophia said something I couldn't hear and Mia threw her head back, laughing again. Her throat was long and brown and her nose ring caught the light from the window.
I stepped back into the corridor before she could turn around.
It had been a week. Seven days of her arriving before nine, of the house filling with sounds it had forgotten how to make. Seven days of the house feeling different.
Not louder. Not smaller. Just occupied.
Every morning she arrived before nine. I heard the front door, the soft thud of her bag hitting the floor, the click of the mini-fridge opening.
She brought bread from the bakery in town for Sophia. Fresh, wrapped in paper, still warm. Accepted like tribute from a foreign dignitary. Which, in that kitchen, it was.
She drank coffee from one of the big mugs. Black. I watched her wrap both hands around it and blow across the surface.
Thinking. Working something out behind those brown eyes.
Every afternoon she sat on that couch in the office and read Dad's journals. She wound her hair up into a messy knot when she concentrated, stabbing a pen through it to hold it in place. She mouthed difficult words to herself.
She curled into the couch cushions the way a cat claims a warm spot. Once, she'd fallen asleep there. I'd stood in the hallway for ten minutes, watching her breathe.
And every afternoon, like some pathetic satellite locked in her orbit, I found a reason to be in the hallway.
Checking on the studio supplies. Getting water. Looking for a book I didn't need from a shelf I never used.
Lies. All of them.
I was watching her.
The guilt of it sat in my stomach like cold coffee. She was my employee. She was reading my father's words, handling his journals with a care I could see from across the room.
And I was finding excuses to walk past her office door, cataloguing the way her fingers traced the page.
The way she tucked her hair behind her ear and it fell right back.
The way her brow furrowed when she read something difficult and she mouthed the word to herself, working it out.
The way she looked toward the studio wing sometimes. Not searching. Just looking. Like she could feel something there, in the empty space between us, the same way I could.
I went back to my studio before I did something stupid like walking in and introducing myself.
The canvas was waiting.
It had been waiting for weeks. Blank, white, stretched tight over its frame, mocking me without making a sound.
I'd tried a dozen times to start something. Loaded paint, put down a stroke, hated it, scraped it off. The colors never matched what I saw in my head.
But today was different.
Today, I picked up a brush and loaded it with raw sienna. I didn't plan it. My hand moved before my brain could argue.
One stroke across the canvas, then another. A shape forming. A curve.
The line of a shoulder.
I mixed titanium white into the raw sienna, added cadmium yellow. The color wasn't exact. It couldn't be, not with my eyes.
But for the first time in months, I didn't care. The feeling underneath the color was alive. That mattered more.
I painted for hours.
I didn't eat. I didn't check the time. I didn't think about the Boston trial Jamie kept bringing up, or the reds on my palette that should have been brighter, truer, more themselves.
I painted the way she looked when light hit her through the glass wall. Not a photograph. Not precise. A feeling captured in pigment.
The fall of dark hair. The angle of a jaw I couldn't stop studying. The warmth of olive skin that I was getting wrong because my cones couldn't process warmth the way they used to.
It didn't matter. The painting wasn't about accuracy. It was about the heat that bloomed in my chest every time I heard her laugh carry through the corridor.
The way the whole house rearranged itself around her presence, even though she didn't know it. Even though she'd never been in this room.
The light shifted outside the windows. Afternoon bled into early evening. The lake turned from gray to dark. I kept painting.
When I finally stepped back, my hands were covered in paint. Raw sienna under my nails. Titanium white dried into the creases of my knuckles.
My back ached from standing too long. I'd forgotten to put socks on again. The cold had crept up from the concrete and settled into my ankles.
The painting wasn't finished. But it was there. A woman. Dark hair falling past her shoulders. Light streaming through glass onto skin that glowed.
Her face was turned slightly away, the way I always saw her. Never full-on. Always from a distance, through a pane of glass, from an angle she didn't know existed.
The colors were off. I knew they were off. The skin tone was probably muddier than it should be, the light too yellow where it should have been white. But the feeling. The goddamn feeling.
It was the best thing I'd painted in months.
I heard the door open behind me.
"Tony."
Jamie's voice. I didn't turn around.
His footsteps crossed the concrete. Slow. He stopped somewhere behind my left shoulder.
I could feel him looking at the canvas. The silence stretched out and I let it, because I already knew what his face was doing.
"Who is that?"
I cleaned my brush in the turpentine jar. Wiped it on the rag. Said nothing.
"Tony."
"What."
"That's her, isn't it? The transcriber."
I put the brush down. Picked up another one. Examined the bristles like they held the answer to a question no one had asked.
"Her name is Mia," Jamie said. His voice had that careful quality it took on when he was trying not to smile. "You know her name. You've been watching her for a week."
"I haven't been watching anyone."
"Buddy." He stepped closer. I could see him now in my peripheral vision. Coat still on, snow melting on his shoulders.
"I've known you since we were seventeen. You think I can't tell when you're full of it?"
"I think you should mind your own business."
"You painted her. From memory. In one sitting." He paused. "The colors are a little off."
"Thanks."
"The feeling isn't." Another pause. "It's incredible, actually. You haven't painted like this since the Barcelona series."
I didn't answer. Because he was right and I hated him for it.
Jamie was quiet for a long moment. Then he exhaled and I heard the grin in it before I saw it.
"You're screwed, buddy."
"Get out."
"Completely, thoroughly, magnificently screwed."
"Jamie."
"I mean it. Look at that canvas. Look at what you just did. You haven't touched a figure study in a year and a half and you just painted one in six hours from memory." He crossed his arms. "That's not casual observation, Tony. That's obsession with a paintbrush."
"It's a painting. That's what I do. I paint."
"You paint abstracts. Color fields. You haven't painted a person since the Barcelona series." He tilted his head toward the canvas. "And you've never painted one like that."
"Going." He held up both hands and backed toward the door. "I'm going. But for the record? This is the first time in six months I've seen you paint something that looks like it matters. Whatever she's doing to your head, don't fight it too hard."
The door closed behind him.
I stood in front of the painting.
It was good. I could admit that in the silence, with no one watching.
The composition was right, the gesture was right, the emotion that poured through the imperfect colors knocked the air out of me. A woman reading in a wash of light. Simple. Honest. Hungry.
And I could never show it to anyone.
Because it was her. The one who worked in my house, sat on my couch, ate lunch with the closest thing I had to a mother. The one I'd hired and hadn't spoken a single word to.
The woman whose name I said in my head more often than I wanted to admit. Whose face nagged at me in ways I still couldn't explain.
Something about her was familiar. Not the way she moved or spoke. Something older. The shape of her jaw. The way her cheekbones caught shadows. It had been nagging at me for days and I was no closer to placing it.
I pulled a drop cloth from the shelf and covered the canvas.
The studio was quiet. The lake was black outside the windows.
Somewhere on the other side of the house, the kitchen light glowed. Sophia's light. But Sophia had gone home hours ago and the only person left in this house was me.
I walked to the bedroom. Stripped off my paint-covered jeans. Stood under the shower until the water ran warm, then hot, then scalding.
Scrubbed the sienna from my fingers. Pressed my palms flat against the tile and let the water hit the back of my neck.
The paint came off my hands. The rest of it didn't wash away so easy. The image of her on the canvas. The image of her in my head. The way they overlapped until I couldn't tell which one was the painting and which one was the woman.
I'm not doing this.
I dried off. Got into bed.
The ceiling above me was nothing but glass and stars. The mountains were black shapes cut against a darker sky.
The sheets were cold. They were always cold. I always slept alone.
I closed my eyes.
Dark hair and warm eyes and the sound of a laugh I could hear through walls.
The way she'd raised her hand to the window the other night. A wave. A reach. An invitation I hadn't earned and couldn't accept.
I turned over. Punched the pillow into shape.
She was still there. Behind my eyelids. In the paint under my nails I hadn't quite scrubbed away. In the covered canvas waiting in the studio like a confession I wasn't ready to make.
I'm not doing this. I'm not falling for a woman I've never spoken to. A woman whose voice I've only heard through walls and whose hands I've only seen turning pages of my dead father's journals.
I lay in the dark for a long time.
Sleep didn't come.