When she can hear words again, I say the thing I am not sure I am allowed to say. “No one will ever use you again,” my voice wrecked and steady. “Not here. Not in my hands. Not even me. Not unless you want it.” I don’t make it sound like a vow Ican carve in stone. Vows carved that way break men. I make it sound like a contract I will renew every time she asks.
She lifts her face. Her eyes are wet. Her mouth—red, bitten, real—open and close once before the words find themselves. “Don’t let me go,” she whispers, and it takes me a heartbeat to recognize it not as surrender but as the simplest request she has ever made of anyone in her life. Not hold me forever. Justdon’t let me go.
I close my eyes. Not for prayer. For precision. “I won’t.”
Chapter 48 – Aurora
I’m cross-legged on the paint-splattered floor in a sun square, sleeves shoved to my elbows, a tray of primaries and a row of palette knives on the drop cloth at my knee. Kenzie, who is fourteen, gives clipped answers, and has a streak of raw defiance that’s too big for her small frame, sits opposite me, mirroring my posture without admitting it’s intentional. She hates that she’s here. She hates that anyone can see that she hates it. I understand both hatreds better than I should.
“You’re going to over-mix,” I say, tipping her cup of water away from the palette like a bartender cutting someone off. “You want to stop one step before you think you should. Leave the streaks. If it looks like expensive marbling, you’ve done too much.”
She narrows her eyes, then glances at my tray where I’ve dragged ultramarine toward cadmium and let them flirt without marrying. “It’s going to look messy.”
“Good,” I say. “Mess is how you see movement.”
She snorts, but her wrist loosens, and I watch the blue eat into the red in slashes that still hold their edges. We’re not painting a picture. We’re making the particular kind of order that shows you you’re still the one with the brush.
“How do I make it darker without making it muddy?” she asks after a minute, as if the question was always there and she needed time to admit she wanted the answer.
“Add the complement in a whisper,” I say, pointing with the knife. “The opposite on the wheel. Not black. Black is a bully. It stomps.”
Her mouth does a little twist that might be the beginning of a smile. “Like your ex?”
“Worse,” I say, and she laughs. I don’t tell her black has its uses. I’ll teach her that when she trusts her hand.
Around us the room hums the way a hive does when you’ve stood close enough for a long time to learn that the sound is a sign of health. Four other residents work at easels under the eye of Vera, one of Dr. Navarro’s art therapists: a soft-voiced woman with threads of silver in her bun and patience that could sand a rough beam smooth. A boy with hair that falls into his eyes is doing something repetitive and tight with a micron pen. A woman old enough to be my mother stands in front of a canvas with her whole body, one arm painting, the other at her side like a counterweight. Her brushstrokes look decisive and necessary. The music is low, the kind of instrumental that never intrudes, just reminds you your breath is supposed to go in and out.
I dip a knife into white and streak it through Kenzie’s mix before she can object. “Highlights,” I say. “If you don’t leave yourself light, it’s hard to find it later.”
“You sound like her,” she giggles, rolling a shoulder toward Vera without looking up.
“Occupational hazard,” I answer. “Want to try the knife?”
Kenzie hesitates, then nods. I pass it to her handle-first. Her fingers look too small around it until she plants her knee and leans into the drag the way I showed her last week: no dainty touches, weight behind the motion. The paint pulls in a ribbon, leaves a ridge of light at the top of the stroke, and she inhales once like she didn’t know that would feel satisfying.
“I hate this place,” she mumbles.
“I hated a lot of places,” I respond. “Do you hate the paint?”
She glances down at the palette. The blue has done what blue does when you set it free from the tube—it has opened, like a window. “No,” she says. The word is small but clear.
“Then keep the thing you don’t hate in your hands,” I say softly. “It helps with the other parts.”
Her gaze slides up to mine, sharp and old for an instant in a fourteen-going-on-thirty way I know coats like varnish over fear. She doesn’t nod. She sets the knife to the page and pulls another dragging line of light.
There’s a clean pleasure in being useful that I’d forgotten. Not the high of a finished painting selling or the sleek satisfaction of a commission hung where it belongs. Not the skittery thrill of a donor’s praise. This is something fundamentally domestic: the rightness of aligning tools, of keeping the dirty rags separate from the clean, of telling a kid who grew up slammed back by adult moods that there is a process and it will hold.
If Cassian won’t tell me the truth, I’ll find it myself.I’d said that to my reflection last night, or maybe just to the black space above me when the lights were off and the suite was breathing. I meant it when I fell asleep with his heartbeat under my ear. I mean it more now with paint under my nails and teenagers who need something from me that isn’t sex, rescue, or spectacle. Maybe this is what it means to stand here instead of running toward every exit with your bag always half-packed.
Kenzie leans back and regards her page with the blank, evaluating stare that means she’s decided she cares and is now angry about it. “How do I stop my hand from shaking when I do the straight lines?” she asks.
“Don’t try to make it straight,” I say. “Make it true. Put all the wobble in one motion so it reads as a decision. Then no one will call it a mistake.”
She looks at me like I’ve just handed her a knife she doesn’t have to hide under a mattress. “Okay,” she says, and the line she pulls is the kind that reminds me why this place exists.
“Ms. Hale,” Vera calls. “Can you look at Joyce’s piece when you have a second?”
“Sure,” I say, and climb to my feet with the discreet grunt of someone whose knees are making their displeasure known.
