Emily startled slightly but didn’t turn around. Her brush paused mid-stroke. “Go ahead.”
He moved to where he could see the canvas without crowding her workspace. The painting showed the lighthouse from a different angle than her previous work. Early morning light washed across the keeper’s quarters, turning the walls golden while the lighthouse tower remained in shadow. She’d captured the way dawn arrived in stages here, illuminating surfaces gradually rather than all at once.
The technical skill impressed him. She knew what she was doing with a brush. She understood how to layer color to create depth, how to suggest texture without overworking the surface. The composition balanced structure and atmosphere in ways that required both training and intuition.
But that wasn’t what held his attention. Something in the way she’d painted the light made the scene feel inhabited. Lived in. The windows of the keeper’s quarters reflected the sky, but they also suggested someone inside looking out. Someone waiting for something or watching over something precious.
“You’re spending real time with it.”
“With what?” She glanced at him briefly before returning to her canvas.
“The light. The way it changes through the morning. This isn’t observation from a single session. You’ve been watching it for days.”
She added a stroke of pale blue to one of the windows. “Is that a criticism?”
He heard the defensiveness in her question and tried again. “No, it’s an observation. Most painters show up, capture the moment they see, and leave. You’re studying it. Building understanding over time.”
Her grip loosened on her brush. “The light’s different every morning. Different clouds, different humidity, and a different angle of the sun. I kept getting it wrong. Too stark or too soft. Finally realized I needed to stop trying to paint one perfect morning and start painting the truth of all of them.”
He’d hit that wall too. Every artist did eventually. You had to let go of trying to capture what you saw and start expressing what you understood.
Miranda had never made that transition. Her paintings remained technically polished but emotionally hollow. She’d perfected her style early and never pushed past it, never risked failing in pursuit of something deeper. He’d admired her confidence at first. Only later did he recognize it as a limitation rather than a strength.
“The way you’ve painted the keeper’s quarters,” he said carefully, “it feels like someone’s home, not a historical building.”
“It is someone’s home. Winnie lives there. Has her whole life. It’s not history to her. It’s just a regular morning.”
She’d done what most artists spent years looking for and found the reality beneath the picturesque surface. Tourists painted the lighthouse as an object. Emily was painting it as a place where people built lives.
She stepped back from her easel and studied the canvas with narrowed eyes. “The shadow on the lighthouse’s base is wrong. Too uniform. There’s a texture to the brickwork that breaks up the darkness differently.”
He moved slightly closer, seeing what she meant. “The mortar lines. They’re recessed enough to catch indirect light even when the main surface is in shadow. Creates a subtle pattern.”
“Yes.” She looked at him directly for the first time since he’d arrived. “You’ve painted it. The lighthouse, I mean.”
“A long time ago.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Before I opened the gallery.”
“Why’d you stop?”
The question was casual, but her eyes held genuine curiosity. Not the prying kind that wanted gossip, but the artist kind that recognized shared experience.
“Got busy with other things. The gallery takes up a lot of time.” The half-truth felt shallow.
She nodded slowly but didn’t quite look like she believed him. She turned back to her canvas and began mixing a darker blue. “I didn’t paint for over a year. Kept telling myself I was too busy dealing with legal issues. Too stressed to focus. Waiting for the right time.”
She added the new color to the tower’s shadow, using a dry brush to create the texture she’d described. “Finally realized I was just afraid. Easier to not try than to try and confirm I’d lost it.”
The honesty in her admission surprised him. “Did you? Lose it?”
“I don’t know yet. Some days this feels like remembering something I used to know. Other days, it feels like learning from scratch. Maybe it’s both.”
The vulnerability in her voice undermined every assumption he’d made about her. This wasn’t someone exploiting a scandal for attention. This was an artist trying to find her way back to work that mattered. He recognized that struggle because he’d been avoiding it for seven years.
She glanced at him. “Your painting before. The work you did. Was it good?”
“I thought so.” He surprised himself by answering honestly. “I was doing sculptures of found objects, mostly urban materials, trying to show how cities grow and change through the debris they leave behind.”
“Past tense.”
