“Hey,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I’m heading down to the studio. I’ve got to finish this piece before Christmas, and I’m already behind.”
I could see it—the twitch of his jaw, the tightness around his eyes. Charlie wasn’t just stressed. He was pressure personified, like a man who lived with a ticking clock inside his chest and refused to let it skip a single beat.
“You got plans today, or—”
“I’ll come down with you,” I cut in too quickly. “I told Jordan I’d check in with Sylvie anyway, but otherwise…”
He blinked. For a split second, his face almost—almost—lit up. But then his eyes slid past me and landed on Nancy Reagan, who was standing behind me, squinting at him with elderly contempt.
“Yeah,” he muttered, “We should probably get her out of here. Carpet cleaners’ll be here in an hour. Best if the criminal isn’t present at the scene.”
“Don’t let her hear you say that,” I murmured, bending to clip on Nancy’s leash. “She knows people.”
I took her for a walk through the square, stopping intoCheese, Please!to say hi to Sylvie and pretend I wasn’t hyper-aware of the man I was about to follow into close quarters. I was trying to tamp down the thing brewing inside me—the part of me that had curled up on the couch before I woke him up and thought,God help me, maybe I do want this.
By the time I walked through the front entrance of the studio, my nerves were shot.
It was warm inside, even though the door was cracked open in the back. A low breeze curled in from the alley, but the heat was from the space itself—alive with energy and paint fumes andsawdust and whatever else Charlie used to make the chaos in his mind come alive.
The front half of the studio looked like a gallery curated by someone half-mad and full of genius—trash turned into treasure, light bending across sculptures made of rusted metal and broken glass. But it was the back room that pulled me in, where the edges blurred between creation and comfort. A worn couch. A long worktable. Coffee mugs stacked haphazardly beside paint-splattered rags.
Home, but only if you knew how to look.
Lee’s voice drifted in from the speakers—slow and dreamy, a little mournful, the kind of song that slipped under your skin and settled in.
Nancy let out one sharp boof like she was announcing us at a gala, and Charlie looked up from where he was crouched, organizing a stack of sketchbooks.
“Hey, you,” he said, voice low, almost easy.
He looked better down here—calmer. Grounded. As if the tension that followed him around like a shadow had finally slipped off his shoulders, the moment he stepped into his world.
“This place looks a lot different when I’m not actively vomiting or unconscious,” I said, curling into the corner of the love seat tucked against the back wall.
From here, I could really take it in—the quiettangle of creationthat made up Charlie’s space. Layers of paint-splattered rags, dog-eared sketchbooks, old snapshots pinned to the walls without a frame in sight. There were piles of what might’ve been trash or art, or maybe both, depending on how generous you were feeling. But it felt lived in. Rooted. It was like someone had poured their entire self into the walls.
Charlie huffed out a laugh but didn’t turn around, his focus locked on the large canvas stretched along the far wall. It wasclose to finished—the kind of piece that vibrated with meaning even before you knew what it was about.
I stood and wandered closer, pulled forward as if the thing was magnetic. When I finally caught it in full, I exhaled. “That’s Magnolia,” I murmured, standing in front of it now, dwarfed by the sheer scale.
The whole piece was her, built out of tiny mosaic portraits—snapshots of family and friends, O’Malley’s, the river, sun-drenched porches, and fireworks over Forsyth. Savannah, and everyone who made it home, woven together into the shape of his sister’s face.
Tilting my head back, I took in the loops of writing running through it all, winding between the images like a thread. “Are those… song lyrics?”
Charlie didn’t look away from what he was doing—tweezing a tiny photo into place with the care of a surgeon—but his voice was soft when he spoke. “Yeah. This one’s for Magnolia. Lee commissioned it. It’s a Christmas gift.”
I frowned a little. “Isn’t she marrying his brother?”
He let out a dry laugh, then finally looked at me. There was a flicker of restraint in his eyes, or maybe curiosity he didn’t know what to do with. “That she is,” he said, placing the photo, a shot of the two of them as kids, right above her collarbone. “But somehow, their love song keeps playing on a loop in this town.”
I smiled, hugging my arms across my chest. “Savannah seems to have a thing for complicated love stories.”
Charlie walked to his worktable, where hundreds of small photos fanned out across the surface in careful disarray. I followed without thinking, drawn to the table and maybe to him, too. I hovered beside him, letting my fingers brush the edges of old memories I wasn’t part of but suddenly wanted to understand.
There was so much history here. In this space. In these pictures. In him.
“Magnolia told me about your uncle when Dig and I were at O’Malley’s not long ago,” I said, tracing the rim of my water bottle with my thumb. “He owned the bar?”
Charlie chewed on his bottom lip, eyes scanning the table of photos. “Yeah. Our parents died when we were still kids, so our Uncle Cole took us in. We grew up in the apartment above the bar.”
