His impatience isn’t affected by my stony silence during the short drive. My nerves hum with anxiety as he pulls into the driveway of his mansion, carefully steering into the garage, parking next to a yellow Maserati.
“You like it?” he asks as my eyes are drawn to the gorgeous vehicle. “Take it home if you want.”
“Sure,” I scoff, uncomfortable with the reminder of our vastly different circumstances. “And spend half the weekend filling in forms for your insurer after it gets stolen.”
“Are you always this optimistic?”
“You’d call it realism if you saw where I lived.”
Once he opens the connecting door to the house, he pauses. “It’s quicker to cut through inside to get to the back porch, but we can take the side path if you prefer.” He points back through the open garage door but the fact he remembered is more reassuring than avoiding his house would be.
“It’s fine. Lead the way.”
I still have no idea what he’s doing. I stick my hand in my pocket, thumbing the side button on my phone and remember joking with Clare about keeping hers turned on. Back when my biggest worry was filling time at a party alone.
“It’s horrible,” Zane says, jolting me out of my reverie. “I fucking hate it here. All this space and there’s only me here to fill it. Dad’s barely home and when he is, he can’t stand to be in the same room with me.”
I stare at him, unable to respond to the barrage of personal information when I’m so used to him deflecting, using humour to keep things light or aggression to lead somewhere far darker.
It’s like opening a window into a different person.
But he grabs my hand before I can regroup, tugging me until we’re walking, my short legs needing two steps for his one. We’ve exited through the back door onto a patio before he lets me go.
The expansive back yard ends at the river. The wide stretch of water is a thousand shades of blue, green, white, and grey. Its surface is murky from the wind whipping across its surface, the disturbance turning the liquid opaque.
Narrow steps lead us down to a lawn, the crisscross of mower marks perfectly aligned. There are stepping stones,actualstones, sunk into the earth, leading across to a two-storey outbuilding. If the house behind weren’t so large, it might obstruct the view, but the slope of the lawn helps.
Their backyard shed is easily larger than our flat.
Zane punches a passcode into the pad beside the door, then pauses. He looks my way, frowning, then wipes his palms against his trouser leg like he’s sweating, anxious.
“I heard you talking with Mr Simmons,” he says. “About struggling to find time to work on your art. I thought this might work as your studio.”
He leads me inside, the space gloomy from the dark skies outside. When he flicks on the lights, illuminating it in one go, my heart leaps into my throat, eyes widening. It’s a fully equipped art studio, better than anything I’ve ever seen.
Half a dozen easels are spaced across the floor, oilcloths obscuring the paintings in progress. Large canvases lean against the walls, facing outward, their designs hidden, piled two or three deep. Bulky frames add their weight to some completedworks, others are bare, their backs showing the staples where the original artist fixed the canvas to the wooden slats.
Ahead of me are gigantic windows. Aside from supports holding the individual panes in place, the wall facing the river is glass. Louvres are mounted either side to alter the amount of light streaming through the clear frontage. Far too little considering the heavy cloud, a situation Zane soon remedies, leaving the overhead lights on as well.
I put a hand to my throat, plucking at the skin.
The visual overwhelms me until I close my eyes. The same image hovers for a second, colours and light inverted until I reopen them.
“This is your studio?”
“I—” Zane shakes his head and I move to the nearby bench, eyes scanning the cork board mounted behind it. The pinned photo references are different from the cheap and cheerful snapshot in the corner showing a small family. A mother, father, and son.
“This belongs to your mother?” To gift such an intimate part of the house for my use is incredibly moving.
“Until she died, yes.”
The loss I feel for my father opens a window into his grief, and my heart breaks for him, empathy flooding forth. “I’m sorry. Were you very old when she—”
And he’s gone. Moving to a canvas, untying the knots that secure the oilcloth before he turns back to face me. “You don’t know who I am, do you? Who my mother was?”
The question unnerves me, unable to make sense of the rhetorical grenade. My voice is tiny as I admit, “I don’t know what you mean.”
Zane almost shudders, then he lifts the oilcloth.
