My hand finds the stylus.
The line picks up where it left off.
Outside, somewhere across the street, Wildcat Stadium sits empty on this Saturday afternoon. The city goes about its business around us, indifferent and enormous, and in here, the program hums, the lines go down clean, and the silence between two people is the kind that doesn’t need filling.
I work through the primary feathers, then the secondary, and then the delicate trailing edge that gives the whole composition its sense of motion, a wing mid-lift, caught between earth and air, committed to neither and both at once.
At some point, Reece stops pretending to look at his phone and watches me work. I feel his eyes on my hands, my face, the screen, moving between them with the patient attention he usually reserves for strike zones and batters. I don’t tell him to stop looking.
After forty minutes, I sit back and assess the transfer.
It’s right—everything I wanted it to be, maybe more.
“Done?” Reece asks.
“With this part.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then, carefully, “Ava.”
“Mm…”
“You are the most extraordinary person I’ve ever met.”
I keep my eyes on the screen. The wing looks back at me, perfect, still, and ready to become permanent.
“Don’t oversell it,” I say.
“I’m genuinely—”
“Reece.”
“Yeah.”
“I know.” I save the file, close the program, and turn around in my chair and look at him sitting in my waiting room, six-foot-something of professional athlete folded into a chair designed for clients half his size, water bottle in hand, looking at me like I’m the most interesting thing in any room he’s ever been in. “I know.”
The clock on the wall reads two fifty.
“My three o’clock will be here soon,” I say.
“I’ll go.”
“You don’t have to.”
“You have work.” He stands, and the movement is easy, unhurried. He sets the water bottle on the desk. “But, Ava.” He stops. “When you’re ready. Not on my timeline… yours.”
“When I’m ready for what?”
He picks up his jacket from the arm of the chair. The expression on his face is the same one I’ve been cataloging since the bleachers, since the stuck roller door, since the kitchen counter, the truck tailgate, the tattoo chair with the machine humming, and my hand steady against his ribs.
“For whatever comes next,” he says.
The bell chimes as he pulls open the door.
“Reece.”
He stops without turning around.
“The memorial piece,” I say. “It’s going to be the best thing I’ve ever made.”
