And she let the silence settle.
It wasn’t peace she felt. Not quite. It was more like the stillness after a storm, where the wind hasn’t stopped howling, but the rain finally has. Her limbs were heavy. Her lungs felt like they’d been rung out.
Sloane rubbed a hand across her eyes, then let it fall over her stomach. Her other hand dangled off the side of the couch, fingertips brushing the corner of an old canvas that had slipped from the stack. She didn’t move it.
Catherine’s face hovered behind her eyelids.
The stairwell. Her voice cracking. The moment she finally admitted she was scared.
Sloane had meant every word she’d said. She wasn’t built for half-truths and love in the dark. If Catherine couldn’t choose this, choose them, then Sloane was ready to walk.
She still would, if she had to.
But she didn’t want to. God, she didn’t want to.
Catherine’s words had cracked open something inside her. Not certainty, but something.
Sloane closed her eyes and whispered into the dark, “That better be true, Harrington.”
She sat there for a long time, letting the weight of everything settle in her chest.
Then, finally, she pushed up from the couch and crossed to her easel. She hadn’t touched it in days, hadn’t been able to find the center of herself long enough to paint anything real.
But now, the silence felt different. Not empty. Just…waiting.
Sloane pulled the white canvas forward.
Her fingers hovered over the brush jar.
Red, she thought. She wanted red.
She dipped the brush in, let the color sink into the bristles, and dragged it slowly across the canvas in one long, deliberate stroke.
It felt like exhaling.
She didn’t think. Didn’t plan. She just painted.
Bold streaks. Wide arcs. The shape of uncertainty. The heat of something unfinished.
A mouth half-open. Eyes filled with something she didn’t dare name.
Not a portrait. Not yet. But maybe it would be.
Maybe, when she was done, Catherine would see it.
See herself.
See them.
Maybe.
The brush moved again.
And Sloane, with paint on her hands and her chest still aching, felt something she hadn’t felt in days.
Free.
13
