I set the sketchbook back on her desk and return to my side of the room. Five steps. Each one adds distance I'm choosing. Each one costs more than the last.
I sit down. I put my glasses on. I look at my screen. The column is exactly where I left it.
A moment passes. Then I hear her pick up her pencil.
The room settles back into the shape it had before. Same positions. Same lamp light falling across two desks. Same quiet.
Different silence.
12
MAYA
Outside, the pines are white to their tops. The sky above them has gone a hard, clean blue after days of grey.
I sit at the kitchen table with both hands around my mug, savouring the smell of cooked breakfast. Bacon fat and coffee and the last trace of rosemary from whatever Reid did to the eggs.
And for a long time I’m not bracing for anything. That's new.
Jace is across the table, chair tipped back, watching Owen with the expression I've learned means trouble.
"I've been thinking," he says.
Owen doesn't look up from his tea. "Don't."
"I haven't said anything yet."
"You don't have to."
Reid reaches past me for the salt. He glances at Jace once, then picks up his coffee. Says nothing.
"The portrait has a good likeness," Jace tells me, as though Owen hasn't spoken. "Very serious. Very brooding."
"I wasn't going for brooding," I say. "He has a good face."
Owen's ears go red. He picks up his mug and takes a long, deliberate sip.
Jace grins. "He does have a good face. Owen, Maya thinks you have a good face. Good enough to be framed."
"Jace."
Reid chastises him. Just the name, delivered without volume or inflection, and it lands on the table like a hand coming down flat. The chair legs come down. Jace reaches for his coffee with the expression of someone who has been caught and is deciding whether to be sorry about it.
Owen is looking at the table. The corner of his mouth goes up before he gets it back under control, small and fast. He takes another sip of tea.
I eat my eggs. The bacon is good. The coffee is hot. Outside, the blue sky sits over the white pines and no one needs to fill the silence and I hadn't realized until right now how much I'd missed that.
My phone lights up on the counter.
Mum.
I look at it. The screen times out. I look back at my plate.
"You going to get that?" Jace asks.
"No."
He holds the look a beat longer than necessary. Then he reaches for more toast. "Okay." A single word and I feel a gratitude for it that is embarrassing in its intensity.
