Neil took the spoon. Added the first ladle of stock. The pan hissed. He stirred, slow and even, and the rice loosened and began to move, and the kitchen smelled of onion and white wine and a meal coming back.
Rory leaned against the counter, arms folded, watching Neil stir like he’d engineered this outcome from the beginning.
‘You planned this,’ Neil said. ‘You made risotto knowing you’d abandon it halfway through and I’d finish it.’
‘I made risotto because I wanted to see what your face does when someone makes a mess in front of you. It does a lot, by the way. Your jaw alone performed a three-act play.’
‘My jaw did nothing.’
‘Your jaw clenched when I stopped stirring, relaxed when you took the spoon, and is currently set at what I’d describe as reluctant satisfaction. You’re enjoying yourself and you don’t want to admit it.’
He was. The risotto was terrible. Too thick, underseasoned, the rice still chalky in the centre despite Neil’s rescue. They ate it on the sofa with the parmesan shaved on top so thickly it almost compensated.
‘Mine’s fine,’ Rory said.
‘Yours is cement.’
‘Cement with parmesan. I’ve had worse.’
They lay on the sofa afterwards. Rory sketched while Neil read. The pencil scratched. The pages turned. Rain on the window, radiator ticking in the corner, and neither of them using the quiet to hide.
Freddie registered things before understanding them.
Neil was lighter at home, quicker to laugh, slower to correct, less rigid about the bedtime routine. One evening he let Freddie have a second biscuit without negotiation and Freddie looked at him like he'd been replaced by aliens.
‘Dad, are you feeling okay?’
‘I'm fine.’
‘You gave me a biscuit without me asking three times.’
‘I'm feeling generous.’
‘You're never generous about biscuits. Biscuits are your hardline position. Mum says so.’
‘Your mother has opinions about everything.’
‘She's usually right though.’
‘Eat the biscuit, Freddie.’
The mural reached the mid-trunk by early December. The wall was dense, textured, the paint thick enough to cast shadows in the afternoon light.
Neil's students had written thirty-seven pieces for the bark text. Rory had selected eleven, carved them into rubber stamps, and pressed them into the wet surface.
Jade Amir's line was there, The roots hold what the branches reach for, embedded in the bark as if the bark had always held it, and every time Neil walked through the courtyard and saw it, a recognition shifted in him that he didn't have a name for.
It happened on a Saturday. First week of December.
Two o'clock in the afternoon. Rain hammering the windows. And Neil was at Rory's flat because Rory had texted at noon, Schiele book arrived. Come see it before my brother uses it as a coaster, and Neil had picked up his keys and gone.
No system.
No permission.
The flat was different in daylight. Smaller, softer. The windows faced west and the grey light found the canvases stacked against the living room wall and showed their edges. Rory's jacket on a chair. A cereal bowl on the coffee table, abandoned, milk opaque.
They were on the sofa, the paint-splattered sofa, the crime scene of the first Friday, with the Schiele book spread across their laps. A heavy book. The pages fell open to nudes: twisted bodies, exposed skin, angular limbs arranged with a franknessthat bordered on confrontation. Schiele's men looked out of the page as though daring the viewer to flinch.
