“He has no idea he’s so little. He thinks he’s my size. I imagine he thinks he guards my apartment while I’m away, ready to rip open a throat if someone dares enter.”
She laughed, and my heart flipped over in my chest.
Beau wiggled, adjusting his position to maximize the attention he was receiving. Her sketch pad had slid partially under him, but she didn’t move to retrieve it.
“He was my brother’s,” I said.
She went still, though not in the way people did when they were uncomfortable. No, this was the way someone did when they were giving you space to say more or to stop.
I stared at the trees past her shoulder. “Renkar’s dead.”
He’d been the only person who’d ever known me completely, in the way twins did, that specific understanding that came from sharing space before either of you had language for it.
“I’m sorry.” She sat with my brother’s dog in her lap and didn’t try to fill the silence with anything. She just let it be there. This was someone who’d learned how to deal with loss.
Beau sniffed the edge of her sketchpad, nosing at the corner. She shifted it away gently, flipped to a new page. She picked up her pencil and started drawing.
“My mother’s been gone a long time,” she said. “You learn to carry it differently over time. It doesn’t get lighter. Just differently shaped. Dad was coaching already, though only college back then. I followed him if he changed teams, from city to city, because he was all I had left.” The pencil kept moving. “His life became my whole world without me fully deciding it.”
I knew what it was like to stay somewhere past the point of choosing. To wake up one day and realize you’d become the thing you’d built around yourself. Staying because leaving felt like betrayal, even when staying cost you something you couldn’t name.
I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t look away either.
Light shifted through the trees. Beau sat up in her lap, his ears forward. He looked ridiculous, especially with the bow the doggie daycare had put around his neck that I’d left on when I picked him up at the end of the day. He was self-important and absurd and completely convinced of his own dignity.
She was drawing him. I noticed the angle of the pad, kept deliberately away so I couldn’t see much of what she was doing.
When Beau finally leaped down and trotted to me, she tore the page carefully along the perforation at the top and held it out.
She’d caught something in the line of his posture and the tilt of his head that was pure Beau. An expression that said he was taking the world seriously and expected everyone else to do the same.
She’d drawn him the way she watched footage. As if he was worth understanding. And she’d handed it over like it wasn’t anything at all.
I suddenly couldn’t swallow.
I folded the paper carefully and put it in my pocket. “Thank you.”
“He’s a good subject.”
Beau had wrapped himself around my leg, tangling the leash. When I moved to untangle it, it caught on her ankle as well.
I had to lean across her to unhook it. The space between us narrowed to nothing. I couldn’t help noticing how close I was and how small she was. Howprettyshe was. That last thought arrived fully formed, and I tucked it away with everything else about her that I didn’t know what to do with.
She didn’t ease back.
I unhooked the leash and stood. Neither of us said anything. The light was going. Beau shifted his weight, ready to move.
I wrapped the leash once around my hand as she closed the sketchpad.
“Goodnight,” I said.
“Goodnight.”
I turned and walked. Beau trotted ahead of me on the path, pleased with himself.
I didn’t look back, though I wanted to. The want was a pull between my shoulder blades that I ignored through sheer stubbornness.
She would be watching Beau, not me. That was worse than if she wasn’t watching at all.
