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“You think that bar has never seen a man with a cocktail in one hand and a Kleenex box in the other?”

Being home should feel like the end of something. Instead, it feels like being returned to the scene of the crime.

“Okay,” I say.

Don puts on his turn signal.

“That’s my girl.”

Chapter forty-three

Alone

Clint

My keys sound too loud hitting the kitchen counter.

Everything looks like it’s backed away somehow. The chairs. The cabinets. The long stretch of counter.

I breathe in. It’s not enough. Try again, deeper this time, but the air feels thin, like the house has lost oxygen.

“Okay.”

My voice goes nowhere.

I kick off my shoes near the counter, then stop when my hands go to my zipper out of habit. No point in that now. I leave my shorts on and go to the couch.

The remote is on the side table where we almost never touched it. I click the TV on. A woman in a red dress starts yelling in Spanish at a man with excellent cheekbones. Music swells as another woman enters with the kind of look that means she’s either the mother, the villain, or both.

Fascinating. I turn up the volume and try to get lost in movement, noise, and light.

I barely let the scene get going before I hit mute.

There’s a coaster off the stack on the coffee table, a dark ring circling the center. Paul’s coffee sat there this morning while I pretended not to watch him while I burned our eggs. I drag my thumb along the ring—dry, just stained—and then place it back atop the neat stack where Paul keeps them.

Down the hall, the studio door is half-open. That feels wrong. It should be either open or shut. For a while, I stand in the hall looking at the thin slice of room beyond it. Easel. Table. Canvas edges. The smell of paint that never really leaves once the cap’s been opened.

Paul’s not in there. It feels like something I’ll have to learn with my whole body.

I push the door open.

His paintings are lined around the walls where he left them. Older ones on this side, new ones along the other.

My foot. My shoulder. My hand. Pieces of me Paul saw before I knew he was looking.

The unfinished one is near the easel. My back, clear and alive. Everything around me a mess of color.

“Okay,” I say again.

The closet door sticks when I open it. Inside, the shelves are mostly empty now, except for some old supplies. I start picking up canvases and stacking them inside. It’s practical. It brings the room back to where it began, before Paul showed up and claimed the space.

The room changes fast. With each painting gone, the air gets flatter. The table becomes just a table. The easel becomes furniture. The studio becomes a room a realtor would call flexible.

My chest tightens.

“Nope.”

I pull the paintings back out.