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“Your son?”

She holds my eyes.

“He’s up there right now.”

She looks toward the back staircase. Her mouth almost smiles, then she steps aside.

The staircase waits behind her, narrow and steep and newly swept, dust still caught in the corners. I grip the rail. At the first step, I look back. The woman is still watching me, not soft or hard. Just assessing.

The stairs creak under me.

At the top, the door is open.

The upstairs does not look like I remember. The bones are the same. High ceiling. Long windows facing the street. Old brick along one wall where the plaster had always threatened to give up. The slant of afternoon light crossing the floor in wide, dusty bands.

A mattress sits in one corner, unmade but not careless. A small table by the windows holds a lamp, a coffee mug, and a small chessboard with one pawn moved. Boxes line the far wall, some open, some still sealed. A pair of work boots waits by the door.

Someone has made it into a place to live.

I step inside and see it, my painting. It’s a landscape. Puerto Vallarta at dusk, the ocean reduced to blue shadow and the sky bruised purple over the rooftops. It’s one I thought I had hidden away for good.

Beside it hangs another. Beside that, another.

My throat closes.

They’re everywhere. Even the failures.

I walk farther in, and then I see him.

At the far window, turned toward the street, hands in his pockets. Broad back. Dirty blond hair longer than I remember. Shoulders I know in paint, in bed, in memory.

“Clint?”

Chapter forty-five

The First Slice

Clint

From the second-floor window, he looks smaller than memory and exactly the same. Polo shirt. Good shorts. Hands going in and out of his pockets, like he doesn’t know what to do with them.

He stops across the street, and my heart tries to climb out through my throat.

For six months, I’ve imagined this moment in ways that should have gotten embarrassing over time. Me walking up calm and cool, saying something devastatingly casual. Me letting him find this place first, then somehow me. Me arriving at his mansion door with a pizza box and a “Did you miss me?”

None of the fantasies included me wanting to sprint downstairs, grab him in the middle of the sidewalk, lift him off his feet, and kiss him like we’re in a jewelry commercial.

A lot has changed in six months. The room behind me. The building under me. My mother downstairs managing things like she was born to intimidate delivery drivers. Me not hiding in Mexico or waiting in Louisville for a life to happen to me.

Paul crosses the street.

My hands curl into fists, nails biting my palm.

Mom’s voice, low and even, saying something I can’t make out.

Then Paul. My whole body recognizes the sound and reacts like an idiot. I step back from the window, then forward again in case I need the frame for support.

Mom says something clearer now.