He went home and stood in front of a canvas for an hour.

Theodore was on the good cushion. The studio was cold. The north-facing windows let in the late February light, thin and blue, the light of a season that was almost over but hadn't committed to leaving. The green scarf was on the hook. The sketchbook was in the drawer. The diner paintings, six of them now, the booth from different angles, the counter, the clock, the coffee pot, the window with the morning light, were stacked against the wall.

He stood in front of the blank canvas and thought about Rifa.

Not the email. Not Toronto. Not the face he'd painted a hundred times, the face that had been his first real subject, the face he'd loved with his whole body and his whole brush and his whole stupid, reckless, too-much heart.

He thought about what Rifa had said the last morning. Not I'm sorry. I was bored. The other thing. The thing she'd said a week before he found out, when they were still pretending, when the wrong soap was still just wrong soap and the late nights were still just late nights. She'd looked at the studio, at the canvases of her face, twenty, thirty, stacked like evidence, and she'd said: I can't be the only thing you paint, Fayiz. It's too much. I'm not enough to fill all these canvases. Nobody is.

He'd heard it as rejection. He'd spent two years hearing it as rejection. But standing in the studio now, in the thin blue light, with six paintings of a diner he'd never put a face in, he heard it differently.

She'd been right.

She'd been right, and she'd said it wrong, and the saying it wrong had led to the wrong soap and the late nights and the Thursday afternoon and the door and the stoop and the bus to Newfoundland. But the thing underneath, the real thing, the thing she'd been trying to tell him: don't make me the whole painting. Make me part of it. Make me a colour in something bigger.

He picked up a brush.

Loaded it with ochre. The warm one. Hers.

He started with the jaw. Not because the jaw was important but because it was the line he knew best, the line his hand had drawn a hundred times on napkins and crumpled and thrown away and retrieved from the bin and drawn again. The angle of it. The way it tightened when she was holding something back. The way it softened when she wasn't.

Then the mouth. Harder. Because Mollie's mouth was where the contradictions lived: the dry humour and the real smile and the work voice and the voice underneath the work voice and the way she bit the inside of her cheek when she was deciding whether to be honest. He painted it slightly open, mid-thought, mid-sentence, the way it looked across the table when she was about to say something that mattered.

Then the eyes.

He stopped.

Rifa's eyes had been simple. Scratch that, Rifa was never simple, but legible. Challenge, tenderness, boredom, joy. Four notes. A clear chord. Mollie's eyes were something else. They were the eyes of a woman who had learned to keep everything behind them, who had developed a surface so convincing that most people never looked deeper, who had turned watching into an art form and being watched into a threat. Painting them required painting both: the surface and the thing behind it.

He tried. He mixed a grey-green that wasn't quite right, scraped it, tried again. Warmer. Cooler. There was something about the left eye that was different from the right, the left was where she went when she was thinking, the one that narrowed slightly before she said something sharp, the one that had looked at him in the diner an hour ago and heard because it's Thursday and understood everything he meant by it.

He painted for two hours. The face assembled itself slowly, imperfectly. It wasn't her. It was close to her. It was the version of her that existed in his memory, which was not the same as the version that existed in the booth, which was not the same as the version that existed inside her own head, and the gaps between those versions were where the painting lived.

The painting was not of Rifa.

He stood back and looked at it and felt something lock into place in his chest, something that had been circling for months without landing. With Rifa, painting her face had been an act of devotion. Every brushstroke a prayer. Every canvas a shrine. He had painted her because she was his world, and the painting was how he held the world together.

This was not that.

This was something else.

This was not devotion. This was recognition. He wasn't painting Mollie because she was his world. He was painting her because she was a person, complicated, closed, occasionally cruel, the way scared people were cruel, and kind the way they were kind too, and he wanted to see her accurately. Not as a shrine. Not as a prayer. As a face. As a woman who pulled her toast into strips and stirred her tea eleven times and carried a dead brother's name like a coin in her pocket and had told him she was afraid of losing him and hadn't known what that meant.

He didn't know what it meant either.

He knew what it looked like.

The painting was rough. The values were off. The left eye was better than the right, which was a problem he'd fix tomorrow or the day after or never. It was the first portrait he'd made since Rifa. The first face. The first time he'd tried to see someone on canvas and not just love them there.

He put the brush down. Looked at Theodore. Theodore was awake, watching him from the good cushion with an expression that suggested the dog had been awake for some time and had opinions.

"Don't say it," Fayiz said.

Theodore held his gaze.

"I know," Fayiz said. "I know."

He cleaned his brushes. Covered the canvas. Stood in the kitchen and ate dal, properly made this time, not burned, his mother's recipe, and looked at the green scarf on the hook and thought about the email in his inbox and the woman in Toronto and the woman in the booth and the thirty-three days that were left on a napkin that was probably in a drawer somewhere, still there, still signed.

He took out his phone. Opened the email. Read it one more time.

Please. R.

He typed: I'm not coming. I'm sorry. I hope Toronto is good. I hope you're good. But I'm not coming.

He looked at the words. Deleted them. Typed them again. Deleted them again.

Typed: I can't. I'm sorry.

Shorter than hers. He didn't say because it's Thursday, because she wouldn't understand that

He pressed send.

The email went. The phone screen went dark. He put it face-down on the counter.

Theodore padded over. Sat at his feet. Pressed his head against Fayiz's ankle in the way that meant: I'm here. This is enough. This is all there is, and it's enough.

Thirty-three days.

☕︎