Theodore reached her first.

The door opened and eleven pounds of terrier hit her shins with the force of a very small, very committed greeting committee. He was wearing a bandana. A red bandana, tied loosely around his neck, and she knelt down and let him press his nose into her hands and his whole body went soft the way it always did, the full-surrender lean, and she heard herself say "Hello, you ridiculous thing, look at you, look at this outfit" in the voice she only used for him, the one without edges.

When she looked up, Fayiz was standing in the doorway.

He was wearing an apron. A floral apron, the kind someone's grandmother owned, covered in faded roses that had been washed so many times they were more suggestion than flower. There was flour on one cheekbone and what looked like turmeric on his left wrist and he was holding a wooden spoon and he looked, Mollie thought before she could stop herself, like someone who belonged in a doorway. Like someone you came home to.

The thought startled her. She pushed it down immediately, like it had knocked something fragile off a shelf inside her.

She stood up. Wiped her hands on her coat. "Nice apron."

"It was here when I moved in. I think it's load-bearing. If I remove it the apartment collapses."

"You have flour on your face."

"I have flour everywhere. Come in before Theodore escapes. He's been trying to get downstairs all morning. He has a vendetta against the landlord's shoes."

She stepped inside.

The apartment was smaller than she'd imagined and bigger than it should have been, which was a trick of the light, she realized, because the light was everywhere. Two enormous windows on the north wall, floor to ceiling, no curtains, the kind of windows that turned a room into a lightbox. The snow outside was still falling and the light that came through was grey-white, diffused, the kind of light photographers paid money for and painters lived inside.

The first thing she saw was the colour.

It was on everything. Canvases leaning against walls, stacked three deep in places, propped on chairs, balanced on the radiator. Paint on the floorboards in drips and smears that had been there so long they'd become part of the wood. Paint on the windowsill. Paint on the edge of the kitchen counter where it bled into the cooking space like two lives overlapping. The colours were warm, ochre, burnt sienna, cadmium yellow, a red so deep it was almost brown, and they screamed against the cold room, against the bare walls, against the December light, like something alive in a space that was trying very hard to be empty.

One canvas near the window caught her eye before the others. Mostly grey, with two marks dragged across it, one green, one a warm ochre, like the beginning of something that hadn't decided what it was yet.

It looked unfinished.

She moved on.

Mollie stood in the doorway between the hall and the room and felt the colour hit her like a sound. She worked with the dead. Her world was grey carpet and white walls and the careful, muted tones of a place designed to hold grief without adding to it. She'd forgotten that rooms could look like this. That someone could live inside so much warmth and still be cold.

"It's a mess," he said, behind her. "I should have..."

"Don't." She said it before she meant to. "Don't apologize for this."

He went quiet.

She walked into the room. Theodore followed, his claws clicking on the paint-stained floor, and she moved through the paintings the way you move through a gallery, slowly, with the awareness that you were looking at something that had come from inside a person. The canvases were different sizes. Some were small, palm-sized studies of colour and shape. Some were large, shoulder-width, the paint laid on thick, textured, so you could see the direction of every stroke. She could see where the brush had hesitated. Where it had pressed hard. Where it had dragged, leaving a trail that looked like the paint was trying to get somewhere and hadn't arrived yet.

They were good. She didn't know enough about art to say why, but she knew the way you knew certain things, with your chest, not your head. The paintings looked like they meant something to the person who made them, and that meaning was visible, the way a scar was visible, the way a face was visible when the person behind it stopped performing.

Then she saw her.

• • •

The painting was medium-sized, propped against the wall near the window, half hidden behind a larger canvas like it had been put there on purpose. A woman. Young. Dark hair, dark eyes, the kind of face that was beautiful the way weather was beautiful, dramatic, consuming, the kind you couldn't look away from. She was looking directly out of the canvas with an expression Mollie couldn't name, something between challenge and tenderness, and the paint was different here, looser, more fluid, like the hand that made it had been in love with the subject and couldn't decide between precision and feeling.

Mollie stared at the painting. The woman stared back.

"Who is she?"

She heard him stop moving in the kitchen. A beat. Two.

"Someone I used to know."

Five words. She recognized every one of them. The careful spacing. The past tense deployed like a shield. The way used to carried the full weight of the sentence and know did none of the work. She recognized it because she used the same construction. Dana. Someone I used to know. The voice you used when the knowing had been the kind that reorganized your bones.

She didn't push. She understood the architecture of that sentence. You didn't knock on walls you recognised.

She looked at the painting one more time. Whoever you are, you were loved by someone who paints like this, and you left anyway. Or maybe he left you. She didn't know which version was worse.

Her fingers found the edge of her sleeve and pinched the fabric until the seam pressed into her skin. She didn't know she was doing it until her hand ached. She let go. Smoothed the coat. Neutral again.

She turned back to the room.

Fayiz was standing by the stove with the wooden spoon and the floral apron and the flour on his face and he was watching her with an expression she'd seen once before, at the diner, the morning she came back.

"Your paintings are really good," she said.

Something in his face cracked open. It was not a smile. It was something before a smile, something younger, like he'd been holding a question for a long time and she'd accidentally answered it.

"They don't sell."

"That's not what I said."

☕︎