He was still standing in the alley when Mollie came around the corner.

She was wearing the grey scarf, the replacement, the one she'd been wearing since he'd failed to return the green one, and her coat was buttoned to the throat and her boots left prints in the snow that were slightly too far apart, which meant she'd been walking fast, which meant she was early, which meant she'd been anxious about something.

She saw him. Saw the alley. Saw the diner door still settling shut behind Saoirse.

Her eyebrows rose.

"Please tell me," she said, "that you were not in an alley with a nineteen-year-old girl who has a crush on you."

"It's not..."

"Because from where I'm standing, Fayiz, and I want you to understand that I'm standing on a public street, it looks like you've started taking advantage of the situation. Which I warned you about. The noble thing. Catnip. I specifically said catnip."

"She was... there were..." He stopped. Saoirse's face. The promise. "I can't tell you."

Mollie tilted her head. The teasing faded. She looked at his face, the way she'd been looking at him more and more in the last month... the funeral-home assessment, the one that weighed what people were carrying. She saw something. He didn't know what.

"Okay," she said. Simply.

He blinked. "Okay?"

"You can't tell me. That's fine. I trust that you're not a monster. Theodore trusts you. Theodore has better judgment than most humans I've met."

Trust, he realized, was more frightening than suspicion. Suspicion you could argue with. Trust required you to be worthy of it.

She looked at Theodore. Theodore looked back. Something passed between them that Fayiz was not invited to.

"Breakfast?" he said.

She looked at the diner. Looked at the street. The snow was falling, the kind that came down slow and sideways, and the city was quiet in the way it got after a heavy night, everything softened, everything muted, the sharp edges of buildings and bins and signposts buried under white.

"Actually," she said, "no."

"No?"

"I don't want the booth today." She was looking down the street, toward the harbour, and something in her voice had shifted... lighter, or trying to be. "Is that allowed? Breaking the routine?"

"The contract says breakfast. It doesn't specify location."

"We could walk."

"Who are you and what have you done with 'I don't do walks'" he said, in something he intended as a British accent

"Is that supposed to be funny?"

"We could walk," he agreed.

Theodore pulled toward the harbour. The decision, apparently, had been made.

☕︎

St. John's in January was a city that didn't want to be walked in.

The wind came off the harbour with an authority that made the fog seem polite. The ploughs hadn't reached Duckworth yet. They walked in the middle of the road, which was less of a road now and more of a suggestion. Theodore led, tail up, nose working. Fayiz followed. Mollie walked beside him, close enough that their sleeves touched when one of them stepped sideways for a drift.

They didn't speak for the first block. The silence between them had gotten comfortable in a way that still surprised him. He'd spent his whole life in silences that needed filling, his father's silences, heavy with disapproval; Rifa's silences, dense with things she wasn't saying; the silence of the studio, which was just loneliness wearing a different coat. This silence was different. This silence had room in it.

It was Mollie who broke it, which was rare, because Mollie didn't start conversations as much as she allowed them to happen to her.

"Do you miss the heat?"

He looked at her. Her nose was red. Her breath made small clouds.

"Every day."

"What's it like? Kerala."

He thought about how to answer. The painter's problem: translating colour into words. "Green," he said. "Everything's green. Not this green." He gestured at a snow-covered hedge that was more white than anything. "A green that has weight. Monsoon green. It rains and the whole world goes the colour of the inside of a leaf, and the air is so thick you could paint it, and everything smells like..." He stopped. "Cardamom. Earth. The backwaters. My grandmother's kitchen. It smells like a place that knows exactly what it is."

"That's..." She shook her head. "You paint when you talk, you know that?"

He didn't know that.

"My family has plantations," he said. It felt strange to say it here, on a frozen street on an island in the North Atlantic, walking beside a woman in a grey scarf. "Spices. Cardamom, pepper, clove. Three generations. My father runs them. His father ran them. I was supposed to run them."

"You were supposed to run a spice plantation."

"Instead I paint seagulls with eyelashes and live in a flat with no table."

"The seagulls are selling."

"The seagulls are an embarrassment. My father was right about that, at least. Not about anything else. But the seagulls, yes, he was right. I was meant to be a businessman, Mollie. I was meant to wear good shoes and marry someone appropriate and come home for Onam and say the right things at the right times and inherit the land and continue the name. And instead I..."

He stopped walking. Theodore stopped too, one paw lifted, mid-investigation of something beneath the snow.

"Instead you what?"

"Instead I fell in love with someone he'd chosen for me, which was the one thing he got right, and then I left with her anyway because the leaving was the point. He didn't want me to choose her. He wanted me to obey. And I can't..." His jaw tightened. "I was never good at obeying."

Mollie was watching him. That look. The one where she stopped cataloguing and started listening with her whole body.

"He called once," Fayiz said. "After we left. One phone call. He said I was dead to the family. He said my mother would agree when he explained it to her. He said I had taken the one thing he'd given me, and turned it into a weapon against him." He paused. "That's not what happened. But that's what he decided happened, and in my family, what my father decides is what happened."

The snow fell. Theodore sneezed. The moment held.

Mollie said nothing for a moment. "Yeah," she said. Quiet. Something in her voice he couldn't read.

They started walking again. The harbour was ahead of them now, the water grey and flat, and the snow made the ships at dock look like ghost ships, like the city was remembering itself.

"Tell me about Cornwall," he said.

She was quiet for a while. Long enough that he thought she wouldn't. Then:

"It's the opposite. Cornwall is everything you're describing, but with the colour turned down. Grey sea. Grey sky. Green, yeah, but a cold green. Hedge green. The kind that scratches your arms when you walk the coastal path. Everything smells like salt and pasties and the specific despair of a seaside town in November."

He laughed.

"It's beautiful," she said. "In the way that sad things are beautiful. The cliffs. The light. Charlie used to say it looked like the end of the world, and he meant it as a compliment."

The name again. Easier now. Less gravel. But the verb was still past tense.

"He hated sand in his shoes. Would stop mid-walk and empty them out with theatrical suffering, like the Atlantic had personally offended him. He was dramatic about small inconveniences. Not the large ones. We had a house near Porthcurno. Tiny. Three bedrooms and a bathroom you could barely turn around in. My mum still lives there. I think. I haven't called in..." She stopped. "A while."

"Why not?"

She didn't answer immediately. They were walking along the waterfront now, the snow softening their footsteps, the city quiet around them in a way that made the conversation feel private, protected, like the weather was giving them permission to say things they couldn't say indoors.

"Because she sounds like him," Mollie said. "Same voice. Same laugh. She picks up the phone and for half a second I hear him and then I remember and the remembering is..." She breathed out. "It's like losing him again. Every time. So I stopped calling. Which makes me a terrible daughter. Which I am. Which is fine. I've made peace with it."

"You haven't."

"No. I haven't. But I've gotten very good at saying I have."

He didn't say anything. There was nothing to say. He knew what it was like to have a phone that connected you to a person who was both there and not there, alive but inaccessible, breathing somewhere on the other side of the world in a house that still had your childhood bedroom in it.

Two people. Two homes. Both impossible to return to. His because a door had been locked. Hers because a door had been left open and she couldn't stand the sound of what was behind it.

She stepped on a patch of ice.

It was unremarkable ice, the kind that formed overnight on pavement, invisible under the new snow, and her foot went sideways and her body followed and she made a sound, not a scream, more like a syllable, the beginning of a word she didn't finish, and his hand was on her arm before he'd decided to reach for her.

He caught her. Badly. His grip landed above her elbow, too tight, and she grabbed his forearm with her other hand and they stood there for a second, braced against each other on the icy pavement, and he could feel her pulse through the coat sleeve, or he imagined he could, or he wanted to, which was its own kind of information.

"Sorry," she said. "These boots are..."

"Leaky. I know. You've mentioned."

"They're also treacherous. They have no grip. They're city boots."

"They don't look city."

"They were on sale."

She was rambling. She rambled when she was flustered. He'd catalogued this. She also hadn't let go of his arm. He also hadn't let go of hers.

They looked at each other.

The snow fell between them, fat flakes that landed on her hair and her scarf and the shoulder of his jacket. Theodore sat on the pavement and watched them with the patience of someone who had been waiting for this and was not impressed it had taken so long.

Neither of them let go.

They started walking again, and his hand stayed on her arm and her hand stayed on his, and it wasn't holding hands and it wasn't not holding hands and it was the most contact he'd had with another person since Rifa and the most she'd had since Dana and neither of them acknowledged it because acknowledging it would mean naming it and naming it would mean deciding what it was and they were not, either of them, ready for that.

They walked three blocks. Past the closed fish shops on Water Street. Past the coloured houses with their snow-heavy roofs. Past the church with the crooked steeple that he'd been meaning to paint for months and hadn't because it was the kind of painting that needed to be earned, the kind that came from knowing a place well enough to see it honestly.

Three blocks.

Her grip loosened first. It was not a release. It was a loosening. A renegotiation. Her fingers slid from his forearm to the crook of his elbow and rested there, he adjusted his arm without thinking, the way you adjusted a canvas on an easel, small movements, instinctive.

They didn't talk about it.

They talked about other things. She told him about the couple at Smith and Sons who'd asked to be buried with their vinyl collection and had specified that the needle be placed on side B of Rumours, which she said was "the correct choice, for the record." He told her about the gallery owner on Water Street who'd called the seagull-with-eyelashes painting "diverting," which was, he explained, the art world's way of saying I don't understand this but I can sell it to tourists.

And underneath the talking, the hand. The arm. The three blocks that became four, became five, became a loop back toward the diner that neither of them rushed.

At the corner of Duckworth and Prescott, she let go.

Casually. The way you put down something you'd been carrying so long you'd forgotten it was heavy. She stepped sideways, an inch, and the cold rushed into the space between them and he felt it the way you felt a colour drain from a painting, something essential, suddenly gone.

"Thursday," she said.

"Thursday."

She walked toward the hill. He watched her go. The grey scarf. The leaky boots. The footprints she left in the snow, slightly uneven, slightly too far apart.

Theodore looked up at him.

"Don't," Fayiz said.

Theodore said nothing. Which, as established, was worse.

• • •

At the studio, the canvas was waiting.

The same canvas. The green mark from the scarf. The ochre stroke he'd added after she told him Charlie's name. Two colours on a grey field. He'd been looking at it for weeks, every morning, the way you looked at a sentence you'd started and couldn't finish.

He put Theodore's bowl down. Filled it. Took off his coat. Stood in front of the canvas with the winter light coming through the north windows, cold and clean and honest, the kind of light that didn't flatter.

His hands were still warm. From her arm.

He picked up a brush. Loaded it with something he hadn't planned, a grey, but not the grey on the canvas, a different grey, warmer, the colour of the harbour in snow, the colour of her scarf, the colour of the space between two people walking in weather.

He painted.

Not carefully. Also not well. The strokes were clumsy in places, overworked in others, the composition was wrong and the values were muddy and there was a moment near the second hour where he almost scraped the whole thing off and started again because it wasn't good, it wasn't anywhere near good, it was the work of a man who hadn't really painted in over a year trying to remember how his own hands worked.

But he didn't stop.

He painted through the afternoon, through the light changing, through Theodore's nap and Theodore's second nap, through the moment where the canvas started to look like something and then stopped and then started again, the way all paintings did... ugly, then promising, then ugly again, then something else, something you couldn't name until it was done.

It wasn't done.

But it was more than two strokes now.

It was a painting. The green and the ochre were still there, buried under new layers, integrated, and around them was the grey, harbour grey, snow grey, morning grey, and the thing that had been two colours on a grey field was now a small, terrible, honest painting of a place he was only beginning to understand.

He stepped back.

Theodore woke up. Looked at the canvas. Sneezed.

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

He put the brush down. His hands ached. His shoulders were stiff. The studio smelled like linseed oil and turpentine and the ghost of cardamom that never fully left the kitchen.

He looked at the painting.

It was terrible.

He kept it.

He had started something.

The days felt suddenly shorter.

☕︎