She was already there.

Same seat. Same coat, buttoned, like the booth was a formal engagement. Tea in front of her, already stirred, the spoon resting on the saucer at the angle it always rested, two o'clock, because Mollie Bates even placed spoons with intention. Her hair was down, which was unusual, and she was reading something on her phone, which was also unusual, and when she looked up at the bell her face did the thing it always did when she saw him: a micro-adjustment, a softening she didn't know she made, the funeral-home mask lifting one millimetre before settling back.

He saw her notice the painting. Her eyes went to it, then to him, then back to it. She didn't ask. She waited. This was one of the things he'd learned about her: she never grabbed. She let things come to her. The patience of someone who'd learned that reaching for things meant losing them.

He sat down. Slid the painting across the table. It was small, twelve inches by sixteen, and the newspaper wrapping was already coming loose at one corner.

"It's not a Valentine's thing," he said.

She looked at him.

"It's not," he said. "It's a... I don't know what it is."

She picked it up. Turned it over in her hands. Felt the weight of it. She handled it the way she handled everything: carefully, with the assessment of someone whose job required knowing what things were before opening them.

She pulled the newspaper away.

The painting was the diner. Their booth. Two cups on the table, one coffee, one tea, seen from his side, looking across at her empty seat. The light was the 8:15 light, the particular winter angle that came through the window and hit the table between them, and he'd painted it warm, warmer than it actually was, because that was how it felt, because the light in the diner was never just light, it was the specific quality of a morning that had someone in it.

Her seat was empty. But the tea was there. Steam rising from it. Her coat was on the seat beside the cup, folded, the way she folded it. Her scarf, the green one, was coiled on top. The salt shaker. The sugar bowl with the chip. The view from where he sat, looking at where she sat, and the warm light and the two cups and the everything of it, all the mornings compressed into one.

She went still.

The funeral-home face. He knew it. He'd seen it at Christmas when she'd walked into the studio. He'd seen it the morning she came back from the disappearance. The face that meant something was happening underneath and the surface had been instructed not to move.

He watched her look at the painting and he thought: I've made a mistake. I've shown her something I shouldn't have. I've taken the thing between us and made it visible and now she can see it and she's going to see too much and this is how it ends, this is how you lose people, you show them what they look like to you and they realize it's more than they signed up for.

His father's voice: you are too much, Fayiz. You feel too much. You show too much. This is why people leave.

Rifa's face, the last morning: I can't be the only thing you paint.

He was already constructing the sentence. It's just a painting. It doesn't mean anything. I was practicing. The light was good. You can throw it away. You can...

"This is the first time," Mollie said.

Her voice was quiet. The voice she used for things that mattered. The voice she'd used when she said I'm gay, Fayiz. The voice she'd used when she said this is the first Christmas I haven't spent on the floor.

She was still looking at the painting. Her eyes were moving across it slowly, the way his moved across her face when he was drawing her on napkins he would crumple and throw away.

"This is the first time anyone's shown me what I look like to someone else."

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

"You're not in it," he said. Because she wasn't. The seat was empty. The painting was two cups and a coat and a scarf and a light. She was nowhere in it.

She looked up at him. Across the table. The mask was gone. What was underneath it was something he'd seen once before, at Christmas, on the floor of his studio, when she'd been sitting with Theodore on her lap and had looked at his hands and had looked away too fast: the unguarded thing. The young thing. The thing she kept behind everything else.

"Yes I am," she said.

He didn't speak.

He didn't need to. She was right. She was in every brushstroke. She was in the warm light he'd painted warmer than it was. She was in the cup of tea with the steam still rising. She was in the green scarf coiled on the seat. She was in the empty space across from him that wasn't empty at all, that was the most occupied space he'd ever painted, because absence, when it belonged to a specific person, was the most present thing in the world.

She wrapped the newspaper around the painting. Carefully. The same care she used for the scarf, two folds, precise, deliberate, the way you wrapped something you intended to keep.

"Thank you," she said.

"It's just..."

"Don't." The same word she'd used at Christmas, when he'd tried to apologize for the studio. Don't. Meaning: don't take it back. Don't make it smaller. Don't tell me it's nothing because we both know it isn't.

He didn't.

Dottie arrived with pancakes. Set them down. Looked at the newspaper-wrapped rectangle leaning against Mollie's side of the booth. Looked at Fayiz. Looked at the calendar behind the counter... February 14, today, circled in red by someone, probably Saoirse, with hearts drawn in the margins.

"Not a Valentine's thing," Fayiz said.

Dottie's face said: Forty-three years, love. Forty-three years. Her mouth said: "More coffee?"

They ate.

The painting leaned against the booth. The jukebox played something that was, for once, not too sad for 8 a.m., something with a trumpet, something bright, something that sounded like the beginning of a sentence that hadn't been finished yet.

At 8:47, she said: "The light's wrong."

He looked at her.

"In the painting. The light. You painted it warmer than it is." She glanced at the window. At the actual 8:15 light, which was grey, which was always grey, which was January-into-February in Newfoundland, which was a place that didn't know the meaning of warm light.

"I know," he said.

She looked at him. The question was there. Why? Why warmer? Why more than it was?

He drank his coffee. Set it down.

"That's how it looks," he said. "From where I sit."

She held his gaze for three seconds. Four. Then she looked down at her tea and he watched her fingers tighten on the cup, just slightly, the way they did when she was holding something back, and he thought: forty-six days. We have forty-six days. I have just given Mollie a painting of the place where we eat breakfast and told her the light is warm because of her and neither of us is going to say what that means because we are two people who made a contract to die and the contract did not include this. The contract did not include any of this.

Saoirse cleared their plates. She saw the painting. Her eyes went wide, then careful, and she looked at Fayiz and then at Mollie and Fayiz watched her understand something she was too young to name but old enough to feel: oh. That's what this is.

She said nothing. Took the plates. Left.

The sketchbook was in his pocket, warm from his body. The painting was in Mollie's hands. Two gifts given on a day he hadn't planned to celebrate, by a man who had been planning to die in forty-six days and was starting to suspect, quietly, dangerously, in the part of himself he couldn't control, that the plan was changing.

• • •

At the door, she held the painting against her chest. Both arms wrapped around it. The newspaper crinkled.

"Tuesday," she said.

"Tuesday."

She looked at him. The look lasted longer than usual. Long enough that he felt it land, the way paint landed on canvas, the way colour landed on grey.

"Happy Valentine's Day," she said. Dry. The tiniest smile. The one that lived behind the wall and only came out when she'd decided, against her better judgment, to mean something.

Then she was gone. The bell. The cold. The empty doorway.

He sat in the booth for a long time after she left. Dottie refilled his coffee twice without being asked. The jukebox cycled through three songs. Theodore lay under the table and chewed on something that was probably a napkin.

He thought about the painting in her hands. About the warm light. About the empty seat that wasn't empty. About the way she'd said yes I am like she was correcting a fact, like she was telling him something he already knew but hadn't admitted, like she was looking at a painting of absence and seeing herself in it because she had looked, and she had seen, and she had told him so. That was the whole thing.

Dottie appeared. Sat down across from him, in Mollie's seat, which she had never done before.

"Forty-three years," she said.

"I know."

"I've watched a lot of paintings go out that door."

He looked at her.

"Not like that one," she said. And stood up. And went back to the counter.

He walked home. The snow had started again, light, the kind that couldn't decide whether it was snow or rain. Theodore trotted ahead, tail up, untroubled by weather or emotion or the particular disaster of falling for someone on a schedule that ended in six and a half weeks.

At the studio, he stood in front of the easel. The canvas was clean. Waiting.

He didn't paint.

He took out the sketchbook instead. Opened it. The pages were blank, cream-coloured, heavy. Good paper. The kind that held ink without bleeding.

He picked up a pen. Drew a line. Another.

Her hands. Wrapped around a cup. The ring on her finger catching the light. The particular way her thumb pressed against the ceramic like she was holding on.

He drew it quickly. Not well. Not the way he'd draw it if he were being careful. But honestly, the way you draw something when you stop pretending you're drawing anything else.

He closed the sketchbook. Put it in the drawer. Stood there.

Theodore was on the good cushion. The studio was cold. The green scarf was still on the hook by the door, where it had been since November, where it would stay until she asked for it, which she wouldn't, because the scarf had never been about the scarf.

Forty-six days.

He was in trouble.

☕︎