Page 18 of These Tears

My thumb drifts across the screen as if I could press through it and get at whatever he keeps locked behind that composure.

Sighing, I realise I might be doing exactly what I hate people doing when they look at photographs – deciding a face tells me the whole story. Nonetheless, nothing about Arthur’s makes me imagine warmth waiting for a child at home.

And it also hasn’t escaped me that there is no mention of Elias’ mother.

The articles hold nothing of value. They mention raised voices. A neighbour calling the police after hearing someone yelling.

My eyes snag on the only part of the text that suggests something more: ‘The suspect showed no signs of emotional distress at the time of the arrest.’

I recline into the couch in slow motion, staring at the line.

Thinking back on the two sessions I’d had with Elias, I remember he hadn’t shown much then either. Everything I had seen of him so far revealed a man who kept his reactions tightly contained, as though letting anything slip might cost him.

I hold my breath, hoping the pressure in my lungs might be sufficiently painful to untangle my thoughts enough to spit out a solid one.

No. Elias Crane wouldn’t show emotion.

A click and a scroll later, he appears on the display of my camera – jaw set, eyes dark, expression strained. Then I flick to the next photograph: a smile so radiant it might as well be pinned to the sky.

‘I don’t believe that for a second,’ I murmur aloud, my chin resting against my knuckles whilst my focus remains on the ardent blue.

The article has flattened him into a sentence. My photographs refuse to.

I set the camera beside the laptop and look from those clinical words to the man caught in the camera display.

Elias Crane is emotion. Emotion is everywhere on him; in the fine tension at the corners of his mouth. In his silence. In the way he holds himself. In his measured voice, as if every syllable has been weighed before being allowed to be released.

As if he’d trained himself to survive everyday life.

When my chest constricts at the possibilities I dare not voice, I note the journalist’s name at the top of the article – Dougal MacLeish – and email him, requesting a meeting. I introduce myself as a psychological thriller author researching cases of patricide and send it deliberately from my private email account.

Ron’s words surface uninvited when my eyes snag on my avatar. He’d told me on our first date that he couldn’t resist meeting me after he’d seen my smile in that picture.

We’d met online. A month of emails and texts before we ever sat across from each other.

When the familiar sensation of loss and inadequacy slithers through my ribs, I stand abruptly and shut the laptop, as if that might trap the feelings between its covers. Then I scurry into the basement, shedding that weight with each step.

I want Crane’s photos developed. I want to see them more clearly – his eyes. His smile.

Some time later, as his face starts surfacing slowly in the first chemical-wet print, I don’t yet realise I’ve already begun arranging my life around the next Elias Crane slot.

In the following weeks, my portfolio of the man with the sky in his eyes thickens faster than expected. Small things. Detail shots. Chain links. Tendons. His arms. Hands always clenched at first, looser by the end of our conversations. I’m probably giving myself too much credit for that. But I do it anyway.

When visits fall through, letters take their place – mostly one-line taunts about Mary Shelley’s ‘questionable fondness for monsters’. We drift into dark romance, where he admits he’s never read a single book in the genre. I vow to bring something – purely for comparative purposes, of course – to… broaden his literary horizons.

It’s a ridiculous choice, in hindsight. Even when I purchased the stalker-captive paperback, it still struck me as possibly too cruel for a man behind bars.

I keep my word, because by then I’m already in too deep to pretend this is just programme work.

I don’t think he’s getting out. Not unless something in the case changes the whole picture. And that doesn’t sit right with me.

Today he greets me with a smile. After two months of trying to soften him, it warms me more than anything.

He relaxes against the chair as though me being here has become a reprieve.

I offer him a smile right back.

‘You’re in a good mood,’ I murmur. ‘Not many people are fond of Mondays.’