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Two weeks later, as class was dismissing, Miss Michaels handed out envelopes to each of the students. The room filled with the rumbling of murmurs and the sound of crumpling paper as her classmates discarded their letters in the trashcan on their way out the door.
Rejections, from what Haven could tell. It made her nerves flare.
Haven opened her envelope carefully, smoothing out the crease in the paper as she read the letter the whole way through.
We appreciate your effort . . .
The competition was stiff . . .
So much talent . . .
We regret to inform you . . .
Better luck next time . . .
Haven slowly absorbed the typed words, disappointment setting in when her eyes scanned the last sentence.
Your submission ranked number 348.
Nowhere near the top twenty.
“You okay, dear?”
Haven glanced at her professor as she refolded the letter, sliding it carefully back into the envelope. “I don’t understand what was wrong with my painting.”
“Nothing, technically speaking,” Miss Michaels said. “It just wasn’t what they were looking for.”
“Why?”
“You see, you took the assignment literally, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, it made it lack the one thing they truly wanted.”
“What’s that?”
“Soul,” she replied. “You could look at your painting and think coldness, but you couldn’t feel it. And that’s what’s important. Your paintings should make people feel something, even if they have no idea why.”
24
Time is a peculiar thing. A moment can feel like an eternity, while sometimes months can pass and seem like no time at all. It’s unreliable, and fickle, but it’s the most constant thing there is. Time. No matter what you do, you can’t stop it. The clock will continue to tick away, minutes passing into hours, hours into days, until suddenly you are standing there and it’s already a year later.
Christmas had arrived, twelve months passing since the day Carmine walked out the door in Durante. It had been a year marked with violence, with uncertainty, where doubt constantly lingered over his head like a stubborn storm cloud.
And the time showed on his face—his expression harder, his skin thicker, and his eyes bleaker, unfriendly and guarded. But in Carmine’s mind, he had difficulty reconciling that he had been away from his former life for so long. To him, it seemed like just yesterday he had seen Haven, just a moment ago he had heard her voice or listened to her laugh, that he had kissed her lips or made love to her. The time that passed had been a mere hazy blip for him, the blink of an eye, a single steady heartbeat, but the weariness in his bones carried the truth.
He had managed to survive a year without her . . . the first, he thought, of a lifetime to come.
Although he was a man now, seeing things a person ought not see, doing things men should never do, deep inside of him the boy still loitered. He dodged his family, sidestepping accountability in lieu of living in a delusional world of his own—a world where he somehow convinced himself he could beat time, that he wasn’t living his life dictated by the steady ticking of a clock, this one moving backward and not forward, counting down how many hours he had left on earth.
Because living the life he did, it was only a matter of time before death came knocking at the door, prepared to take him away.
And it only sped up with each chime of his cell phone.
Sycamore Circle.
* * *
Carmine glanced at the message as he strolled barefoot through the downstairs of his messy house, sipping straight from a half-empty bottle of vodka. Sighing, he set his drink on the counter in the kitchen before calling Remy, tapping his foot impatiently as it rang and rang. No answer.
He tried calling twice more as he threw on a coat and some shoes, wanting to know if he needed a ride to the site, but each time he only reached voicemail.
