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“I loved Dave,” I say.

Kell nods once. “I know.”

“I loved being married to him. I loved the life we built. I don’t have to diminish what we had to choose this. And I don’t need you to be anything like him.”

Kell is quiet for a moment. “I never asked you to stop loving him. But I’m done auditioning for the position of Dave.”

“Good.”

“Because I don’t want another Dave.” I take a step toward him. “I want you.”

For a moment, neither of us says anything. His fingers flex once at his sides. “What does that mean?”

“It means you. Not a quieter version. Not a more familiar version. Not a more predictable version. You.”

For months, I’ve been acting as though choosing someone means I can somehow guarantee what happens afterward. I can’t. Dave taught me that. Megan’s death did too. The future isn’t promised to any of us.

But that isn’t a reason not to choose what I want now.

“I love you, Kell.”

He doesn’t answer immediately. For one horrible second, forty-eight years of dignity abandon me, and I consider explaining that he doesn’t have to say it back, that I understand if he needs time, that I didn’t come here expecting anything. Before I can ruin the moment, he reaches for my hand.

“Come with me.”

“I’m already standing two feet from you.”

“I mean over here.”

That isn’t the response I expected. He leads me toward the far side of the studio, past several canvases stacked against the wall. One large canvas is turned backward, its wooden frame facing the room. I’ve noticed it before and assumed it was unfinished or something he didn’t like enough to keep working on. Kell stops beside it.

“This is the morning after I tied you.”

The memory tightens something inside me. His thumb moves once over my hand.

“I didn’t know what to do with it afterward,” he says.

“With the painting?”

“With what I understood while I was painting it.”

Then he turns the canvas around. For several seconds, I can’t speak.

It’s me. Not the version I see in mirrors or photographs. Not the hospital administrator with controlled hair and carefully chosen clothes. Not the woman smiling beside Dave in the pictures I kept because removing them would have felt like pretending that part of my life hadn’t happened.

This Laura is half awake in my bed, her hair flattened and mussed from sleep, one shoulder angled into the pillow and the rumpled sheet gathered near my waist. My face is bare and relaxed, softer than the version I usually allow the world to see. There’s something so unguarded in it that my first instinct is to look away.

I don’t, because he didn’t paint me as broken. The colors are softer than anything else I’ve seen him use. The background barely exists. All the detail is in my face, my hands, the last of the tension seeming to ease from my body even inside the painting.

“You painted this from memory?”

“Yes. I started the next day.”

“It’s not finished.”

“No.”

I touch the corner of the canvas. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen myself like that.”