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I stop beside him and look down at the canvas. “You’ve been painting for less than two weeks. That’s not normal.”

He turns toward me, and I hear the words properly only after they’re out.

“Not wrong,” I add. “Just unusual.”

His expression eases.

“Different.”

I’ve called him different before. I’m only now realizing how easily the word can sound like a judgment.

I look at the painting again. It isn’t anything I would ever have chosen for my house. There are no marshes, no reeds, no careful mallards suspended over autumn water. Nothing quiet or orderly or arranged to let the eye rest.

Kell’s painting doesn’t let anything rest. Orange burns through blue. White cuts across both. A dark sweep through the center should make the whole thing chaotic, but somehow it holds together.

I wouldn’t have picked it.

I can’t stop looking at it.

“Kell.”

“Yes?”

“I think you’re a painter.”

He gives me the kind of expression reserved for things he considers obvious.

“I know.”

Chapter Fourteen

Kell

I know the painting is finished before Laura does. It is Sunday afternoon, and she is in the kitchen when I decide. She doesn’t realize anything has changed until I come inside and start washing paint from my hands.

“You’re done?”

“Yes.”

She sets down the knife she’s using on a tomato. “Done done?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means you’re not going back out there in twenty minutes because you suddenly decide it needs purple.”

“It doesn’t need purple.”

“That sounds promising.”

I lean back against the counter. The large painting is still at the park because there’s nowhere in Laura’s condo to put it while it dries. Yesterday evening, when rain started moving in, the woman who manages the park let us carry it into the maintenance building behind the pavilion. There’s enough open floor space inside that I can work on it without anyone touching it, and she said we could leave it there until Monday.

I’ve gone back twice today, and both times I changed something. The first time it was the white near the bottom. The second time I added another line of blue through the center.

Now, when I think about going back, I can’t find anything I want to change. That’s new.

Laura picks up the knife again. “What made you decide it’s finished?”

“Nothing bothers me anymore.”