CHAPTER 1: The Words I Was Never Supposed to Hear

It was a portrait.

Not photorealistic — Claire had never worked that way.

But unmistakable.

The posture, the particular tilt of the head, the way the light caught the left side of the face and left the right in warm shadow.

It was our mother.

Not old.

Not the way we had last known her, in the final years when she had grown smaller and quieter and had taken to sitting near windows as though the light was something she needed to store up.

This was our mother young — or youngish, the age she must have been when Claire and I were small, when she had seemed to us like the largest person in any room.

She was standing.

Her hands were at her sides, open, relaxed.

She was looking at something just outside the frame, and her expression was — I searched for the word and couldn't find it.

Not happy, exactly.

Not sad.

Something more specific than either.

The face of someone who has just understood something difficult and has decided to be at peace with it.

"Claire," I said.

"I started it about six months ago," she said.

She was standing a few feet behind me, giving me room.

"I kept stopping.

I couldn't get her face right.

Not because I couldn't remember it — I remembered it perfectly.

But because every time I got close, I'd have to stop and—" She paused.

"You know."

I nodded.

I did know.

"I finished it three weeks ago.

At two in the morning.

I sat back and looked at it and I just — I talked to her.

Out loud.

In here, by myself." Her voice was very quiet.

"I told her I was sorry it took me so long."

I couldn't speak for a moment.

I kept looking at our mother's face.

At the open hands.

At whatever it was she was looking at, just out of frame.

"She's not looking at something," I said finally.

"She's looking at someone."

Claire didn't answer right away.

"Yes," she said.

"Who?"

"Us," Claire said.

"I think she's looking at us."

I pressed my fingers to my mouth.

I breathed through my nose, slowly, the way you do when you are trying very hard to stay upright.

Claire came and stood beside me.

She slipped her hand into mine, and we stood in front of our mother's painted face in the quiet of the studio, and neither of us said anything for a long time.

The freight elevator hummed somewhere down the hall.

Outside the oversized windows, the city went about its business.

In here, it was just the two of us and the woman we had both been missing for four years, rendered in oil and pigment and whatever else Claire had poured into those months of stopping and starting and talking out loud at two in the morning.

"What are you going to do with it?" I said finally.

"I don't know yet," Claire said.

"I thought about keeping it here.

But I think—" She stopped.

"I think it should be somewhere it can be seen.

Not in a gallery.

Somewhere that means something."

I looked at her.

"Mom's kitchen had that wall," I said slowly.

"The one across from the window.

She always said she wanted something there but she never found the right thing."

Claire's grip on my hand tightened.

"The house is still in the estate," I said.

"We haven't decided what to do with it yet."

"I know," she said.

"Maybe we don't have to decide right away."

She looked at me.

Her eyes were red-rimmed but steady.

"Maybe we go back," she said.

"Together.

And we put it on the wall."

I nodded.

My throat was too full for words, so I just nodded.

We stood there a little longer.

Then Claire squeezed my hand once and let go and said, "Okay.

I really do have a lease signing at two."

I laughed.

It came out wet and real.

"Go sign your lease," I said.

She covered the painting carefully with the cloth.

She picked up her keys.

She looked around her studio one more time — at everything she had made in the year she had been afraid to let anyone see — and something in her face settled.

The door clicked shut behind us.

In the elevator going down, she said, "Are you going to tell Ryan about the portrait?"

"Yes," I said.

"Good," she said.

"He should know."