1. The Studio
“Hold on, I’m coming to get you!” I screamed running up the hill towards Martin’s studio. The rain felt like a wall I had to fight my way through making every step feel like I was walking underwater. the streetlights blurred into halos as the world trembled with thunder. I barely noticed the pain shooting from my shoeless feet as I scrambled fell down and got back up.
I could hear his voice, light and teasing, “You worry too much, Celia. One day that heart of yours will drown you.”
I stumbled on the street and saw his door was unlocked, it shouldn’t have been. I thought this was a lie cause no way he could just be... gone. I pushed it open and the smell hit me, oil paint, turpentine and something faintly metallic beneath the storm’s wet breath. The studio was dark except for the flashes of lightning that threw the room into silver fragments, paintings, canvases, all standing in silent witness.
“Martin!” My voice cracked. “Martin, come on, this isn’t funny. You win, okay? You always win.”
The words bounced back to me from the bare walls. I moved deeper into the room, the sound of my feet splintering the quiet.
“You can come out now,” I whispered, half-pleading, half-expecting him to step from behind an easel with that grin of his.
“You win.”
No answer.
Something white on the floor caught my eye, a shirt, rumpled, damp. I dropped to my knees. It was his, one of those old linen ones he always wore when he worked, still carrying the faint trace of his cologne and paint. I clutched it to my chest, breathing in until my lungs burned.
The room tilted. My eyes fixed on the corner of the easel where a smear of red, paint, I told myself, it’s just paint, darkened the wood.
A sound escaped me, low and broken. I heard sirens but the world dissolved into memory.
***
He stood behind me once, warm and solid, his hands guiding mine around a brush. “You’re holding it like a weapon,” he’d said, laughing softly. “It’s not a sword, Celia.”
“I’m not built for art,” I’d protested.
“You’re built for everything,” he’d answered. “You just don’t know it yet.”
His fingers closed over mine, slowing the stroke across the canvas. “There,” he murmured, the word almost lost in the music playing somewhere in the background. “See what happens when you stop trying to be perfect?”
I turned to look at him, and he smiled the way he always did when he knew he’d stolen my breath, eyes bright, a little dangerous, like he carried fire under his skin.
“Martin, don’t...”
Too late. A streak of blue landed across my cheek. I gasped, he laughed, and suddenly I was chasing him around the studio, both of us slippery with color and joy. He caught me by the waist, his forehead against mine. “Now you look alive,” he whispered. The air between us had tasted like paint, happiness and something sweeter.
***
“Miss Ardent?”
The voice snapped the memory like glass breaking. I blinked, and the studio was dark again, crowded now with uniforms. Yellow tape was being unrolled at the doorway, fluttering like a warning.
A young officer stepped closer, trying to sound gentle, “Ma’am, this is a crime scene. You need to let us...”
I didn’t hear the rest. My fingers brushed the floor. The red smear wasn’t paint. It had sunk into the grain of the wood, impossible to scrub out. My throat closed. I pressed the shirt tighter against me, rocking slightly. Someone reached for my arm and I pulled away.
“Don’t touch me,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine.
Another man, older, knelt beside me. “Miss Ardent,” he said quietly, “you shouldn’t be here.”
Behind his voice I heard another one, colder, echoing from memory, “He’s a distraction to you, and a mole I need gone from our lives.” My father’s tone had been casual, the way he talked about a faulty contract or a shipment gone missing.
The tears came then, hot, silent, unstoppable. The last one fell onto the floor, mingling with the rain that had blown in through the open door. Something inside me cracked with it, a soundless break that felt permanent.
I looked up at the detective, “He didn’t do this to himself.”
The words tasted like rust. They tried again to help me stand, to lead me out into the night, but my body moved on its own, unsteady, hollow. The storm swallowed me whole as I stepped outside. The rain drenched me instantly, plastering his shirt against my chest. I started walking, not caring where the road went.
Every flash of lightning painted another memory; Martin spinning me under the streetlight after a summer storm, both of us soaked, laughing, his lips brushing mine in defiance of the watching town. “They’ll never own you,” he’d told me then. “Not if you stop pretending.”
I didn’t quite believe him, but I’d wanted to. I stood outside the town looking at the mansion’s outline looming through the downpour on the hill, my home that felt like a cage. The wind howled around me like it was trying to warn me back, but I kept going. Each step felt heavier, as if the earth wanted to hold me where I was, in the space that still smelled like him.
A song he used to play drifted through my head, soft and haunting, the refrain looping: and it feels like an eternity... It felt cruel now, the idea of forever when he was gone.
By the time I reached the gate, my hands were shaking too hard to open it. The guards said something, their voices muffled by the storm. I just stared past them at the glowing windows; the perfect silhouette of a perfect family that would never let me mourn in peace.
Martin’s words echoed one last time, “They’ll never own you, not if you stop pretending.”
I pressed my forehead against the cold iron of the gate, whispered to the night, “Then maybe it’s time I stop.”
