Chapter 2 SEVEN DAYS

POV: Elara

The Same Week

The specimen was a hellebore. Specifically, a Helleborus niger, or Christmas rose, that was in its second week of bloom. Its petals were an off-white colour that would have been shown as white in less detailed pictures, but they were actually a mix of cream, grey, and the faintest green at the edges of the sepals. Elara had been trying to get the right colour for four days.

She was close.

You couldn't paint what you saw because of how translucent it was. You had to paint what was behind the thing you saw and let the medium do the rest. Her professor at RISD had told her this so clearly and completely that she had written it in the front of every sketchbook since: "Draw what is behind the light, not the light itself."

It was the day of the week. Seven days until the wedding.

She had been in the studio since eight. It was the second bedroom of their apartment, which had been a studio since three months after she moved in. That was three months after she and Leo had the conversation where she told him she was looking for her own place now that she could afford something modest. He said, without looking up from his drafting table, "You could just stay." Not a romantic declaration. A solution in architecture. She had stayed.

The hellebore was for the Harmon Gallery exhibit. There were eighteen pieces in all. Ten were finished and framed, six were still being worked on, and this one, the hellebore, was the last and most important because she had decided last week that it would be the anchor, the piece she centred the back wall around, and it had to be just right.

At two, she heard Leo go to bed.

She had been up. She had not told him that she was awake. She heard him move around the flat with the same care he used when he thought she was sleeping. She knew he was using memory to find his way in the dark because he had mapped the space so well that he didn't need any light. She had tried this once, at the beginning of their relationship, by moving a chair two feet away from where it usually was. He had moved around it without any problems. She didn't know if she should be charmed or scared. She had been both.

He had gotten into bed next to her and lay still, like he did when he was thinking hard about something. She lay on her side facing the window and listened to him not sleep. She thought about whether or not to turn over, and in a way that she wasn't proud of, she didn't.

The offer had come on a Thursday. Four months ago. They had just come from the Harmon Gallery's preliminary show, the one where Daniel Harmon had first indicated serious interest in giving her a solo exhibition. It was November, and they were walking. It was cold in the way that November is cold in Manhattan, which is to say: direct, with no room for feelings about it. Leo had his hands in his pockets. Since they left the gallery, he had been quiet, but it wasn't an awkward quietness. It was the stillness of a man who was thinking about something.

He had said, "We should get married and It makes sense."

She had agreed.

She had said yes and meant it. At the same time, she felt a sensation and specific move through her chest-not doubt or hesitation. It's more like the feeling of reaching for a word you know and finding a word that sounds similar but is different. Close and good enough but not exactly the one.

"It makes sense." The next morning, she wrote it down in her sketchbook and stared at it for a long time. The thing was that it did make sense. They had been together for four years, living in the same flat and sharing their lives. They knew each other's rhythms so well that she sometimes answered questions he hadn't even asked yet. It made perfect sense. There was no way to argue with their logic.

She wanted more than just reason. Not a big gesture; she had never needed one. She wanted to know that he had picked her. Not because it made sense. Not because it made sense. Because he had stood at the edge of the rest of his life, seen her there, and made the choice to jump.

A man was checking the load-bearing capacity of a building before agreeing to it by saying, "It makes sense." She knew this about him. She had learned his language, which was the language of things that last, for four years. She had also turned every act of service and quiet maintenance into the emotional words she needed to know that she was loved. She was good at translating. Some days, she was tired of being good at it.

She put the brush down. The hellebore was nearby. She thought about what the professor had told her to do: draw what is behind the light as she looked at the petal tip's translucence.

She grabbed her phone. She sent Maya a text that said, "Are you still coming on Thursday?"*

The answer came in less than thirty seconds, which meant Maya had been waiting for it: "Already on the train." I also have some questions.

Elara smiled at the phone. She put it down on its side.

She grabbed the brush. She went back to the hellebore plant. The clear part would come. She only needed to find out what was going on.