The cigarette slips between my fingers and hits the concrete floor.
My stomach twists. Seaside.
Home.
The word punches the air out of me. Micah tenses beside me. I stare forward, New York’s lights suddenly too bright. I haven’t been back there since I walked out on…her.
Seven years ago.
Seven years since I stood on her porch and then disappeared. My throat tightens, but all that comes out is, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
Nolan’s grin widens. “Think of it as coming full circle. Plus, we have some possible deals going on in Portland. So we’ll keep you out of the press for a bit. There’s someone there who could change everything for us.”
I look down at the scars on my hands and wonder what Emma Easton would see now if she looked at me.
Probably a dead man walking. A ghost.
Chapter six
EMMA EASTON
Soft, golden morning light spills through the expansive studio windows, warming the wood floors. The air smells like salt, citrus cleaner, and acrylic paint. Nova sleeps near the door, paws twitching in some dream, her tail flicking against the wall every few minutes.
A week has gone by since I spent an entire night crying over my ex boyfriend. Heather has been so supportive, checking in on me multiple times a day. It’s sweet, but also a little annoying. I love her anyway. She knows how careless I can be when it comes to Jude. The only time my parents truly grounded me was when I refused to come home at our agreed-upon curfew. I was soin love with that boy, that I became someone else for a while. Maybe he was always someone who had a bit of a rebellious streak.
Maybe I should have seen his drug dependence coming…
I shake my head, willing the thoughts away with a heavy sigh. My side of the building is airy and open, more studio than office. Two deep green velvet couches sit beneath the tall windows, arranged around a low coffee table cluttered with sketchbooks, charcoal tins, and a few abandoned brushes I’ll clean later. Canvases lean against nearly every wall—some blank, some mid-process, some finished pieces I’m not ready to part with. Sunlight hits the one on the easel now, making the wet strokes look like they’re still moving.
Co-owning this place genuinely feels like cheating at adulthood. I get to help people through art, and I get to bring Nova with me every single day. She has her own plush dog bed tucked beside my storage cabinet, but she prefers wandering between clients, collecting pets like payment.
The rest of the space beyond the French divider doors is Dr. Cassandra Waters’ domain. Her side is sleeker, quieter: soft neutral rugs, tidy bookshelves, framed diplomas, the faint scent of lavender from her ever-burning diffuser. Psychiatry, structure, grounding. My studio: expression, mess, release. Together we make a strange sort of harmony.
I joined the practice last year, merging my therapy work with painting. It was a leap I didn’t think I’d be allowed to take. Cass already owned the building, but her husband, one of my professors in college, loved my thesis on creative expression as emotional processing. He pushed her to reach out, and when she offered me a partnership, I said yes before she even finished the proposal. It was, without exaggeration, a dream I didn’t realize I’d been waiting for.
Across from me, Cal studies his canvas. His brush trembles slightly in his hand, a streak of navy bleeding into the gray sea he’s painting. His jaw tightens, but his blue eyes stay on the storm he’s creating.
“Too dark?” he mutters. He’s fifty-two, but doesn’t look a day over forty. Years in the military have shaped him into a rugged man with gentle eyes.
I shake my head. “No. Storms are allowed to be dark, Cal.”
He nods, lips pressed together as he runs a hand over his short brown hair. “Feels...messy.”
“Messy’s good,” I say with a soft shrug, reaching for my own brush. “Means you’re not holding anything back. I like to say that art is the truth our souls are trying to tell us.”
We paint in silence for a while. He tells me, after a while, that the sea reminds him of good things when he’s struggling with the bad memories of being overseas. I don’t push. I just add a streak of white to the horizon and tell him that sometimes, painting the thing that haunts us gives it less power.
I’ve learned that some clients just want someone to sit with them while they pour their souls onto the canvas. Others barely touch the art and talk to me about what keeps them awake. I offer the freedom and a safe space to explore either option.
When he leaves, he smiles down at me. It’s small, tired, but real. That’s enough. He’s gone through hell and back, as have most of my clients. So I’ll take a small smile if it means he’s fought off the darkness another day.
After he’s gone, I clean the brushes, listening to the soft clink of glass jars and the rhythmic scrape of dried paint from under my fingernails. The studio settles into that nice, familiar quiet after a full day.
The soft click of the divider doors makes me look up.
“Long day?” Dr. Cassandra Waters steps into my half of the studio, her blue cardigan draped over her arm, and her darkcurls pulled into a low bun. She always looks like she walked straight out of a wellness retreat brochure. She’s in her fifties, but she’s aged so well that she looks so much younger. It’s actually crazy how beautiful she is.
“You could say that,” I laugh, setting a jar on the drying rack. “Three clients in a row this morning whoalldecidedtodaywas the day to crack open their childhood trauma vaults.”