“Sure.” He sighed, nodding. “It’s time.” For a fleeting moment he looked so sad that I could hardly bear it, and then it passed, and he was his handsome, sunny self again.

“Why me?” I asked—a simple enough question.

“I told you. Tomato Tomato meant something to me,” he said.

I looked at him with suspicion and he laughed. “Honestly,” he said. “Fill this”—he spread out his arms—“full of that.”

The piece that he kept mentioning, Tomato Tomato, was from my last show, The Distance Between Our Moral Imaginations. Each painting in that series was named with a word that conjured the differences between Americans and our long-lost colonial overlords, half named from the song “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”: Potato Potato, Either Either, Neither Neither, Produce Produce, Privacy Privacy, Leisure Leisure, Patriot Patriot. Tomato Tomato truly is a painting that everybody falls in love with. There is some quality of love that reaches out of it—love that is so big, and so real, you cannot remember what life was like before you felt it.

“And—because I know you’ll appreciate it,” he said.

He was right.

*  *  *

I was so engrossed that I didn’t hear them pulling in through the rainstorm. Marlin in paint-spattered white jeans and a t-shirt; Jes in navy coveralls. Each carried a cardboard box.

“Whaddya think?” Marlin called out. They walked straight to a metal bookcase, halfway back, covered in tools and ephemera.

“It’s an airplane hangar,” I called back. “It’s a miracle.”

“Get your shit out of my studio, then!” she yelled.

“Right now?”

“No time like the present,” Jes said, picking things off the bookshelf, boxing them up. “We came to move the rest of the Carey stuff.”

“Oh my God, you don’t need to move that,” I said. “It’s totally fine—please don’t.”

“We’re not moving it for you,” Tyler said, but nicely.

Marlin tossed him her keys.

“Let’s go!”

He drove us back to Pine City in her brand-new Ford F-250, a black behemoth with a gleaming topper over the bed. I stole glances at him from the passenger seat.

When we got to the print studio, he had me open both doors so that he could back in and out of the rain, and by the time we got ourselves inside we were both soaking wet and depositing huge, muddy tracks across Marlin’s studio floor.

“Whoops,” I said, looking down.

“She won’t care. She wants her studio back,” he assured me, putting his hand on my arm. Startled by his touch, I tried not to blush. He let go, grabbed a box, and slid it down the truck bed. “We’ll mop up later.”