Aiyana laughed. “That is close. Just take the loop until you see the big yellow house with the wraparound porch. It’ll be after the administration building, set off by itself. You can’t miss it. I’ll meet you there.”

Tia took a deep breath. As excited and relieved as she’d initially been to reach out to Aiyana, she was suddenly running out of enthusiasm for taking this risk.

But she liked Aiyana. Now that she’d come this far, she wanted to follow through.

“Thank you. I’ll be there in a second.”

Seth stood back to examine his work. It wasn’t often that he had such a vivid picture in his mind of what he wanted to create that he was able to do it, start to finish, in one day. The frenzy of energy required to work that fast, before he could lose any of his vision, left him drained afterward, and today was no different. But as he stood back to consider the piece he’d just finished, there was little he felt the need to change. That was unusual. He was such a perfectionist that there was always some small or even large tweaks he wanted to make. But in creating the contemporary rendering of what Tia’s entry into his life meant to him, he seemed to have said everything he needed to say.

He just hoped she never saw it, or, if she did, that she didn’t recognize herself in the figure he’d created with calming blues and alarming reds. The reds represented her situation, her drive, her disappointment and the physical reality of the life-altering crash with its resulting scars. The blues represented her young age at the time, the hope she’d felt and should still feel and a certain humanity he could sense in her, even though he didn’t know her very well.

It was the duality of the painting he liked, because it also represented what he felt toward her: the sympathy, the friendship, the well-wishes of the blue juxtaposed to the desire and sexual frustration of the reds.

“I’m done,” he said, even though he was alone, and tossed his brushes aside before yawning and combing his hair back from his face with his fingers. He didn’t want to think anymore. He didn’t want to feel anymore, either. He’d always felt too much. And he found the tension between the past and the present as exhausting as the painting mania of the past six hours.

He’d been living on too little sleep for too long and was going to bed. His brushes were expensive, but he didn’t even have the energy to wash them out. He suddenly didn’t care if he had to replace them all.