“Because every question answered is another can of worms opened, and I’m trying to put the worms back in the can.”

“Please?”

She scratched at a splatter of dried paint on her smock and sighed. “First of all, I’m not mad. It’s just that I watched you walk away from the table tonight, and I knew where you were going, and why, and I wanted to go with you. And that feels like a problem. Here’s something else that feels like a problem: When I’m with you, just sitting here working, or talking, or not working, or not talking, I don’t want to be anywhere else.” She rubbed her eyes and looked up at the skylights, then back at me. “I could see what you were feeling after you played those songs, and all I wanted to do—” She caught herself, shook her head. “Forget it. I can’t say it. It’s not right.”

I was glad she didn’t say whatever she held back, because I had a feeling that if she had it would have haunted me for a long time.

She was spot-on about the worms though.

I looked down at her watercolor palette. The little black circle of paint she’d been diluting to color in some of the dog’s gray fur was wet and tacky, and I pressed my thumb into it. But then I lifted my thumb and it was covered in wet black paint; I didn’t know what to do with that, so I pressed my thumb into my jeans, on my thigh, right above my knee. I held it down for a few seconds so the denim would absorb the water and the pigment, and when I lifted it back up I saw a black thumbprint there.

“Should I quit?” I said, voicing a question I’d been pondering all day. “Do you want me to leave?”

She shook her head. “That would shatter me right now.”

“What if I want to quit?”

“You don’t.”

She was right. I didn’t. “That doesn’t mean I think staying is a good idea. It’s certainly not going to make this any easier.”

She shrugged and said, “I don’t need it to be easy. Besides, we’re adults. Surely we’re capable of boundaries.”

I nodded, but I wasn’t so sure. And I had a notion that I would be better at boundaries than she was. Cal might have been a boyfriend to her, but he was a brother to me. Intuition told me brother held more weight than boyfriend.

October looked down at my thumbprint. Then she pressed her thumb into the black paint like I’d done and pressed it onto my jeans, right on top of where I’d put mine, and our prints merged into one.

“Look.” She smiled for the first time since I’d arrived. “We made art.”