I smiled too, but the loneliness and longing I felt for her throbbed and stung like everything else. A moment later October lifted my hand and pressed the tip of her black thumb into the tip of my black thumb and twisted them together, much like Cal and I had done as kids, only we’d used blood instead of paint.

“Friends,” she said.

“Do you really think we can be friends?”

“I think we already are.”

I dropped my head backward and gazed up at the ceiling. The skylights were filthy again. I couldn’t see anything but sticks and dirt and fallen leaves, and that made me sad too. All that dead stuff.

I stood to go, and October said, “Everything will be all right, Joe.”

“How do you define all right?”

“You and I are going to be friends, and you and Chris are going to be friends, and we’re going to work together and make art, and put this thing to bed.” She pointed back and forth between the two of us. “Whatever this is. We’ll get over it. We have to.”

I thought about the song she’d played for me the night we first talked in my apartment. The title of that song, I’d since learned, was “Sorrow,” and I’d listened to it a couple dozen times by then.

I don’t wanna get over you . . .

I went back to my apartment, but I didn’t go to sleep. I watched and waited for October to leave the studio. After she did, I went over to get some varnish and applied three coats of it to the spot on my jeans where we’d left our thumbprints. I’d only ever used that varnish to protect acrylic paint on canvas and wasn’t sure it was going to work on watercolor and denim, but I applied it anyway.

I still have those jeans.

I’m wearing them right now, as a matter of fact.

The little oval of our thumbprints is still there.

It’s faint, the palest shade of gray now, but it’s still there.

Chapter 13

THIRTEEN.

There was a note on top of a stack of papers waiting for me in the studio when I got to work the next morning. I saw my name, written in the same architectural script as the note October had left on my door, and for one reckless instant I both hoped and feared it was going to say Run away with me, or I still can’t stop thinking about you, or I don’t wanna get over you, or something that would erase the boundaries I had sworn to uphold the night before.