She could see the blame he threw at his parents’ feet, for forcing him to be a certain kind of man, to live a certain kind of life. But he always had a choice. He could have said no.

Did she have a choice? Or was she complicit in allowing her grandmother to make all of her choices for her?

“What do you think?” He sat there, waiting for a reaction, a small comment to spur him on—just as she had whenever she first showed her grandmother her art.

She closed the notebook, tapped one finger on the plain black cover and imagined what she would paint on it to reveal the person hidden within. A mountainscape, perhaps, through which a river runs, with a waterfall made from crystal droplets of sound, each one representing a part of his soul, a part of the pain he thought he had felt.

“Isn’t country music just like church music?”

“I’m offended,” he said, with hand on heart but a smile on his face.

“It is. They both blame someone else for all of life’s problems.”

The waiter came over, put down two more glasses, and gathered away the empties.

Tyler took several slow sips, then licked his lips and leant toward her.

“That’s a bit deep for a Sunday night, don’t you think?”

Emily fished out a cube of ice, sucked away the whiskey, then crunched the rest between her back teeth, felt the absence of sensation on one side of her face, where the nerves had never quite healed. She pictured a well, at the bottom of which sat a boy, trapped by his past, by his mistakes, waiting for someone to throw down a rope and set him free.

“I’m not saying there’s no power in music.”

“Exactly,” Tyler said, raising his glass in a toast. “Think of how much more you feel when watching a film, a TV program, because of the music. Psycho was originally shown to audiences without the infamous score and they weren’t scared, not even a little bit.”

Emily gave a small shudder. “I always pull back the shower screen to make sure there’s no one there.”

“Really?” He raised his eyebrows.

It had crept up on her, like a birthday surprise. The way he had covered her sorrow with a web of friendship. Little by little, something new growing from something old that before had never been given a chance to breathe.

“Anyway, music and religion are both about expressing what is too difficult to explain,” Tyler said. “In fact, isn’t that what painting is too? Surely you can relate to that?”

“You can’t equate Dolly Parton with God.”

“Yes, I can, Dolly Parton is a genius,” he said, waving his pint at her and sluicing a little over his jeans. “And I dare you to deny that you know all the words to ‘Nine to Five.’”

She could already hear it in her head and smiled.

“You have a nice smile.”

She looked back down at the beer mat on the table, desperate for a change of subject.