The guest house door opened and Tim came outside. He nodded his acknowledgement of Jasmine, glancing at her bare legs but looking away quickly. He pulled a dustsheet off of his painting equipment in the corner of the garden and started to work immediately. Did Jasmine imagine he had been messing with her at the breakfast table? Maybe she just didn’t understand social cues. A wave of self-doubt came over her and she thought back to what had happened at school last year. Did she just not have the ability to read other people at all?

Tim continued to paint the wall with almost complete indifference to her presence. She looked at the clock; she still had a good hour before she had to go to school.

‘Do you need any help?’ she offered, before she had even really thought about it. She remembered her father telling her to make more of an effort and she had realised that she didn’t like being ignored.

‘Thank you. Just grab any brush and start painting,’ Tim said, pointing to the box of brushes.

She chose one and started at the opposite end of the wall to him. It felt therapeutic to be turning this tired old dirty lemon wall into something fresh and new. The surface was rougher than an inside wall, taking a little more effort, so she began working the paint into the cracks and tiny holes. Tim had already filled in all the bigger ones, but her mother had insisted she didn’t want it to look too perfect or it would lose its charm.

As they painted, they got closer together and it wasn’t long before they were standing side by side. They had worked together in silence, which, when Jasmine thought about it, was a strange thing to do. Tim’s bare arm touched hers as they finally met in the middle.

‘Wow, guys, that looks amazing,’ Jasmine’s father called out across the garden, adding, ‘I hope she’s not giving you too much trouble.’

‘None at all.’

She felt annoyed at her father in that moment for saying such a dismissively ‘dad’ thing. He knew she was no trouble; he was just saying that for something to say, something he had seen some other dad say, on TV maybe. Frank did things like this sometimes, and she’d heard him repeat other people’s opinions and pass them off as his. She wasn’t entirely sure her father had any real opinions of his own. Most of the things he said were second hand, something her mother had said before, or something he had seen on TV.

‘We’re off to work now. Keep an eye on the time, Jasmine.’

Again, his words annoyed her. Treating her like a baby. She heard him go back inside and she relaxed again.