The last thing Isla expected to be doing that afternoon was handing a half-naked stranger a roll of painter's tape.
But here she was.
Lennox Vale had the kind of voice that wasn't loud—it didn't need to be. It was deep, low, and textured like the inside of a velvet box. When he asked if she could hand him the tape ("blue, on the corner of the crate, next to the lemon yellow"), she hadn't even realized she'd moved until she was already standing inside the work zone, shoes toeing the edge of a spilled cobalt puddle.
His fingers brushed hers as he took the tape.
She flinched.
So did he.
Neither mentioned it.
The silence that followed was thick—sticky with unspoken questions and things that buzzed just beneath the skin.
"You live around here?" he asked, carefully pulling off a strip of tape.
Isla shrugged, arms crossed tight across her chest. "Three houses down. The one with the crooked mailbox and too many wind chimes."
Lennox nodded, pressing the tape onto the wall with practiced precision. "You the one who leaves those used books in the free library with notes inside?"
Her lips parted slightly. "You read them?"
"Only the good ones."
"How do you know which are good?"
He looked over his shoulder then, gray eyes locked on hers. "They smell like heartbreak and cinnamon."
She blinked. "That's... oddly specific."
He smiled. "I'm oddly specific."
Isla could feel her heartbeat in her fingertips.
She tried to look away. Failed. His chest was still bare, the soft curve of his ribs rising and falling with each breath. There were splatters of orange across his collarbone, a smudge of ultramarine near his jaw. His body wasn't perfect—not sculpted like a movie star—but it was real. Raw. Lived-in. Like a man who wrestled with storms and sometimes let them win.
She should have left. This was the moment, in every version of her cautious life, where she would smile tightly, say "Nice to meet you," and vanish.
But she didn't move.
Instead, she asked, "Is she me?"
He blinked.
"The girl," she clarified, pointing toward the unfinished mural. "Did you paint me?"
Lennox turned, slow and deliberate, his eyes narrowing like he was weighing something heavy in his chest.
"No," he said. "She's not you. But she's... made of the same ghosts."
The words hit like a tide.
Isla opened her mouth to ask what he meant, but he'd already turned back to the wall, lifting a brush soaked in moonlight gray.
"Come back tomorrow," he said. "She might have a name by then."
---
That night, Isla couldn't sleep.
The wind howled like an old folk song outside, and her curtains danced with the rhythm of some forgotten lullaby. She curled in bed beneath two quilts, one leg tangled out, staring at the ceiling like it held answers.
She kept thinking about the way he looked at her.
Not like she was beautiful.
Not like she was broken.
But like she was real.
When was the last time someone had looked at her like that?
Three years ago. Kitchen floor. Blood on tile.
She squeezed her eyes shut.
No. Not tonight.
---
Meanwhile, across town, Lennox Vale stared at a blank canvas inside his sister's old studio.
He held the same brush he used on the mural earlier. The one that had touched her image. The one that somehow made his pulse race in a way he hadn't felt in years.
He dipped it into black.
Not paint.
Ink.
He wrote her name in the corner of the canvas—her real name. Not the one he'd only just learned. The one he somehow knew.
Isla.
A name like tide and twilight.
A name he hadn't heard in dreams, but felt in the ache behind his ribs.
He pressed his palm against the paper.
And painted a match, unlit.