Too Late to Love Me novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Ninety Minutes

The Great Hall at Whitcombe holds four hundred, and by noon there were more than that.

People stood along the walls and sat in the aisles.

Camera crews from two local stations had set up behind the last row.

On the stage, two easels faced the audience under hot white lights.

A third seat stood between them, a plain wooden stool at the edge of an actual wooden pier, built from scaffold boards that morning.

Margot Aldridge sat in the front row with the other five panelists, not looking at me.

Hattie had gutted the sculpture studio for paint and brushes.

Half of them were mine, rescued from the studio in a trash bag, and they smelled of turpentine.

Zane stood against the back wall with his cap low and his arms folded, one hand over the other, hiding the scar.

I found him in the crowd once, and he lifted his chin a quarter of an inch.

That was all I needed.

"Ninety minutes," the dean announced, in the voice of a man reading his own sentence.

"Each artist will paint Harbor at Four from nothing, as it appeared in the original work."

"The panel will judge."

Zachary walked out from the wings.

He wore a gray hoodie, jeans, and an expression of such polite contempt that the front rows laughed.

He climbed onto the pier and sat on the stool with his hands between his knees, hunched over, the exact line of the boy in my painting.

I had drawn that hunch six months ago, from a boy asleep on a stairwell.

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