Too Late to Love Me novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Palette Knife

We ran the six blocks to Ware Hall in the dark.

Hattie ran in her slippers with a sculptor's mallet in her fist, because she said it was the nearest thing she had to a plan.

Zane ran a step behind me, the cap pulled low, without saying a word.

The night guard in the lobby looked up from his phone and did not stop us.

I took the stairs two at a time to the fourth floor.

The door of Studio 4B stood open.

Everything I owned in the world that mattered had been thrown across the floor.

My canvases lay face-down in turpentine, six months of work, slit from corner to corner.

Each cut was clean and deliberate and the same length, the work of someone who liked it.

My sketchbooks were torn into strips and heaped in the sink.

My grandmother's wooden brush case was snapped in half on the windowsill.

A palette knife stood upright in the center of my easel, driven into the wood to the hilt.

I picked up the broken brush case, and my hands were perfectly steady.

That frightened me more than crying would have.

"Oh, June," Hattie whispered.

Zane stood in the doorway and looked at the room, and a muscle jumped in his jaw.

"I should have thought of this," he said, hoarse.

"This is what they do first."

"They take the paintings that aren't finished, so the finished one is the only one in the world."

"Don't," I said.

"Don't explain it to me."

"I'm going to find who did this."

I walked down to the lobby with the broken case in my hand.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Too Late to Love Me from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.