Lover on Loop: Her Cruel Revenge Game novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: Left Hand

I didn't have an answer for her, and neither did she.

She switched Darren's phone to silent and went back to the apartment, and the next morning she was cold and efficient and gave me a list of flats to repot.

By day twenty-eight the greenhouse had stopped staring at me.

On that Friday night she came into the shed with an easel under one arm and a canvas under the other.

"It's from the studio," she said. "June let me in. I took your brushes, too."

"Why?"

"Because it's my turn to say what a day costs."

She set the easel up on the gravel floor.

She clipped a photograph to the corner.

It was Benji at five, laughing on the dock in the yellow raincoat, with a front tooth gone.

"Paint him," she said. "Now."

"I haven't painted him in two years."

"Because I broke your hand?"

"Because I can't get his face."

"Then do it with the left."

I stood looking at the brush she held out.

My left hand had never made a mark in its life that I'd liked.

"That's today's price," she said. "That, and the true thing."

I took the brush.

I made a bad start.

The canvas filled slowly with a lopsided child, one eye lower than the other and a mouth too wide.

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