Three days in, I understood something about Sebastian Vale.

He didn't perform.

Most people, when they want something to seem a certain way, perform it — they arrange the body, the voice, the expression. Sebastian didn't. When he was interested in something his attention sharpened in a specific, undeniable way. When he wasn't, he was simply elsewhere.

He was interested in his grandfather.

He was also, apparently, interested in me.

Not romantically — or not only. More like he was trying to understand something, the way I looked at a painting before I knew how to sketch it.

I was drawing in the garden on day three when he came and sat on the bench across from me.

He didn't say anything. Just sat.

I kept drawing.

After ten minutes he said: "You're drawing the wrong bed."

"I'm drawing the one I want to draw," I said.

"The east bed has better light at this hour."

"I know. I'm drawing the west one because the shadows are more interesting."

A pause.

"Show me," he said.

I turned the sketchbook.

He leaned in to look. Closer than necessary, the way people get when they forget they're supposed to maintain a distance.

"The depth," he said. "How do you get the depth on the rose canes?"

"Pressure variation on the pencil," I said. "And leaving white space. You don't draw the highlights, you leave them."

He looked at that for a moment.

"That seems counterintuitive," he said.

"Most things in drawing are counterintuitive." I turned the sketchbook back. "You draw what you know is there, and it always looks wrong. You draw what you actually see, and it looks right."

He was quiet.

"What do you see," he said. Not a question, exactly.

I looked at the garden.

"Someone doing the same thing every day for forty years," I said. "Out of love. Because love takes a specific shape when it's long enough — it stops being a feeling and starts being what you do with your hands."

He looked at the rose beds.

"My grandmother planted them," he said.

"I know. Your grandfather told me." I sketched the next shadow. "What was she like?"

"Precise," he said. "She had opinions about everything, all of them correct. She made my grandfather argue his positions before she agreed with them because she said he was better when he defended himself." A pause. "He's been defending positions she's not here to hear for eleven years."

I stopped sketching.

"He talks to her," I said.

"Every morning in the garden."

I looked at the path between the beds.

"He's going to miss him terribly," I said. "Your grandfather. When he — your grandfather will miss him terribly."

Sebastian looked at me.

I'd meant to say: *when he dies.* I'd said: *when he.* Left it unfinished, as if the fact of it were still negotiable.

"Yes," Sebastian said. Quietly. "He will."

We sat in the garden with the afternoon between us and the complicated fact of what we were doing — the contract, the year, the dying man who spoke to his wife's roses every morning.

"Sebastian," I said.

"Yes."

"Why didn't you want something real?" I said. "Before. The women you dated."

He was quiet for a moment.

"I didn't want to give someone something I wasn't sure I had," he said. "It seemed—" He paused. "Unfair."

"What weren't you sure you had?"

He looked at the roses.

"The kind of love that turns into tending something for forty years," he said. Plainly. Without performance. "I wasn't sure that was in me. I didn't want to promise it and find out it wasn't."

I looked at the sketchbook in my lap.

"So instead," I said, "you hired me."

"Instead," he said, "I hired you."

A silence.

"Nora," he said.

"Yes."

"I'm sorry this is the circumstance." He said it like the legal briefing — clean, even. But underneath it something that wasn't clean at all. "That you need the money and this was the option."

"Don't apologize for the option," I said. "It was my choice."

"Still."

I looked at him.

He looked at the roses.

Neither of us said anything else.

But I kept the shadow section of that afternoon in my sketchbook, where I put things I intend to come back to.