Empty Canvas (Erin's Memories)

Chapter XXIV: Empty Canvas

When the time came, Erin pretended she hadn’t noticed. She let the hush hang a while, letting the air soak up any last tremors from Liesa’s story. The two of them shared the bench in the Cabana, just close enough for Erin to feel the warmth of Liesa’s thigh, but neither was ready to acknowledge the possibility of comfort. It was easier to watch the blue candle and act like time meant nothing here.

Finally, Liesa spoke. “Het is jouw beurt*,” she said, soft and not unkind. She gestured at the candelabra, then pulled her knees tighter, a silent pledge not to interrupt.

Erin snorted. “Great,” she said. “I can’t wait to remember everything I tried to forget.”

But she reached out, anyway, holding her hand above the blue smoke. She expected it to be cold, and it was, but not in the way of ice or rain. It was the cold of morning, the kind that wakes you up too fast, the kind that refuses to let you crawl back into sleep.

She reached. The cold smoke curled over her fingers, and the Cabana peeled away. The memory asserted itself with a snap: her undergrad campus, bright with the hard glare of November. She was twenty-one, which now seemed both ancient and heartbreakingly green. UIC’s east campus quad lay before her, a tangle of cement, squirrels, and students sculpted by Midwestern wind. She stood near the fountain, the stone rim slick with yesterday’s sleet, a battered thermos braced against her chest like a shield. Her backpack, overstuffed and fraying, left a horizontal dent across her shoulder blades. She wore jeans with a torn knee and, over it, a men’s flannel shirt she’d nicked from the lost-and-found; it didn’t fit, but she’d never cared.

Erin observed her own younger self in the memory, detaching as the scene unfolded. She was thinner then, posture set to repel, lips already practicing for the future. The world’s expectations weighed on her, and she’d already decided she had no intention of playing along. Not today. She’d been angry for years by that point, but it was an anger only half her own; it was borrowed from every woman she’d watched get taken for granted, from every friend who’d played by the rules and ended up burned. It was an armor. But memory could see what armor tried to hide.

She saw Andy approach: Andy of the past, bumbling and overexcited, before any of the real darkness had spilled out of him, cutting that excitable current with sorrow. His hair was a little longer, his face softer and unmarked by the later tension, but the spark that made him, for lack of a better word, Andy, was already there. He wore a hoodie two sizes too big, earbuds dangling from its kangaroo pocket. He nearly tripped on a loose brick but caught his balance with a sheepish hop, grinning in relief at not having faceplanted in front of God and everyone. His smile was dumb and delighted, and even in the memory, Erin could feel the flutter it had once sent through her chest.

Andy carried two cups of coffee: one for himself, one for her. He raised the spare as a kind of peace offering, as if presenting a rare flower to a skittish animal. Memory-Erin squinted at him, suspicious, then at the coffee, more suspicious still. He stopped too close, and it took real effort in the present not to wince on behalf of her younger self. There was something almost painful about how much hope was in his eyes. Like every day he woke up and decided, anew, that the universe might not be so bad after all.

“Morning, Erin,” he said, voice cracking on the second syllable. He thrust the cup a little too eagerly. A drop sloshed onto her boot.

She glanced at the spill, then at him, then at the cup again. “I didn’t ask for coffee,” she muttered, but she took it anyway, the first warmth she’d felt that day.

Andy blushed, visibly. “Yeah, I know. I just thought…” He seemed to run out of script, cheeks coloring as the November wind needled his ears. “I thought maybe you’d want company. For the walk to class. Or…” He trailed off, and Memory-Erin’s eyebrow arched, not unkindly.

She took a sip. It was too creamy. She tried to scowl, but the corners of her mouth twitched upward, and the mask cracked, just for a moment. “I didn’t ask for cream, either,” she said.

Andy grinned, unbothered. “I asked for you,” he said, then immediately looked horrified at his own words.

The present Erin, watching from the outside, wanted to scream at him, at herself. She wanted to shake her younger body by the shoulders and **** it to say what mattered, to not pretend she didn’t care, to not make a joke of the real thing that wanted to grow between them. She wanted to tell him what it meant when he remembered how she took her coffee, even if he got it wrong, and what it meant that he would risk being stupid just to make her smile.

Liesa, watching, let out a small laugh. “He was brave, sometimes.”

Erin nodded, and found that her heart ached. “He was. Sometimes.”

The memory snapped forward: a sequence of afternoons so dense and run-together that it seemed her college life had been nothing but libraries, the low hum of **** air, and the careful orchestration of not looking at Andy for too long in public. Memory had a way of flattening the days into one long ribbon of fluorescent lighting, high windows spitting out the last of the Chicago daylight, and the constant, brambly threat of someone asking her what she was doing with her life.

She saw herself at the library table, a spot she’d staked out by the sixth floor windows weeks before, her territory marked by the scabs of highlighter left on the formica and the battered thermos she always brought. Andy would show up late, always. Sometimes by five minutes, sometimes by half an hour, depending on whether he’d gotten lost in a coding problem or an internet hole or, once, a spontaneous game of ultimate frisbee with strangers on the quad. He’d barge in with his backpack unzipped, books threatening to spill out, and always, always holding food for her. Usually it was trail mix or off-brand granola bars or whatever snack was cheapest that week at the student union.

He’d dump the snacks on the table like an offering and sit across from her, and Erin’s younger self—so much more brittle than she remembered—would pretend not to be hungry, holding fast to the self-imposed rule that she would never accept charity, not even a packet of peanuts. But she always took one, always after making a face or lobbing a sarcastic comment at him about how trail mix was expensive and how she wasn’t a squirrel.

She saw Andy’s smile, bright and unselfconscious, and she saw the way he watched her even when he thought she wasn’t looking. He was so eager to make her happy, so transparently delighted by any crumb of approval or attention she tossed his way. She recognized the look now—it was the same look she’d seen on the faces of loyal dogs, and she felt a wave of guilt so fresh it nearly knocked her out of her chair. Even knowing how it all ended, she wanted to go back and treat him better, to give him more than she’d allowed herself to give back then. She now understood the why: the wound left behind by Liesa’s disappearance, and the fear that it must have been because of something irretrievably broken within him.

And wasn’t that what she had thought about herself, when she had decided to break it off with him?

It was strange, watching herself from the outside, seeing how she’d drawn the lines of engagement and dared him to cross them, only to punish him when he did. Erin remembered the way her own heart would tripwire whenever Andy leaned in close to explain something, his voice just shy of a whisper, and how she’d flinch at his nearness even as she craved it. She remembered how she’d memorize his hands, the way his fingers drummed on the tabletop when he was anxious, the way he’d tap his pinkie against his thumb when he was thinking. The way he’d sometimes, absentmindedly, reach for her wrist when he made a point and how she would freeze, torn between the prickly urge to pull away and the deeper, softer urge to let him touch her.

But the memory had no interest in nostalgia. It moved forward, relentless, to the fights. Not big ones, not at first. Just the small arguments that sprouted in the cracks between midterms and the mounting stress of her father’s texts and emails. She saw herself snapping at Andy for minor slights, for being late or forgetting to bring her a pen. She remembered being cruel for reasons she couldn’t name, as if she needed to test him, to see how much he’d tolerate before walking away. She hadn’t wanted to need him, hadn’t wanted to owe him anything, and so she made a game of seeing how far she could push before he broke. But he didn’t, not then.

The memory skipped, as if out of mercy, past the slow accumulation of inside jokes and half-finished conversations, past the lunches eaten on the steps of the harsh, sun-bleached campus plaza, past the subtle way they began to align their schedules just to maximize the time they spent together. Erin watched her younger self grow comfortable, then restless, then angry at her own restlessness. She saw herself looking for reasons to be annoyed, picking fights out of boredom or spite, sabotaging any moment that threatened to become genuine. She saw Andy trying to keep up, trying to turn every sharp comment into a joke, trying to diffuse her anger with patience or a dumb grin or, sometimes, just a gentle, infuriating silence.

She skipped the rest of that winter. She didn’t need to see the slow accretion of affection, the way Andy found reasons to touch her hand, her elbow, the sleeve of her sweatshirt. She remembered all of it too well.

The next memory rose: the first time Andy kissed her, simple and unadorned, on the hunched, frost-glazed steps outside his apartment building, under the sickly yellow circle of a streetlight that had been threatening to die for months. The bulb flickered, buzzing just above the threshold of darkness, casting wobbling shadows in the salt-stained concrete corridor between the parking lot and the battered brownstone’s front door. It wasn’t cinematic; the moment was lopsided and a little ****, but it was real, and even in the half-dream of recall it landed in Erin’s chest with the **** of something final.

Now she remembered the cold first, the way they shivered in their jackets, breath visible in the air between them, the awkward choreography of two people who had run out of things to say but were both too stubborn to go inside. Andy’s hands were deep in his pockets, his posture bent and folded, as if making himself smaller would somehow make the risk of what he was about to do less catastrophic. Memory-Erin stood with her arms crossed over her chest, chin jutting forward, the universal pose of someone bracing for either disappointment or impact.

He’d spent most of that night trying to impress her—he’d cooked a boxed pasta dinner, played a playlist of bands she’d mentioned once, half-ironically, and even attempted to light a scented candle he found in the back of a kitchen drawer, only to trip the fire alarm when he forgot about it. The evening culminated in an hour-long debate over which was the superior Star Trek captain, and neither would admit defeat, so they’d gone for a walk to cool off the argument.

On the steps, Andy hovered, fidgeted, and then, with a breath that sounded like gearing up to jump a gorge, he’d said, “I was gonna wait and see if you’d make the first move, but then I remembered you’d rather die than lose a bet.” She’d snorted, which was almost a laugh, and that was all the encouragement he needed: he cupped her elbow, asked with his eyes, and then kissed her. Lightly at first, then again, a little firmer, a little braver, as if he was surprised she hadn’t already pulled away.

It was not a good kiss, objectively. It was messy, their noses collided, and she was so caught off-guard that she nearly bit his lip. But what she remembered most, what stung sharpest in the retelling, was the way he stepped back afterward and looked at her—not with smugness or victory, but with a kind of wild, breathless hope, like he couldn’t believe he’d gotten away with it.

Even in memory, Erin felt the urge to run. But she stayed, and in staying, she felt for the first time in years that she might actually break through the shell she’d built around herself. That maybe he’d seen through it all along, and cared anyway.

A wave of feelings she’d stuffed down for a decade came back, raw and undiluted, as if she were still standing there in the cold, fighting the reflex to crack a joke or say something snide to deflect the charge of the moment. Instead, she’d said nothing, just pressed her forehead to his and let the silence fill up with everything she wasn’t ready to say.

Liesa, still beside her in the fog, hummed thoughtfully. “You remember details well,” she said, gentle. “Even when you think you don’t want to.”

Erin shrugged, and found she had somehow sat on the floor, hugging her knees tighter to her chest. “I don’t see the point in rehashing it. It’s not like I can change what happened after.”

“Maybe not,” Liesa said. “But you can decide what you want that memory to mean now.”

She let the memory linger, then stood up and waved it away, almost impatient, but her eyes stung. The smoke thickened again, resolving into a different scene: not a library this time, but a cramped, overlit campus apartment whose walls were painted in hopeful, peeling pastels. The ceiling fan stuttered, making a subtle percussion beneath the buzz of voices. There was a dinner party underway. Senior year, the last week before finals.

This memory, unlike the library, was crowded with people. Andy stood near the kitchen island, animatedly telling a story to a cluster of friends. Erin, pressed into a lopsided armchair with a paper plate balanced on her knee, watched the group with the anthropologist’s detachment she’d always worn to social gatherings. But something was different tonight. She was not at the margin of the conversation, or the designated plus-one who hovered, waiting to be dealt with; she was inside the circle, and nobody seemed to mind. Andy kept glancing over at her, eyes flickering with the silent, can-you-believe-this joy that made everyone else’s laughter feel contagious. He’d introduced her, not as “my friend” or “a girl from class,” but as Erin, no qualifiers, as if everyone should already know who she was.

Sam was there, too, occupying half a couch and, true to form, commanding the room with stories she’d heard from her grandmother, wild tales of her mother’s misadventures in the city, and the saga of her own disastrous attempt to join the rugby team for a single practice. Erin remembered the story, because later that night Sam would recount it again, privately, with more vulnerability and less bravado, and Erin would realize that loudness and isolation were sometimes the same thing. In the moment, though, she watched herself listening, not because she was required to, but because she wanted to. She saw how, as the evening went on, her posture relaxed, the ever-present knot between her shoulders unwound, and she actually laughed—a real, involuntary laugh—at something Andy said about the conspiracy of campus squirrels. She looked happy, or a passable imitation.

In the fog beside her, Liesa observed. “You were beautiful, then,” she said. It landed softly, but not without weight.

Erin, watching herself emerge and then dissolve in the memory, shrugged. “I was less angry, then.” But even as she said it, she questioned whether that was the truth. Less angry, or just better at hiding it? She remembered how her optimism had always felt like a borrowed garment, ill-fitting and prone to showing its seams at the worst moments. She remembered, too, the fear that every good thing was a prelude to loss, that friendships and happiness were not things you kept but things you rented, always with the threat of eviction.

In the memory, Andy moved through the crowd with two plates of cake, stopping behind her chair and setting one beside her with a flourish. “You gotta try this,” he’d insisted, wielding a fork like a stage prop, “Sam brought it from that place on Clark, apparently it’s the only thing keeping the city’s diabetes rate up.” Erin had rolled her eyes but taken the fork anyway, and when Andy perched on the arm of her chair, she let her body lean, just a little, toward him. She didn’t remember the taste of the cake, but she remembered the feeling: the rare, disorienting lightness that came from being wanted out of genuine delight.

There was a moment, right before the scene started to blur, when Erin caught Sam looking at her across the room, her expression a mixture of joy for Andy, and a warning not to break his heart. Sam lifted her cup in mock salute, and Erin, uncharacteristically, raised hers in return. It was the closest thing to belonging she’d ever felt.

The memory slid into another: Andy’s graduation day. The gymnasium was hot, packed with parents in folding chairs, the air dense with the scent of carnations and dryer sheets. Erin wore a cheap sundress and a borrowed cardigan, the sleeves too long for her arms. She watched herself try to wrangle Andy’s family into a group photo, her own voice rising in exasperation. In the memory, Andy pulled her aside, said, “It’s okay. You don’t have to fix everything.” He kissed her cheek, soft, and for a second, she looked at him the way you look at a secret you never want to lose.

But the next scene was a fight. Had Erin really forgotten how many there were, near the end? She had not. Most of them had blurred together by now, but this one was sharp as a tack under the nail, and the Cabana, maybe sensing its importance, replayed it slow, with extra clarity, the way a cruel child might tug at the wings of a fly just to see if it could make it scream.

She saw herself in the apartment they had rented together, the same battered brownstone as always, but the warm light was gone—replaced by a cold, late spring dusk that seeped in through the windows and left everything a wan, sickly blue. Memory-Erin stood in the kitchen, hair pulled back, circles under her eyes, hands wrapped tight around the handles of a shopping bag. She was moving with the taut, brittle precision of a person who knew one wrong word would set her off, but couldn’t stop herself from saying it anyway.

Andy stood at the window, half-turned away, his posture a study in learned helplessness. Arms limp at his sides, head drooping slightly as if he could compress himself down into the floorboards and escape the conversation entirely. He looked younger, still growing into the width of his shoulders, terrified to take up more space than he deserved.

“Are you serious?” Erin was saying, voice high and ragged. “You said you’d get the groceries. All I asked was for you to remember one thing. I even wrote it down, twice, in your phone and on the fridge. And you still forgot.”

He didn’t look at her, not directly. “I’m sorry,” he said, but it sounded like a reflex, like something he’d said so many times it had worn a groove in his mouth.

“You keep saying that!” Memory-Erin slammed the bag onto the counter. Something inside it rattled and fell over, and she flinched at her own ****. “You’re always sorry, Andy, but you never actually do anything about it.”

He shifted, crossed his arms, uncrossed them again, then finally faced her. His expression was impassive, but his eyes—always too honest for the rest of his face—were swimming. “I don’t know what you want me to say,” he said quietly. “I already told you. I forgot to get the yogurts. It’s not a sign I don’t care.”

“It’s not about the yogurt!” she exploded. “It’s about you never being present. You don’t call back, you don’t answer half my texts. It’s like you don’t even notice I’m here unless I yell.”

He took a step toward her, then stopped. “That’s not true.”

She snorted, a bitter, involuntary sound. “Name the last time you did something for me that you didn’t have to. Like, just because you wanted to see me happy.”

He blinked, as if she’d struck him. In the memory, the question hung in the air like a blade.

“Is this about last night?” he said, voice thin. “Because I thought we were good. I thought we had a nice time.”

“You fell asleep halfway through the movie,” Memory-Erin said, and felt the shame of it all over again. “And then you started talking about some bug in your code and just—checked out. I spent half the night wondering if you’d even notice if I left.”

She was crying now, despite herself. Her voice got smaller with each word. “I want to be enough, Andy. I want to feel like I matter, like you see me. And you keep pushing me out, and then you apologize, and then you do it all over again. I can’t keep doing this.”

He stared at her, jaw clenched, and for a second she thought he might finally yell back, say something mean enough to end it. Instead, he just looked so tired. “I’m trying,” he whispered. “I don’t know how to be what you want.”

Erin watched her memory-self deflate, the anger draining away to reveal the hollow beneath. “I just want you to let me in,” she said, the words barely audible.

He gave the tiniest shake of his head, as if he couldn’t even picture what that meant.

In the memory, silence fell. It was total, absolute—no traffic outside, no hum from the fridge, just the sound of her own breathing and the quiet shudder of the ceiling fan. She could see herself searching his face for a sign that he’d finally heard her, that something had shifted. But all she saw was that familiar helplessness, the look of someone who wished they could just disappear.

She broke the silence first. She always did. “I can’t do this, Andy,” she remembered saying. “I need more than this. I need you to let me in.”

He shrugged, helpless. “I don’t know how.”

She stood there for one more second, like she might take it back, like she might scream or laugh or hit him just to get any reaction at all. But she didn’t. She just grabbed her bag and walked out, shutting the door softly, and the memory followed her down the overlit hallway, past the peeling wallpaper and the dusty stairs and out into the humid night.

Erin pulled her hand from the smoke, heart hammering. She pressed her palms to her eyes, hard, then let them fall.

Liesa waited, hands folded. “You were always loyal,” she said, not as a compliment but as a fact. “Even when you left.”

Erin shot her a look. “I left because he wouldn’t change. Not even for me.”

“Maybe that’s why he cared for you,” Liesa said. “You never lied about wanting more.”

Erin huffed, then reached for the candelabra again. “That’s not the only reason.”

The smoke swirled. A living room, small and tidy. Erin’s mother stood in the kitchen, sleeves rolled, chopping carrots with a kind of surgical focus. Her father, back from a park-ranger shift, dropped his backpack by the door and disappeared into the den. Neither parent spoke to the other. Erin, twelve years old, stood between them, shuffling her feet and trying to find a reason to exist. She offered to set the table; her mother pointedly ignored her, then set the plates herself. Her father emerged only when dinner was already on the table. They ate in silence.

Liesa whispered, “Your family was broken.”

“They never let me forget it,” Erin replied.

The next scene: a hospital room, her father in a cast after a backcountry rescue gone wrong. Erin brought him soup, sat with him while her mother fumed in the hall. He called her his “little soldier.” She watched herself glow at the compliment, then shrink when her mother poked her head in and said, “Don’t coddle her.”

Erin yanked her hand back from the smoke, almost angry at it. “I was never enough,” she said, to herself or to Liesa or to the Cabana. “No matter how hard I tried. Not for them, not for Andy.”

Liesa didn’t offer a platitude. She just nodded, like she’d expected as much.

Erin straightened her spine, wiped at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “I spent so long trying to fix people, I forgot how to just… be with them. No one wanted me, because I’m broken.” She looked at Liesa, almost daring her to contradict it.

But Liesa shook her head. “You did not forget. You just need someone to let you. And you aren’t broken.”

Erin gave a shaky laugh. “That’s a therapist answer if I ever heard one.”

Liesa smiled, sheepish. “I have a lots of therapy.”

They both laughed, and the tension cracked, letting in a sliver of something lighter.

Erin considered, then took a deep breath, sighed, and said, “I don’t want to show him the anger. I don’t want that to be all he sees.”

Liesa cocked her head. “So show him the rest.”

Erin hesitated. Then, with deliberate care, she reached for the smoke again.

This time, the memory was warm, suffused with sunlight. She saw herself and Andy in that shoebox apartment they’d scraped up enough to rent in their first year post-undergrad, the brownstone, before that final fight. The place always smelled faintly of burnt popcorn and mildew, but that spring it also smelled of tulips, a mason jar of them, stolen from the park and set on the chipped Formica table. The overhead fan wobbled when you turned it on. The window AC unit was propped up by Andy’s old calculus textbook, which neither of them would ever need again. She remembered that day with a sharp ache that surprised her. They had only recently moved in together.

She watched herself pinning a string of off-brand fairy lights above the headboard. In the memory, she balanced on the mattress, tongue sticking out in concentration, holding the lights in place with frayed duct tape. Andy snuck up behind her, planted his hands on her hips, and made her jump so hard she nearly cracked her skull on the ceiling. “You’re the worst,” she mock-growled, but when she turned, cheeks flushed, he looked at her with that wide, slightly crooked smile she used to pretend she hated. “Am I?” Andy said. “I thought I was the best.” She’d pretended to scowl, but the joy was already bubbling up in her. She laughed, a sound so unfamiliar now that it made her chest ache to remember it. In the memory, she let herself collapse backward into Andy’s arms, let him spin her around and tip her onto the bed, both of them cackling as the lights fell in a tangle.

There was a time when she belonged, she realized, watching this. When she wasn’t just an add-on to someone else’s story, but a living, breathing part of it. They’d lain there for hours, arms and legs entwined, telling each other improbable stories about the future: Andy in a sleek office, giving TED talks about whatever he’d invented; Erin as a globe-trotting wildlife photographer, or maybe a chef with her own food truck, roaming the country and never settling anywhere too long. She laughed at the audacity of it, the arrogance of believing they could simply choose a happy ending. But in the memory, she believed it.

She watched Andy trace the line of her jaw, the curve of her shoulder, the constellation of freckles on her bicep. “You know they say every freckle is a star from a universe where you did something different?” Andy’s voice was gentle—not the too-careful, brittle voice he used at the end, but his true voice, light and unafraid. “So if you connect the dots, it’s like a map back to all the other Erins.”

“Maybe those Erins made better decisions,” Memory-Erin said, and Andy looked at her, all affection and no judgement, before kissing her on the forehead.

She remembered how safe it had felt, letting herself exist with no armor, no sarcasm, no plan for escape. She remembered how she hadn’t always been waiting for the moment when it would all turn sour. Sometimes, she’d just let herself be loved.

The memory fast-forwarded, as if on its own: cardboard boxes stacked in a corner, a shared calendar on the fridge. She saw the time Andy brought home a pathetic, half-dead cactus from the curb and announced that they would rescue it together. They named it “Sir Spikes,” and for weeks, Erin kept a log of its progress—number of new arms, percentage of not-deadness, notes on its “psychological state.” Andy went along with it, even during finals, even when he was too tired to think. She watched, almost startled, as she herself left little notes on the mirror in Expo marker: “You can do hard things.” “I’m proud of you.” “Love you.” As if she, too, knew how to care for someone, how to make a home.

Eventually, the memory rolled forward to a rainy night in late May, the two of them sitting on the fire escape with paper plates of greasy pizza, legs dangling into the wet-dark. Andy wiped sauce from her chin and said, “We should get a cat. Or maybe a dog, if you want.” Erin, in the memory, laughed and said, “Let’s just keep the cactus alive for one more month.” She watched Andy’s face fall, just for a second—a flicker of fear. But then he reached for her hand, and she took it. In the memory, that was all it took to believe in something like forever.

Erin let herself relive it, let herself smile through the ache in her ribs. She watched them finish the pizza, watched Andy coax her back inside, watched herself curl up against him on the mattress with her head on his chest, listening to the steady drum of his heart. It wasn’t a special night, not really, but in the memory, she could feel the enormity of the happiness she’d let herself have.

When the scene faded, Erin noticed she was clutching her own hand so tightly her knuckles had gone white. She released it, and the afterimage of their happiness lingered in her chest, painful and sweet as the flare of a scar opening over something unexpectedly warm.

Liesa watched, eyes gentle. “You loved him.”

Erin nodded, once. “I did.” She paused, felt the wetness on her cheek. “I still do, maybe." She blinked, her eyes wide with wonder. "Fuck, I do." She looked at Liesa, as if hoping the other woman had the answer. "But I don’t know how to forgive him for not loving me back the same way.”

“He loved you the only way he could,” Liesa said, surprising her. “But he didn’t know how to show it.” She sighed. “We can never claim all of Andy’s heart. There is someone there who does not leave. But perhaps… we can take what we can.” She gestured to the candle, and the memories Erin had just shown. “Is it not enough?”

Erin blinked, unsure what to do with that. She closed her fist, shattering the memory, then sat back.

She exhaled. “So. That’s me. All the worst parts and the dumb, hopeful ones, too.”

Liesa smiled. “You’re strong, you know. Most people would have broken.”

“I did break,” Erin said, voice low.

“But you got up,” Liesa countered. “You kept trying.”

They sat in silence, watching the blue candle burn lower.

After a while, Erin looked at Liesa, her eyes still wet with tears. “Maybe we’re more alike than I thought.”

“Maybe we get another chance,” Liesa said, softly. “If we want to open ourselves again.”

Erin barked a laugh. “God, you sound like a self-help book.”

“Het spijt me,**” Liesa said, but she was laughing too.

They lapsed into a comfortable hush, the kind that happens after a long argument or a good cry.

At last, Liesa asked, “What will you do for the challenge? What will you paint?”

Erin thought about it. She imagined painting the anger, the sharp lines and red. But then she imagined the memory of Andy’s hand on her skin, and the fairy lights, and the feeling of warmth that lived underneath the armor.

“Maybe I’ll show both,” she said. “The soldier and the girl she’s protecting.”

Liesa grinned. “That’s good. I think Andy would like that.”

Erin shrugged, but she was smiling. “He always liked me better when I wasn’t fighting him.”

They let the silence stretch, both women quietly rebuilding themselves from the fragments of memory and regret.

When the blue candle finally guttered, Erin stood, flexed her shoulders, and offered Liesa a hand.

“Let’s go show them what survivors look like,” she said.

* "It's your turn."

** "I'm sorry."