DRAKE WOKE A few hours later, his vision filled with the tableau he’d seen earlier at the gala: Hart with Adeena and Denise. The painting composed itself in his mind; he could imagine the layers of pigment, the swirl of the brushstrokes, how he would shape the light and perspective, bend them to suit his needs.
One day he’d recreate Steadfast—more for his own pleasure, to prove that animals didn’t rule the world, not his world, anyway. But first he wanted to paint the three women—Three Graces he would call it.
Leaving Hart to sleep, he moved into his studio just as the sunrise streamed its pearlescent light through the eastern facing windows. His favorite time to sit and sketch, before the city was fully aroused, before he had to face the rigors of his own work day, while night-soaked dreamscapes and images remained fresh in mind. He draped the remnants of Hart’s dress over an easel where the first rays of the sun caught the shimmer of light trapped in the folds of purple velvet.
He took his pad and, instead of charcoal, grabbed a pencil. These were only preliminary studies, a mapping out of the images he wanted, so vibrant in his mind but so difficult to translate onto paper and canvas.
He let his mind wander as he worked.
Steadfast had been about capturing and using light to convey the emotion of the piece. He’d experimented repeatedly until he’d developed a technique with pigments and dyes that allowed the canvas to absorb a fraction of the light and reflect the rest. It had been tedious and frustrating finding that right balance between light and light, the solid and the transparent, luminescent, but worth it in the end.
Grace would be more about shadow he realized as he looked down on his first sketch. Adeena so dark, Denise so fair, and Hart in the middle. As always, Hart would be the crux of the image.
He’d drawn her just as he’d seen her last night: that slightly crooked smile, those eyes that had seen too much to allow any moment of happiness to be disregarded, filled with knowledge that threatened to taint the joy.
Yet it didn’t. And that was the battle, wasn’t it? How to reveal the shadows that clung to Hart’s life, darkness that would have long ago devoured a less sturdy soul, and balance them with the joy she brought to her life—and his.
Shadow and light. His fingers kept moving, playing. A tricky balance to find, to use flat pigments and canvas to express the emotions that fueled a soul.
But now that he knew what he wanted, half the battle was won. The rest was just endless experimentation, trial and error.
With Steadfast, he’d unveiled Hart’s courage—which she would deny wholeheartedly, saying she was afraid of almost everything, but he knew better.
Drake looked once more on the face of the woman he loved and felt he had uncovered a new understanding of her. Balance was extremely important to her life. Just as it was for him. He was constantly striving, either as a cop or an artist, to create order out of chaos, to find a balance he could reproduce in his own life.
Adeena and Denise were studies in movement, laughter rippling through them. Hart was the center, moving, responding, full of raw emotion, yet also curiously still.
He was reminded of a film he’d seen in seventh grade social studies class. Whirling dervishes, their faces filled with a calm transfixion as they communed with God while their bodies embraced perpetual motion in a flawless, graceful dance of life. Which came first, the motion or the calm? He wondered and drew Hart’s image once more, this time using a page to render her face alone.
Eye of a hurricane—the calm, serene center of the storm created by raging winds circling around the edge. That was Hart. She had no need to search for balance or strive for it, she just was. It explained why her actions did indeed speak louder than words—they were created by primal forces instructing her in what needed to be done to maintain that precious balance.
The scratch of the pencil was the only sound in the room. Drake filled in shadows, balancing the light, but wasn’t happy with the results. The pencil wouldn’t do. He had the composition he wanted, but the rest of the image would be built by color and texture. Lots of metals—maybe even grind some gold or silver directly into some of the pigment? He looked at the rose blush of light shimmering from the folds of Hart’s dress. No, not silver or gold. Copper.
He thought about seeing Hart work in the cacophony of the ER, watching her during a trauma resuscitation, or when she’d confronted violence. Somehow Hart always kept her equilibrium, knowing what action needed to be taken and doing it without hesitation.
Drake marveled at that. A man on a constant quest for stability in his life, he’d found a woman with a perfect sense of balance.
But the only way to stay centered was to acknowledge the chaos that swirled around her, constantly working to tear into the calm eye of the storm, devour it.
Those were the shadows. The price Hart paid for being Hart, the price Drake would pay for loving her.
He shook his head, banishing morbid thoughts into the brilliant rays of the rising sun, condemning them to a fiery death.
It did not always have to be that way—would not, not as long as the two of them were together.