Page 71 of How to Get Even

Bella knelt by a little boy, helping him choose some colours. Maurice passed through the gallery an unnecessary number of times to check on some spurious thing and tried not to fall over his own feet checking out Mr Tawney.

Chase could see that working, he thought with a smile.

He felt a tug at his pant leg and looked down to find a young boy staring up at him with large solemn eyes.

‘Yes?’ he said.

The kid tugged again.

Chase bent down and offered the kid his ear.

‘I don’t know what to draw,’ the kid whispered, a confession that seemed pulled from Chase’s own psyche.

He turned to look at the kid. ‘You don’t?’

The kid shook his head.

‘What about an animal?’

The kid shook his head again.

‘A flower?’

The kid scrunched his nose up and Chase hid his smile.

‘A house?’

When he went preternaturally still, Chase clenched his jaw. Eventually the kid shook his head. He caught Mr Tawney’s concern from the corner of his eye, but waved him off.

‘What’s your name?’ Chase asked.

‘Joseph,’ the kid replied with a nod that shook almost his entire little body.

‘Do you know what I liked to draw when I was a kid, Joseph?’

The kid looked at him as if trying to work out how Chase had once been a kid. Sometimes he wondered himself, but he pushed that thought aside and took the very small-sized child’s seat at the table. Joseph laughed as Chase’s knees rose above the table, but he came to stand next to him, until Chase kicked out the empty chair beside him for Joseph to sit on. Chase picked a piece of paper and his hand hovered for a second over a pen, before choosing one at random.

‘Nothing,’ Chase whispered to the kid as he started colouring in the page, finally answering the question he’d asked before. ‘I didn’t want to draw cats, or clouds, or airplanes,’ he said, the pen moving the pen across the paper, while still looking at the little boy.

‘What did you want to draw?’ he asked.

‘I,’ he confided at a whisper, ‘wanted to draw feelings.’

Joseph looked back at him. Wide, brown eyes full of wonder. ‘Can you do that?’

Chase nodded. ‘My mother said I could,’ he confided. ‘She said that I could draw anything I wanted to. Anything. And so can you. With this pen, nothing is right or wrong. And no one can take what you do with it from you,’ he told Joseph, who ate up his words like they were the God’s honest truth. And that, Chase realised, they were.

He looked down at the piece of paper beneath his pen and stared at the first piece of artwork he’d created since he’d caught Annalise and Darren in his bed.

‘What do feelings look like?’ the kid asked.

Chase pushed his piece of paper towards the kid. ‘Mine look like that today.’

‘Today?’

Chase nodded again as Joseph peered over at the colours, hovering over a forest green colour that merged into a deep grey, with slashes of red.

‘Tomorrow they might look different.’

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